REVIEW 794: MALAIKOTTAI VAALIBAN

Release date:	January 25, 2024
Director:	Lijo Jose Pellissery
Cast:	Mohanlal, Katha Nandi, Sonalee Kulkarni, Manoj Moses, Danish Sait, Hareesh Peradi, Sanjana Chandran, Manikandan R. Achari
Language:	Malayalam

 

Malaikottai Vaaliban features some of the most sensational images and sound ever created for the Indian screen. Sadly though, it is proof that visual and aural stimulation alone do not guarantee greatness. Writer-director Lijo Jose Pellissery’s new venture is a feast for the eyes and ears, but it is also stretched to nearly three hours with a plot and character graphs undeserving of that length. This unfortunate combination gives the film its defining characteristic: its soullessness. 

 

Starring Mohanlal as the eponymous protagonist, Malaikottai Vaaliban is a tale of a legendary warrior in an unspecified age gone by. Vaaliban travels across the land in an unassuming bullock cart with his foster parent, Ayyanar (Hareesh Peradi), and the latter’s son, Chinnappaiyyan (Manoj Moses). When they reach a village or town, Chinnappaiyyan announces their arrival with loud proclamations about Vaaliban’s past exploits. At the first stop that we see, Vaaliban vanquishes a local muscle man with more ease than Sunny Deol uprooting a handpump from the ground or Superman stopping a speeding train with bare hands. His confrontations get increasingly more challenging, but none equal an enemy he encounters who combats him through underhand means. 

 

With deliberate ambiguity about the time and place in which this story unfolds and the ethnicity of those among whom it is set, Pellissery makes it clear that he wishes to transport us to a mythical world where cultures, races and even geography cannot be pinned down. Most of the characters speak Malayalam, but at at least one arid location, there are faces in the crowd that look more like the weather-beaten visages found in the Thar or Kutch or in the dustbowls of Haryana. The dancer Rangapattinam Rangarani has a Tamil-sounding name but facial features more familiar in west or north India, her attire and jewels seem inspired by Maharashtra, and she is played by the Marathi film star Sonalee Kulkarni. Katha Nandi who is cast as Chinnappaiyyan’s lover Jamanthipoova is Bengali and looks it, while the Kannada cinema actor Danish Sait steps into the role of Vaaliban’s foe Chamathakan. In most films, this mix ‘n’ match might have been random, but in Malaikottai Vaaliban it feels deliberate considering everything else going on here.   

 

At one point in this Malayalam language ecosystem, characters break into a Hindi song. The story also includes a brutal European coloniser king with a name rooted in present-day UK but speaking a language from mainland Europe. 

 

This heterogeneity is attractive for a while. The cast is immensely likeable and immersed in the theatrics required of them as they surrender themselves to Pellissery’s vision headlined by the all-round splendour emanating from the screen. Those grand shots of vast barren terrain, a rust coloured stole with a sequinned trim being dragged dramatically on the ground, the golden lights of a crowded bazaar in the night, a primary character introduced through shadow play, a crimson-dominated palette that matches the blood splashed across a stone wall at one point, a Colosseum-like arena (more Game of Thrones than Gladiator) and bird’s eye views of human bodies dancing, fighting, advancing towards each other – they are all framed with loving attention to each dot, line and tint on cinematographer Madhu Neelakandan’s colossal canvas, complemented by Gokuldas’ art direction and costumes by Sujith Sudhakaran and Ratheesh Chammravattom. 

 

Malaikottai Vaaliban’s soundscape – with sound design by Renganaath Ravee and music by Prashant Pillai – is just as fabulous. Its signature refrain resembles a male mob letting out their breath in a collective whoosh. 

 

Each of these elements is spectacular as an independent entity, but when woven together, the overall package feels self-indulgent after a while with too much use of slow motion, too many aerial shots and too little substance in the script written by P.S. Rafeeque and Pellissery. People here are treated less like people and more like props, epitomised by the sinful under-utilisation of Manikandan R. Achari in a bit part as a jailed slave.

 

As the thinly sketched characters begin to weigh the narrative down, these embellishments are exposed as just that: embellishments, trying to convince us that there is more to Malaikottai Vaaliban than its luminous epidermal layer. Truth: there is not. I kept willing myself to be drawn into the story being told, but an overwhelming sense of tedium made that impossible. 

 

Like Deepak D. Menon’s painterly portraits of scenery, including one that “should be framed for museum display” as I wrote in my review of Padavettu (2022), a zillion moments in Malaikottai Vaaliban ought to be frozen as stills for the walls of prestigious galleries. A shot of concentric circles of humans in this film is surpassed in its beauty in recent Malayalam cinema only by Rajeev Ravi’s compositions for Thuramukham (2023). Malayalam films are known for delivering world-class camerawork even on tiny budgets, but these three films, regrettably, prioritise/d visual appeal over characterisation. Malaikottai Vaaliban is the cinematic equivalent of a gorgeous, lifeless mannequin rather than the pulsating life form that a quality film always is.

 

Pellissery has created abstract art earlier too, but unlike the seminal Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakam (2023), here we get abstractness for the heck of it. His influences and references in Malaikottai Vaaliban are as disparate as they come, ranging from Westerns to samurai cinema, conventional Indian action drama – the sort with outlandish stunts performed by omnipotent heroes exemplified by Rajinikanth – and even Tinkle Comics. The predatory Chamathakan, for one, comes across as a human cousin of the jackal Chamataka from my favourite Tinkle series, Kalia the Crow. Pellissery also replicates a scene from that most famous of Spaghetti Western-inspired Indian films, Sholay: the one in which Gabbar forces Basanti to dance on shards of glass to save Veeru. 

 

A game of Spot The Cultural References is not stimulus enough to stay awake through Malaikottai Vaaliban though. The only character whose skin we are allowed to look past is Ayyanar, but by the time that happens, the film is in its finale. 

 

Vaaliban says at one point: “What the eye has seen is the truth. What has not been seen is a lie.” The lines that ensue and a disclosure by a prominent character indicate a Rashomon Effect not visible within the space of this single film but over a span of at least two. Yes, there’s a sequel (the announcement comes in Malaikottai Vaaliban itself). I’ll explain vaguely to avoid spoilers: until the point in his life at which this film ends, Vaaliban had believed a certain something that he was told; we believed what he believed; but the events in this film are being recounted after he learnt the truth, which will now be revealed to us in Malaikottai Vaaliban 2. Sort of. I think.

 

Interesting idea, but it comes too late in the day to save Malaikottai Vaaliban 1. So am I looking forward to Part 2? Not really. There’s not enough coffee in the world...  

Rating (out of 5 stars): 2   

 

Running time:

155 minutes

 

Poster courtesy: IMDB