Release
date:
|
September 27, 2019
|
Director:
|
Ramesh Pisharody
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Mammootty,
Vanditha Manoharan, Athulya Chandra, Manoj K. Jayan, Suresh Krishna,
Mukesh, Siddique, Innocent, Dharmajan Bolgatty, Hareesh Kanaran, Sunil
Sukhada, Kochu Preman, Salim Kumar, Anoop Menon
Malayalam
|
Ganagandharvan is not about a man called Ullaas (played by
Mammootty) who is a gaanamela singer.
Ullaas’ story is just an excuse in this film to paint men as victims of
feminism and the laws designed to protect women from sexual exploitation.
Ramesh Pisharody
betrays a disdain for women and condescension towards them even before
courtroom battles commence between an evil femme called Sandra and hapless paavam Ullaas. In a scene that casually
reveals the writer-director’s patriarchal worldview, a bunch of male friends
are gathered at Ullaas’ house to discuss legal options available
to him. Ullaas’ bandmate Titto (Manoj K. Jayan) is in the
kitchen trying to make tea for the guests. Among them is the father
of the budding lawyer Anamika who is herself present. Dad is trying
to convince Ullaas to hire her. When Titto emerges to express an inability to
find the tea leaves, Daddy turns to Anamika Mol – not to Ullaas who you would
think should know where everything is kept in his own house, but to
Anamika – and asks her to prepare the beverage for all of them as though it is
the most natural thing in the world for her in particular to do so. She obeys
wordlessly, magically finds the tea leaves (I suppose because every woman is
born with a tea-leaf-spotting chromosome) and emerges with a tray for the
men. Having fulfilled what the filmmaker clearly deems her designated feminine
duty, she proceeds to wax eloquent about the various sections of the Indian Penal
Code that Sandra could deploy to take revenge on Ullaas for perceived
wrongs.
The kitchen saga in
this scene is so pointed and so detailed – Titto is actually shown looking for
tea leaves, Anamika is actually shown making tea – that Pisharody is clearly
making a statement through it: that this woman, who is fully capable of filling
what is socially perceived as her pre-ordained womanly role despite having a
career outside the house, shares his views on the twisted nature of feminism;
that being a woman professional is acceptable just so long as you know
your place and stay in touch with your congenital domestic skills;
that every woman is biologically tuned to make her way around household
jobs in the way the uterus is biologically tuned for pregnancy, noses breathe
and hearts beat.
The patriarchal,
anti-feminist, misogynistic messaging of Ganagandharvan is the primary purpose of its existence, and Ullaas
is Pisharody’s instrument of choice.
Ganagandharvan revolves around nice
guy Ullaas, a singer whose goal of becoming a film playback
singer remains unfulfilled. He now spends his days performing at weddings and
other public and social functions. His wife Mini (Vanditha Manoharan) loves him
but is frustrated with his lack of progress. His daughter has zero respect for
him.
When he is
approached with an extraordinary request to help Sandra (Athulya Chandra), he
gets sucked into a vortex of circumstances and misunderstandings fuelled by
what the film describes as society’s and the legal system’s pro-women bias.
Various women from Anamika to a “feminist judge” are used as mouthpieces
for Pisharody’s propaganda conveyed through sarcasm and a fake concern for
women with genuine issues. And Sandra, a character written with an utter
lack of nuance, is used to repeatedly say things like, “Njaan oru pennalle, law endoode nikkyu ollu” (I am a woman so the
law will stand with me). To underline her horridness she is shown slapping a
man after hitting him with her car and justifying her obnoxious behaviour with
the dictum
that attack is the best form of defence.
This review does
not intend to suggest that laws sensitive to women’s concerns have never been
misused. No law or system in this world can escape at least some degree of
misuse, but so-called Men’s Rights Activists exaggerate the minuscule
percentage of such episodes in the context of women-related laws – ignoring the
humongous scale of violence and discrimination against women worldwide – to demonise
feminism, feminists and systemic consideration for women.
Mollywood presents Ganagandharvan just a fortnight after
the release of the insidious Bollywood film Section
375, which operates on the same premise. Such films are a backlash against
the increasingly vocal nature of contemporary feminism, which has the benefit
of platforms such as the social media that were not available to earlier
generations of rights warriors.
The screenplay’s
low IQ is exemplified by a character who is worried when a new judge takes over
Ullaas’ case. “The new woman judge is a feminist,” he says, “till date she
has never ruled in favour of a man.” Yawn. Boring. Seriously how little
intelligence must you have to parrot this clichéd line about feminism? If you
believe a movement for gender equality is anti-men, then one has to assume that
you believe all men are anti-equality.
Pisharody’s failure
lies not only in his status-quoist, antagonistic ideology, but in his inability
to tell a story well. Considerable time is spent on establishing Ullaas’
family, his musical background and lost dreams in the first hour of Ganagandharvan, but all this becomes
irrelevant once he is trapped by Sandra. There is no answer to why
Pisharody and his co-writer Hari P. Nair did not plunge straight into the
Ullaas-Sandra track.
This is not the
only time-wasting writing choice they make. A parade of characters played
by well-known character actors appear and disappear in Ganagandharvan without contributing much to the narrative, apart
from providing some comic relief. At first they are funny – the sub-plot
involving Ashokan, for one, certainly merits a few laughs. Then though, these
bit parts become tedious as they needlessly stretch the film’s length, the
humour clashes with the grim storyline and it becomes clear that even these
comedians are being used to further Pisharody’s cause.
The character
played by Suresh Krishna works as long as the film appears to be a
slice-of-life saga set within a musical troupe. When it metamorphoses into a
legal drama, he becomes completely superfluous and the supposedly grand
revelation involving his all-white attire is downright silly. Salim Kumar turns
up for a few seconds simply to insinuate, with a purported wisecrack, that
domestic violence laws are routinely misused by women. And the sudden
appearance of Anoop Menon in a climactic twist is just plain stupid. Tacky
writing all around.
There is really no
point in asking: what were you thinking, Mammootty? Because Mammootty,
our beloved Mammukka, screen legend, actor par excellence, he who also chose to
star in sensitively handled, quality cinema like Peranbu (Tamil) and Unda (Malayalam)
just this year, has done far worse by women in his decades-long career in a
slew of films that make Ganagandharvan
look humane in comparison. At least here we are spared the posing around, the
bizarre trademark focus on his sunglasses, shoes and gait in the midst of grave
plot developments, or his own character spewing venom at women. The tragedy of Ganagandharvan is that
Mammootty actually acts well in the film, but the empathy he evokes for his character sticks out like an oasis in
what Tagore might have described as a “dreary desert sand of” a dead screenplay
and flat performances by the female leads Vanditha Manoharan and
Athulya Chandra who are dealt badly written roles and are young enough to be his granddaughters anyway.
Perhaps nothing in Ganagandharvan should come as a surprise
considering that Pisharody and Nair co-wrote last year’s Panchavarnathatha which was dull and
pointless. That film, starring Jayaram and
Kunchacko Boban, was not fixated on building animosity towards women in the way
this one is, but it did make light of intimate partner violence. Team Ganagandharvan too features a man
casually telling a woman that considering the way she behaved with
Ullaas, he should at the very least have slapped her once, to which
she seems to agree. Apparently the only thing more
natural than the female human’s ability to find tea leaves in a kitchen is the
right of a male human to hit her if she bugs him.
Rating (out
of five stars): 1/4
CBFC Rating (India):
|
U
|
Running time:
|
139 minutes
|
This review has also been published on Firstpost:
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