REVIEW 773: TRANCE

Release date:	Kerala: February 20, 2020 Delhi: February 28, 2020
Director:	Anwar Rasheed
Cast: Language:	Fahadh Faasil, Sreenath Bhasi, Soubin Shahir, Nazriya Nazim Fahadh, Gautham Vasudev Menon, Chemban Vinod Jose, Dileesh Pothan, Vinayakan, Arjun Ashokan Malayalam with some Tamil and English

How can a film descend so dramatically from being profound, poignant and quirky pre-interval to shallow, stretched, sterile and repetitive thereafter?

Director Anwar Rasheed’s Trance takes off brilliantly. Fahadh Faasil plays Viju Prasad, an aspiring motivational speaker talent-spotted by a large corporation and transformed into a religious preacher. The early scenes of Viju in Kanyakumari trying to establish himself in his profession even while struggling to financially and emotionally support his mentally unwell brother are moving. They are also an uncommon blend of quiet yet wacko.

Fahadh dazzles throughout the film, but in the first half he gets to sink his ravenous actor’s teeth into a meaty script. Those manic eyes camouflaged from the world reveal themselves only when he is alone. In his avatar as a pastor, he explodes on stage with a matching manic energy. Those scenes in front of a mirror teeter on the edge of resembling his character Shammi’s signature scene in Kumbalangi Nights, but Fahadh has a distinctive touch that turns them into a tribute and a nod to that iconic 2019 film instead of a copy.

The first half of Trance is also enriched by the presence of Sreenath Bhasi in a brief role as Viju’s troubled sibling Kunjan. Bhasi is less celebrated than Fahadh in Mollywood but he is, without question, one of this industry’s most gifted actors. In the little time he gets on screen, he makes Kunjan an understated mix of fearful and fearsome, fond of Viju yet possibly resentful towards him because he is conscious – without ever having been taunted – of being a burden on his protective, devoted elder brother. What lies beneath that boyish facade one cannot quite tell, and Bhasi makes the character intriguing.

It is heartening that for a second year in a row, Malayalam cinema has made the effort to dwell on mental health, a theme that Indian cinema at large neglects.

The time spent on Viju and Kunjan’s relationship is the best written, best directed part of Trance.

The other is the electric interaction between Viju and a journalist called Mathews (Soubin Shahir) in a TV studio. The latter is in top form as a man pretending to be what he is not, quite like Viju.

Vincent Vadakkan’s screenplay excels too in its initial depictions of the machinations and manipulations at play when a wolf in preacher’s clothing stands on a stage working a frenzied mob of the faithful. Those passages are enthralling and oftentimes hilarious. After the interval though, similar scenes are repeatedly rolled out with little that is new being added to what has already been shown and said. By then the downhill slide is well and truly underway.

This is when it becomes noticeable that apart from Viju and Kunjan, there is absolutely no detailing in the writing of the rest of the players in Trance. Among others, Gautham Vasudev Menon, Chemban Vinod Jose and Dileesh Pothan are victims of one-note characterisation. The first two are evil representatives of a corporate giant, the latter is their amoral lackey – that is it, there is nothing more to them.

The low point of Trance though is the token female presence provided by Nazriya Nazim Fahadh.

(Some readers may deem certain parts of this paragraph spoilers) Nazriya’s decidedly marginal character, Esther Lopez, is brought in by the villains to be Viju a.k.a. Pastor Joshua Carlton’s secretary, to get close to him and unearth certain information about him. Obviously a regular professional would not serve their purpose. The recruiter is asked to shed light on Esther’s murky background, and she offers this cryptic explanation: “the usual – boyfriend scene.” OMG, she had a – you do not want your children hearing this – b.o.y.f.r.i.e.n.d.? When the lady explains herself, we learn that by “boyfriend scene” she meant that Esther fell in love, was ditched, took to alcohol and drugs, and perhaps has a child. (Spoiler alert ends)

The film is straining at this point to appear cool, but unwittingly betrays the writer’s biases – biases, it must be said, that are not unknown to commercial Malayalam cinema. This is a world in which sweet, young, innocent-looking women look sad immediately after sex. Because to a conservative mind, sorrow is a woman’s natural reaction to sex, even when consensual? Insert eye-roll emoji here. There is nothing to indicate that Esther Lopez is an assumed name, so it must also be asked why she could not have been a Marykutty Jose, Parvathy Rajendran or Shazia Mohammed. Was this a sub-conscious choice? What point was being conveyed by writing this alcohol-swilling drug addict as a woman with a decidedly Anglo-Indian sounding name who lives in Mumbai and has a Hindi line from a song playing in the background in her introductory scene?

Boss, all the slickness in the world – production design: Ajayan Chalissery, music: Sushin Shyam and Jackson Vijayan, camerawork: Amal Neerad – cannot camouflage your innate prejudice and traditionalism or the fact that in the second half you have allowed style to trump depth.

