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Release
date:
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April 5,
2019
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Director:
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Nadirshah
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Cast:
Language:
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Biju Menon, Asif
Ali, Baiju Santhosh, Nikhila Vimal, Dharmajan Bolgatty, Sreenivasan, Ganesh
Kumar, Surabhi Lakshmi, Soubin Shahir, Hareesh Perumanna
Malayalam with
some Hindi, English and Tamil
|
What was that
about?
What on earth was
that about?
Director
Nadirshah’s Mera Naam Shaji is
inexplicable from start to finish. This is not inexplicability arising from
deep intellectualism or even basic intelligence. Barring a handful of instances
of humour, what it is is a vacuous screenplay struggling to figure out how to
get to where it wants to be.
Three strands run
through the film, drawing on the present-day experiences of three men from
different parts of Kerala who do not know each other and share the same first
name, (you guessed it) Shaji.
The Shaji played by
Biju Menon is a contract killer whose modus operandi is to stab people in their
buttocks.
On a parallel
track, the Shaji played by Baiju Santhosh is a cabbie driving a group of young
people around Kerala, among them a woman called Neenu Thomas (Nikhila Vimal)
brooding by herself in the backseat, untouched by her companions’ mood for
revelry.
Then there is the
ne’er-do-well Shaji played by Asif Ali, a con man who hangs out with his buddy
Kundishan (Dharmajan Bolgatty), even as he mourns the separation from the woman
he loves, while his purposeful politician brother (Ganesh Kumar) works hard for
the survival of his party.
Their paths
inevitably intersect, but the impactless wanderings until then and thereafter
suck the fun out of the marginally interesting manner in which they first
encounter each other. The confusion arising out of their shared first name
should have resulted in a riotous comedy of errors, but it does not.
Clearly the buttock
stabbing is meant to be funny, but the writing is too feeble in this case for the humour to take effect.
Equally clearly,
the track involving Shaji the driver and his passengers is meant to be
suspenseful, but the grand reveal is weighted down by limp writing, clichéd and
confused characterisation, and some lousy acting by supporting artistes.
Clearly too we are
meant to root for the youngest Shaji’s fading romance, but it is too weakly
written to be worthy of any emotional investment. For one, there is nothing
more to the other person in the relationship than this description: the pretty
young woman that Asif Ali’s character loved and lost. Nothing at all.
The antagonism
towards womankind at large that Mera Naam
Shaji lets slip near the climax explains why writers Dileep Ponnan
and Shaani Khader struggle to step into women’s shoes and thus end up creating such
stereotypical female characters. Apart from one hero’s dull love interest who
has no agency, twiddles her thumbs and waits to be rescued by her boyfriend,
there is the driver Shaji’s loud, nagging, jealous wife (Surabhi Lakshmi). As
one of my favourite teenagers might say with an eye roll – boring!
“Boring” is not the
word for the barely disguised animosity that erupts briefly in a scene
involving the criminal Shaji. At the sight of a woman engaged in a street
fight, he says out loud for no logical reason: “What's this? Vanitha mathalo? (A women’s wall?)” The
reference, of course, is to the hundreds-of-kilometres-long human chain of
solidarity formed by women in Kerala just months back to draw attention to
their battles against patriarchy. The deliberate casualness with which it is
mentioned is obviously meant to trivialise the grave issues of discrimination
that they sought to highlight.
Shaji’s subsequent
comments in the scene go even lower. He spews a misogynistic lecture at the
woman about how she and her ilk should be set right, in effect advocates
domestic violence, and for good measure, walks away from that conversation
cursing all “feminist activists”. Since this woman had previously been shown
smoking, drinking and speaking English, I guess she was deemed worthy of
nothing but condemnation in Mera Naam
Shaji’s universe. This passage comes across as a symptom of a
long-simmering, deep-seated resentment.
Considering the
visceral hatred for women in this portion, the concern expressed elsewhere in
the screenplay for a survivor of sexual violence feels faked.
There is not much
to recommend the men of Mera Naam Shaji.
Asif Ali is a sweet-looking chap but lacks a strong screen presence and here
has the additional disadvantage of playing the worst conceptualised of the
three lead roles. Given a good script, Biju Menon can be stupendous, but
without that here his acting just feels repetitive. Baiju Santhosh does the
best job of this trio, but how far can he go with such limited material to work
on?
Sreenivasan plays a
lawyer in Mera Naam Shaji whose
motivations are as inexplicable as the film itself.
As for Nikhila
Vimal, she has little to do beyond look mournful throughout. What a waste of a bright, striking, good-looking actor.
Like everything
else in this film, there is no particular well-thought-out contextual reason
for the choice of a Hindi (not Malayalam) title, or the use of a full-fledged
Hindi-Malayalam qawwali (albeit a
tuneful, lively one) in the soundtrack. The latter is specifically sought out by one of the smaller characters. If the idea was to
remind us that his cultural awareness and exposure extend beyond Kerala, then
the fact that he also turns out to be a sexually promiscuous villain amounts to
either intentional or subconscious othering. It is laughable that the same film
then spells out a spot of messaging on secularism in the very ordinarily
composed closing song. Shaji, you see, was chosen as the name of the three
leads – Shaji Usman, Shaji George and Shaji Sukumaran – because you will find
it in all parts of Kerala, across religious and other communal divides.
It is hard to
believe that Mera Naam Shaji has come
to us from the same director who, right before this, delivered Kattappanayile Rithwik Roshan (2016), which, whatever its minuses may
have been, was funny and well-meaning. Mera
Naam Shaji is not just misogynistic, it is boring. Seriously, what on earth
was it trying to be?
Rating (out
of five stars): 1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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U
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Running time:
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134 minutes
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This review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy:
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