REVIEW 728: LOVE ACTION DRAMA

Release date:	September 5, 2019
Director:	Dhyan Sreenivasan
Cast: Language:	Nivin Pauly, Nayanthara, Aju Varghese, Sreenivasan, Mallika Sukumaran, Vineeth Sreenivasan, Renji Panicker Malayalam and Tamil

“Just name one quality of Dinesh that has caused you to like him,” Shoba’s worried father quietly beseeches her. His beautiful daughter has nothing to say in response. The fact that she is supposedly in love with the Dinesh in question and this scene comes well into the second half of Love Action Drama speaks volumes about their relationship. An answer is nowhere in sight even when the end credits roll around, which speaks volumes too about the vapid writing of this film.

It takes a special effort to cast Malayalam cinema’s sweetheart Nivin Pauly and Tamil-Telugu megastar  Nayanthara in the same project yet somehow end up with a flat, man-centric, immature dramedy. Actor turned directorial debutant Dhyan Sreenivasan manages that feat. You might imagine that Dhyan would be getting reams of advice at home – he is, after all, the son of the venerable veteran actor-writer Sreenivasan and younger sibling of the supremely successful actor-director-singer Vineeth Sreenivasan. His connections, genes and the star power of his lead cast are no match though for the shallow writing of this film.

Love Action Drama is a romance in which it is impossible to figure out from start to finish why the central couple are into each other or whether they are into each other at all. They say they are in love so we are forced to believe it but the writing of the bond between them is sterile. The misplaced priorities in Dhyan’s screenplay are entirely to blame. The characterisation of Shoba is sketchy at best. More time has evidently been spent styling her than writing her. The result is that Nayanthara looks stunning (although it would have helped to go easy on the oil or lotion or whatever it is that her team used to shine her arms to distraction in her introductory scene), but there is little we get to know about Shoba beyond that she is a Chennai-based Malayali who runs some sort of business, and as one man early in the film confides in another, she is that terrible F word. You know, feminist. Hawww.

Dhyan treats the female of the species like an alien race in the way a person might if he has lived in a segregated society all his life and never had solid friendships with women. In contrast, the writing of Dinesh is detailed. So is his relationship with his friend Sagar (Aju Varghese).

Shoba and Dinesh meet when she visits Kerala for her friend’s wedding. He is an alcoholic, chain smoker and layabout, in mourning since he fancies himself to be in love with the bride who is his cousin. His feelings clearly do not run very deep, considering that by the end of the wedding he has transferred his giggly affections to Shoba.

Like George from Premam – Pauly’s 2015 blockbuster – Dinesh too is an immature guy from the beginning to the end of this journey. A film may very well be centred around a kiddish adult, the problem arises here because the film itself is kiddish. Love Action Drama is no different from Premam in the way it casually applies the word “love” to a man who saw a woman and found her hot.

Besides, Dhyan lets slip some really deep-seated prejudices masked in comedy in his film. At three places, casual remarks by his characters reveal that he believes it is a given that dark skin is ugly. And what is with Malayalam cinema’s insistence on depicting little children in serious romantic relationships? Not funny at all, please.

The use of language in Love Action Drama calls for a discussion. The manner in which conversations shift from Malayalam to Tamil and back is smooth and natural because of the milieu and the backgrounds of the characters. But the Hindi words “beta” (son) and “acchha” (okay) written into lines spoken by Renji Panicker’s character do not trip lightly off the actor’s tongue and end up coming across as a forced, somewhat tacky effort to offer evidence that he is Mumbai based.