There is so much promise in the first half of Trance in its depiction of religion as an opioid. The second half though, completely fails to take that substantial beginning forward. A sub-plot involving Vinayakan has potential but its soul is overshadowed by production polish.

More important, if the goal was to probe corruption in religion and the exploitation of gullible devotees, then by zeroing in on a niche Christian group rather than mainstream Christianity or for that matter Hinduism or Islam, Rasheed and Vadakkan have taken a comparatively less risky path. As far as the writing challenge goes, ridiculing an overtly madcap religious sect that flails its arms about while screaming “Hallelujah” and “Praise the Lord” is relatively easy. Investigating such a group, since it is off-mainstream, is also politically safer than delving into the mind games, questionable finances and regressiveness of a more widely recognised sect from any one of the major world religions with a presence in Kerala.

Even within the space occupied by smaller, corporatised churches, Trance ends up being superficial. For a more insightful take on such organisations, check out the admittedly soapish but nevertheless insightful American series Greenleaf on Netflix.

In the end, in any case Trance seems less pre-occupied with depth and more concerned about impressing the audience with its cool camera angles. When a man kills another, I was too distracted by the blood drops falling in slow motion into a transparent drink to be disturbed by his motivations. And the film’s epilogue-like closing in which a gallant dude rescues a woman who was making no effort to rescue herself (because what else can a paavam girl do but wait around for Lochinvar on his white horse?) seems to have been thrown in only as an excuse to take the story to foreign lands.

I cannot believe that Trance was made by the director of one of my all-time favourite Malayalam films, Ustad Hotel. Next time cook that script some more, please.

  

Rating (out of 5 stars): 2.5

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	170 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/trance-movie-review-fahadh-faasils-manic-energy-lends-an-edge-to-an-initially-promising-ultimately-undeserving-script-8100991.html

Posters courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/trancemovie/

REVIEW 619: KOODE

Release date:	Kerala: July 13, 2018. Delhi: July 20, 2018.
Director:	Anjali Menon
Cast: Language:	Prithviraj Sukumaran, Nazriya Nazim Fahadh, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Maala Parvathi, Ranjith Balakrishnan, Atul Kulkarni, Devan, Roshan Mathew, Darshana Rajendran, Santhosh Keezhattoor    Malayalam

“Coach Ashraf was the first person to ever pass the ball to me,” Sophie tells Joshua, on a gray day up in the mountains of southern India. She is a rebel who has been paying a price for her self-respect, and is grabbing a moment of solace here with an old friend.

Joshua is young like her, but his shoulders are slightly hunched under the crushing burden patriarchy places on men. “Actually, I was the one who passed the ball to you,” he corrects her shyly, before acknowledging that the coach had asked him to do so.

A lesser filmmaker may have framed this brief dialogue such that it cries from rooftops, “See this, viewers! See how socially conscious I am!” Producer-director-writer Anjali Menon though leaves us to make of it what we wish. Read it, if you will, as an exchange of inanities between two people hesitantly picking up the frayed threads of a precious relationship snuffed out in its infancy. Or read in it thoughts left unspoken – by a woman remembering a mentor who backed her when she took the reins of life in her hands as a child, and by a man who may still not grasp the magnitude of that moment but is glad he was in it anyway.

Koode uses words sparingly. Menon even cheekily stresses the risks involved in this creative choice during the early banter between Joshua and his sister Jenny, when he laughingly takes a swipe at her incessant chatter and she shoots back: “If even I don’t talk, this will become some kind of award-worthy art film.”

Jenny is what conformists might call “comic relief” in an otherwise intentionally languorous narrative. But to speak in terms of formulae would be a disservice to this lyrical film. Koode is a remake of Sachin Kundalkar’s Marathi venture Happy Journey in which a sister who has barely met her brother while she was alive appears to him after her death. Kundalkar is credited with the story and Menon with the screenplay and dialogues of Koode. In the Malayalam retelling, Joshua is the older sibling who was sent off to work in the Gulf at 15 since he was floundering at school and the family desperately needed cash to treat baby Jenny’s congenital, life-threatening condition.

The film opens with an adult Joshua (Prithviraj Sukumaran) returning home on receiving news of Jenny’s death. From the moment we first meet him, his entire being seems enveloped in a halo of sadness. It soon becomes clear that Joshua has long resented his family for destroying his youth. He is now resigned to a future of loneliness but Jenny (Nazriya Nazim Fahadh) comes back and will have none of that. Joshua is the only one who can see her, and she tries to help him see beyond his fatalism and bitterness. Whenever she is on screen, she lifts his spirits and Koode’s melancholic air.

Parvathy Thiruvothu plays the schoolteacher Sophie, who was kind to Joshua when they were classmates and on whom he had a teenaged crush. In a bow to Happy Journey, the coach they love is played by Atul Kulkarni who was the lead in the Marathi original.

