REVIEW 784: SUFIYUM SUJATAYUM

Release date:	July 3, 2020
Director:	Naranipuzha Shanavas
Cast:	Aditi Rao Hydari, Dev Mohan, Jayasurya, Siddique, Kalaranjini, Valsala Menon, Hareesh Kanaran, Mammukoya
Language:	Malayalam

This is not the first time star-obsessed India has witnessed such an occurrence, and it is unlikely to be the last. Back in 2008, Kuselan – a Tamil remake of Mollywood’s Katha Parayumpol – was heavily marketed as a Rajinikanth-starrer though the iconic actor only had a cameo in it. Now in 2020, the promotions of Sufiyum Sujatayum have created the impression that Jayasurya, one of the leading lights of contemporary Mollywood, is the film’s male protagonist. Fact: Jayasurya plays a supporting part. He is not the lead. 

Such deceptive marketing might have been partly forgiven if Sufiyum Sujatayum had something worthwhile to offer. It does not. This story of a dance teacher called Sujata in love with a young Sufi at a Muslim shrine in her town is not just superficial in its treatment of inter-community romance and tensions, it is also pretentious and dull. 

Aditi Rao Hydari plays Sujata who happens to be mute. Jayasurya plays the man her father forces her to marry. And first-timer Dev Mohan has been cast as the Sufi. 

Writer-director Naranipuzha Shanavas uses silences, close-ups of Sujata’s delicate face and feet, religious chants and mood cinematography as a substitute for writing depth. The first half of Sufiyum Sujatayum takes too long to establish the heroine’s love story. The second half wanders too long before taking us to an interesting twist involving a graveyard in the final half hour, but Shanavas squanders that plot development when he immediately circles back to the unexciting relationship between Sujata and the Sufi.

Frankly, that pre-climactic twist by itself had the potential to be expanded into a brilliant socio-political satire on Hindu-Muslim strife in today’s India, but Shanavas clearly failed to recognise his own clever idea. What he gives us then is a listless, unremarkable film.

Although the credits feature a bunch of respected character artistes, no one stands out since no one’s talent is put to great use. Dev Mohan is given little to do beyond look pretty and occasionally, briefly whirl as dervishes do. It is a measure of Jayasurya’s charisma that although his character is mostly confined to the second half, he still manages to leave a stronger impression than the lead pair. 

As for Rao Hydari, she fails to live up to the hype generated around her in the run-up to this release. The marketing team’s decision to tomtom Sufiyum Sujatayum as her “return to Malayalam cinema after 14 years” is almost embarrassing for two reasons: first, because her role (on debut) in the Mammootty-starrer Prajapathi in 2006 was minuscule, clichéd, unmemorable and insignificant; and second, because since then she has spent most of her career in Bollywood where she has struggled to make an impact. Despite the promise she showed in Yeh Saali Zindagi (2011) and London, Paris, New York (2012), she has packed her CV largely with Hindi films in which she has barely had anything to do beyond look sweet and fragile on the sidelines while men go about their business. 

Don’t get me wrong: Rao Hydari is good-looking, moves with dancerly grace, and if the aforementioned Hindi films are a barometer, is a capable actor. But the problematic marketing of Sufiyum Sujatayum has ended up drawing attention to the faults in her filmography that make it hard to assess this performance. You see, her characters in most of her Hindi films have hardly had any spoken lines (for one, watch Wazir); as a result – and this is the harsh truth – when she plays a mute woman in Sufiyum Sujatayum, in terms of acting she is not actually doing anything vastly different from her earlier work. Yes, Sujata sometimes resorts to sign language, but Shanavas uses that aspect of her more for the visual appeal of the actor’s attractive, fluid hand movements than as a building block in what could have been a complex character.

Apart from its soulful music and overall prettiness, one of the nice touches in Sufiyum Sujatayum is the way languages other than Malayalam are woven into stray dialogues to indicate the somewhat cosmopolitan nature of the town in which the story is set; it is also nice that the subtitler lets us know when a character has spoken a non-Malayalam tongue. However, considering that the main characters all converse with each other in Malayalam, there is something odd about the way a couple of lines from a Hindi song run in the background out of the blue when Sujata experiences heartbreak, and Hindi lyrics pop up again with the end credits – the switch in language makes no sense here, it has no contextual relevance, but it places Shanavas in an expanding club of Malayalam filmmakers who seem to think Hindi is a signifier of coolth, in the way Hindi filmmakers once viewed English. The only contemporary Malayalam director who has been able to pull this off without any logic to support his choice is Lijo Jose Pellissery when he slipped Do Naina into Angamaly Diaries – it worked perhaps because the scene in question was overall so beautifully constructed. Not so in Sufiyum Sujatayum. 

Kerala may seem like an idyll of communal harmony when compared to the tattered social fabric of north India in 2020, but the troubling reality is that all is not well between communities in the state popularly described as God’s Own Country. Sufiyum Sujatayum was an opportunity to dwell on the opposition to Hindu-Muslim marriages in Malayali society, a theme that was so sensitively handled by another Shanavas – director Shanavas K. Bavakutty – in the terrific Kismath in 2016. Instead, Naranipuzha Shanavas devotes himself to the spectacle he is trying to create in Sufiyum Sujatayum, and just about skims the surface of his chosen theme. 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 1.5

Sufiyum Sujatayum is streaming on Amazon Prime Video India.

Running time:

122 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/sufiyum-sujatayum-movie-review-jayasurya-is-more-effective-in-his-supporting-role-than-the-leads-of-this-listless-film-8555331.html

Poster courtesy: IMDB

REVIEW 714: MARCONI MATHAI

Release date:	July 12, 2019
Director:	Sanil Kalathil
Cast: Language:	Jayaram, Athmiya, Vijay Sethupathi, Mallika Sukumaran, Joy Mathew, Aju Varghese, Mammukoya Malayalam with Tamil and a bit of Hindi

It is a measure of how confused, confusing and amateurish this film is that the makers have failed to do something as basic as arrive at a single spelling for the hero’s name. The closing credits list him as Mathaai, the subtitles refer to him consistently as Mathayi or rather by his nickname Marconi Mathayi, and the film’s IMDB page, which I assume is managed by them, goes with Marconi Mathai. For the sake of order and my peace of mind, I am sticking with the latter.

Jayaram here plays a happy-go-lucky elderly bachelor called Mathai who is fond of the radio. He earned the monicker Marconi Mathai when he got an oddly old-fashioned tiny Kerala town hooked on the invention credited to Guglielmo Marconi. Mathai is a former Armyman who now works as a security guard at a local bank. His popularity does not shield him from the global obsession with marriage - the entire town is determined to alter his marital status, with one old lady going so far as to belittle him in public because of it.

Unmarried people are used to being trivialised and pestered, their privacy constantly invaded with even virtual strangers deeming it fit to ask why they have not hitched themselves to another human being.  There is a film worth making on how Indian singletons deal with the pressure and peskiness. Marconi Mathai is the opposite of being that film. The intrusiveness of Mathai’s community is cutesified and given the veneer of comedy, and it is clear that we are expected to consider it a mark of their affection that they are perennially on his case to get himself a wife. They coax and scold and scheme and prod and bully and badger and hound him so much and for such a large part of the running time that I swear I got so exhausted at one point, I felt like yanking Mathai off the screen, finding him a willing woman and forcing him to marry her, just so that the darned film would get over.

Many yawns later, a young spinster called Anna (Athmiya) joins the bank as a sweeper cum cook, and Mathai’s friends decide she is an ideal match for him. That she looks young enough to be his child does not deter them, and why would it? Since when has age been a hurdle in romance for Malayalam cinema’s star Daddy brigade?

Weirder still is Mathai’s reaction. There are spoilers coming up, but seriously this film is so bad, do you really care about niceties? So as I said, Mathai, who has persistently avoided marriage for decades because he was hurt in love as a child, suddenly falls for Anna. Yeah yeah, Athmiya is a beauty, but considering that there are millions of good-looking people in this world, and Anna is dull to boot, it is a mystery that Mathai is willing to give up his life-long commitment to bachelorhood for her.

The bigger mystery of course is why Tamil cinema stalwart Vijay Sethupathi picked this vacuous, pointless film for his Malayalam debut. Cineastes are still reeling under the impact of his stupendous performance in Thiagarajan Kumararaja’s Super Deluxe earlier this year, and Mollywood has so much quality to offer an actor of his calibre, so why on earth did he opt for this empty vessel?

Sethupathi plays himself, a major Kollywood star who lands in Kerala to promote his new Tamil film for what seems like weeks or maybe even months via a call-in radio show. It takes a particularly infertile imagination to come up with such an implausible, ridiculous ruse to write Vijay Sethupathi into a screenplay. The role has been positioned in the promotions as being substantial, but it is really nothing more than a stretched-out cameo in which the actor is saddled with terribly written dialogues in what amounts to an extended ad for Red FM.

You know of course the two threads will intersect at some point, but never mind how the twain meet. Just know that Mathai, when rejected by Anna, acts with less maturity than a five year old and – get this – the entire village shames her for breaking his heart, which causes her to promptly fall in love with him.

When the action shifts to Goa (don’t ask why), Marconi Mathai becomes even more slapdash, dull and purposeless than it was in Kerala. Oh, the trauma!

Someone actually wrote this script. A bunch of talented someones actually agreed to come on board. And someone actually agreed to finance it.

It makes no sense to analyse the acting because the greatest thespians in the world would struggle to rise above a story and screenplay this bad. If there is a bright spot on this very dismal landscape, it comes in the form of Sajan Kalathil’s pretty aerial shots of the story’s water-bound location, and Sameera Saneesh’s eye-catching outfits for Anna. And then there were those moments when I allowed my exasperation at the limp narrative to recede into the background and simply gaped at Vijay Sethupathi. Thus do hapless viewers stuck in a movie hall find ways to extract the price of a ticket off the screen.