“Koode” means “with” or “in the company of”. It is a word not usually seen on its own. By picking it as the name of her film, Menon therefore seems to be reminding us that solitude is one of life’s many acceptable possibilities and that relationships are worth having not to fulfill social obligations but when they enrich us. The title is perhaps rooted in Gandhi’s favourite hymn Abide With Me, a Christian funeral anthem of sorts, a Malayalam version of which, Koode parkaan, can be heard playing after Jenny’s passing.

So much is said without being said, about fleeting acts of consideration that can alter lives, about how a patriarchy that overtly stifles women also covertly smothers many men, about the consequent silence around male child sexual abuse and the social opprobrium a divorcee in a small town faces, about how financial independence gives women the courage to opt out of suffocating relationships, and about the very human fear that we are or will be forgotten when we are not physically around our loved ones.

Menon does it all in a film that is almost dreamy in its tone, with bursts of energy and sunshine provided by Jenny and sections of the soundtrack. Raghu Dixit’s background score and the songs – by Dixit and by M. Jayachandran – move smoothly from languid to lively, depending on the mood of the narrative. Having listened to the music in a loop since watching Koode, I am not yet sure of its standalone appeal for me independent of the film, but within the landscape of Joshua, Jenny and Sophie’s story, it is a great fit.

The atmospherics of Koode would have been impossible without its spectacular camerawork. Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where it was reportedly shot, are nature’s gift to every gifted cinematographer, but DoP Littil Swayamp serves us beauty even in grubby pictures. From that breath-stopping opening shot of a group of men at an oil refinery to dreary desert sands to a wealth of greenery to the actors’ speaking faces, everything is an opportunity in his hands. He makes particularly good use of repeated aerial shots that, apart from visual magnificence, provide some perspective on the lead trio’s place in the larger scheme of things, which further serves to underline a point Jenny makes about focusing on the here and now since the past is gone and we know not what comes next.

Parvathy has the most challenging role in Koode since she has the least dialogues and the least screen time of the three leads. I felt vaguely dissatisfied with the limited space given to this interesting individual, but the actor makes it work, imbuing Sophie with both a sense of intense dejection and a fire that marks her out as a contrast to Joshua: he is mostly battling inner demons, hers are external.

The writing and Nazriya’s acting often cutesify Jenny, but it is possible to explain this away as the fallout of her being a sickly, much younger, possibly pampered child around whom her whole family’s existence revolved as long as she was around. Though this sort of hyper-bubbly girl is too familiar a sight in commercial Indian cinema, Nazriya’s charm is hard to resist. Besides, Jenny provides a necessary foil to the despondent Joshua.

The fulcrum of Koode of course is the scripting of Joshua and Prithviraj’s brilliance. He turns his eyes into bottomless pools of sorrow while playing this broken man, every line and angle of his physique embodies the pain Joshua carries inside him, and yet whenever he is with Jenny, the actor manages to lighten up and transition into an attractive young man who has not, after all, forgotten how to laugh. It is a pleasure to see this fine artiste so absorbed in a character, especially because Mollywood often taps his stardom in films undeserving of his immense talent.

Of the top-notch supporting cast, Ranjith Balakrishnan stands out for his sympathetic performance as Joshua’s auto mechanic father. I did not quite get the cameo by Sajitha Madathil as a teacher whose initial harshness towards the unwell Jenny is not consistent with her later actions. On the other hand, Devan is cast well in one of the film’s nicest satellite parts, as Jenny’s father who is, to overturn a cliché, the man behind this gutsy woman.

Anjali Menon is best known among serious cinephiles outside Kerala for her direction of the blockbuster Bangalore Days (2014). Critically acclaimed though it was, I confess I am not thoroughly sold on it. Sure I enjoyed it for the most part, but I found Dulquer Salmaan’s briefly stalkerish behaviour and the othering of Nivin Pauly’s girlfriend problematic, as was the faux youthful hipness of some elements in the film. I fell in love with her work actually with Ustad Hotel (2012), which she wrote but did not direct. The trivialisation and othering of DQ’s European girlfriend was troubling there too, but it was a barely-there reference barring which the film was a gem.

Koode’s vastly different storytelling style proves Menon’s versatility. It also tells us that she is a mistress of the unsaid. There are no banner headlines in this film so watch it carefully or you may just miss that hand sliding down a body where it ought not to be, a man in a conservative world reacting without judgment to a younger woman’s sexual curiosity and adventurousness, a girl in a position in which we tend to expect boys in music troupes, or the flash of a realisation that a woman at a steering wheel in a vehicle in which a man is also a passenger is a rare sight in an Indian production.

I might have preferred it if the concluding scenes involving Joshua and Sophie’s stories had completely abjured social conventions or been left to the imagination, but that is a marginal quibble in a film that is, in its entirety, a near spiritual experience. Anjali Menon’s Koode is a sharply observant, occasionally humorous, emotionally stirring piece of cinema.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	2 hours 35 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/koode-movie-review-anjali-menon-weaves-prithviraj-parvathys-brilliance-nazriyas-charm-into-a-mystical-experience-4791031.html

Visuals courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/koodethemovie/