Director Sanil Kalathil shares the blame in the credits for the abysmal writing. In the tradition of many Malayalam filmmakers who seem to think Hindi is the ultimate sign of coolth, he tosses a couple of Hindi lines into the background score as Mathai cycles around the town square in a love-lorn daze, borrowing heavily from the Bollywood classic, ‘Yeh kya hua, kaise hua, kab hua’, though with a different tune: What is this that has happened? How did it happen? When did it happen?

The reference of course is to the feeling of lurrrrrvvve that is washing over Mathai’s being during that scene, “pyaar” as one of his Hindi-fixated buddies insists on calling it. The words of the song unwittingly echo my thoughts about Marconi Mathai: What is it? How did it happen? When? And why oh why?

Marconi Mathai has the air of being a film that thinks it is addressing crucial existential questions. Let me assure you, Mr Kalathil, it is not.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):

U

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/marconi-mathai-movie-review-why-oh-why-are-vijay-sethupathi-and-jayaram-in-this-ridiculous-ode-to-marriage-6986481.html

Poster courtesy:

https://www.facebook.com/marconimathaioffical/

REVIEW 663: ENTE UMMANTE PERU

Release date:	Kerala: December 21, 2018.  Delhi: December 28, 2018.
Director:	Jose Sebastian
Cast: Language:	Urvashi, Tovino Thomas, Mammukoya, Hareesh Kanaran, Dileesh Pothan, Siddique Malayalam with some Hindi

Tovino Thomas as the leading man, Urvashi playing a woman who may be his mother, pretty shots of the Kerala countryside, and glimpses of parts of Lucknow that even Hindi cinema rarely visits – what’s not to like? Answer: the lack of substance.

Jose Sebastian’s Ente Ummante Peru is interesting only to the extent that here, unlike in most Indian films where kids go in search of a parent, this kid is not looking for his Dad from whose existence he hopes to gain respectability or from whom he intends to demand to know why the man abandoned his wife/girlfriend and child, nor is he longing for maternal love (like, say, Vineeth Sreenivasan’s character in Aravindante Athidhikal). Here, instead, he hopes to re-acquire respectability by adding a mother figure to his life. That’s a change for the better...I guess?

But wait, let me not get ahead of myself. This is the story of Hameed who discovers, upon his father’s death, that Papa was married to two women, one of whom, he assumes, is his Mum. He sets off to find her, because his worth as a potential groom has fallen, it seems, since he is now an orphan. It feels odd to have that word applied persistently to a full-grown adult played by the strapping, muscular Tovino Thomas, but the writers (Sebastian himself and Sarath R. Nath) must have had something in mind when they sent Hameed off on his Mommy quest.

Whatever that something was, it is still within the confines of their minds. There is an atom of an idea somewhere in there that could perhaps be expanded into a good screenplay someday, but that day has not yet arrived.

Senior women film artistes struggle to find substantial roles and strong scripts, so I can kinda understand why an actor of Urvashi’s superstar stature signed up for this project, but men of all ages, especially of Thomas’ age, face no such drought, so I wonder what this sought-after youngster – with films like Oru Mexican Aparatha and Mayaanadhi under his belt – saw in this directionless writing.

Ente Ummante Peru does have some things going for it though. There is, for instance, some humour in the banter between Hameed and his close buddy played by Hareesh Kanaran a.k.a. Hareesh Perumanna. And Mammukoya as Hameed’s other arch ally is a dear because, well, he is Mammukoya.

I also enjoyed the sights and sounds of Lucknow, especially the imposing mansion and the decaying old-style haveli Hameed visits. For a part of this stretch, Sebastian also manages to conjure up an air of mystery around Urvashi’s character Aishu, another woman who is introduced late into the plot and an intriguing youth we see only from a distance.

Somewhere around this time Hameed asks Aishu, “Who are you?” The answer never comes, and we never quite get to figure out why Hameed or Aishu do any of what they do, or why Hameed becomes so desperate to find his mother (even his desperation to be married not being a believable explanation). The screenplay also offers little reason to feel invested in their relationship, or the story of Hameed’s late father, the son’s relationship with the old man, or even his equation with the young woman who is the reason why he goes off looking for his mother in the first place.

The narrative is lifted up by several notches with the entry of Urvashi who has more charisma per fingernail than most people can summon up with their entire personality. It is particularly commendable that she makes Aishu so striking considering that the woman is curt and unappealing.

Thomas is always easy on the eye and a pleasant presence, but the lack of chemistry between him and Urvashi is a reminder of how dependent good acting is on good writing.

There is, after all, only so much that even the great Urvashi and sweet Tovino Thomas can achieve with a clueless script.

Rating (out of five stars): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	131 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/ente-ummante-peru-movie-review-urvashi-is-irrepressible-tovino-is-nice-enough-but-the-script-lacks-substance-5813151.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ente_Ummante_Peru