Like many Malayalam music directors these days, Shaan Rahman really needs to get over his apparent belief that injecting Hindi or English songs and lines into a film’s soundtrack somehow ups its cool quotient. It is hard to understand this practice. Is it that these artists think Malayalam is not cool enough? Or do they see Hindi and English as the only possible indicators of modernity and an urban Indian setting? By all means, mix languages, brother, if you can come up with something special and it fits. What though is the point you hope to make when, in a Malayalam-Tamil film set in Kerala and TN, you kick off the narrative with a Hindi-English number titled Raathein (Nights), a word that you cannot even get your singer Narayani Gopan to pronounce correctly, which your lyricist Preeti Nambiar then follows up with amateurish lines like “setting me afire / whatever we desire / come a little closer to me” and “all I want tonight / touching you and feeling you and loving yooooouuuu”?  What is the purpose of the uninventive, heard-before refrain “mere khayaalo ki malika tu” (woman, you rule my thoughts) in Varavaayi? The song that does manage a flow in its English-Malayalam blend is Kudukku possibly because lyricist Manu Manjith does not sound strained and because the amazing Vineeth Sreenivasan imbues “On the floor baby / hit it hard baby / rock the party baby / pattoolangi podi (if you can’t, then go to hell, woman)” with an intentionally over-done comedic tone that complements and therefore acknowledges the unapologetic silliness of it all, though I do worry about the simmering animosity towards the woman in these lines.

Love Action Drama works in parts when Dinesh and Sagar are hanging out together and making an ass of themselves. The effectiveness of some – not all – these scenes comes from the chemistry between Nivin Pauly and Aju Varghese, and their natural comic abilities. Varghese is of course cast incessantly as a comedian, Pauly’s filmography has offered him more variety. What makes him the star that he is is his ability to be as grave as his characters in films like Action Hero Biju and Kayamkulam Kochunni have required him to be, innocent and earnest as the chap he played in Bangalore Days and the silly fellow he was in Premam.

Love Action Drama taps his versatility with a narrative that repeatedly breaks its own mood by jumping from extreme intensity to extreme frivolity without warning often within the same scene. The switches are fun at first because they signal the writer-director’s keenness that we not take his film too seriously. Fair enough. The technique wears thin though as Love Action Drama’s lack of substance becomes increasingly obvious and it wanders about aimlessly, wanders again, then wanders some more.

Late in the film some twists are set up as obstacles in the Shoba-Dinesh relationship. As it happens, they do come as interesting surprises, but their impact is greatly diluted by the absence of conviction in the first place in the relationship that is sought to be destroyed. After having misbehaved terribly with Shoba, at one point when Dinesh begs her to take him back, she says: “Convince my father.” Convince yourselves first, ya.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	142 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/love-action-drama-movie-review-nayanthara-is-a-mere-aside-in-an-immature-nivin-pauly-dramedy-7305061.html

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

REVIEW 665: MIKHAEL - GUARDIAN ANGEL

Release date:	January 18, 2019
Director:	Haneef Adeni
Cast: Language:	Nivin Pauly, Unni Mukundan, J.D.Chakravarthy, Manjima Mohan, Siddique, Suraj Venjaramoodu, Kalabhavan Shajon, Shanthi Krishna, Sudev Nair Malayalam

It is not particularly a compliment to describe a film as better than The Great Father. Yet that is the nicest, most reassuring thing I can say about this new Malayalam film by the man who gave us that horrendous Mammootty starrer about child rape in 2017. Haneef Adeni, who made his directorial debut with The Great Father and followed that up with writing the comparatively tolerable Abrahaminte Santhathikal (2018), is the writer-director of Mikhael: Guardian Angel, which stars Nivin Pauly as a doctor estranged from his mother but fond of his little sister. When the girl encounters a pest in school and stands up for herself, events take a tragic turn.

There is bound to be a tale worth telling in the journey of an individual who at first lives by Jesus Christ’s dictum “when a man strikes you on one cheek turn the other cheek” but later mines the Jesus who lost his temper in a temple over the commercialisation of religion. And if you sift the grain from the chaff, the core plot from the pretentions to grandeur, there really is a halfway decent story somewhere in the maze that is Mikhael. But Adeni being Adeni, he wraps it in an over-ambitious, pompous package with hollow references to Christian mythology (in particular, Archangel Michael) combined with an overbearing, wannabe-cool soundtrack.

The irritating music and pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo overshadow both the storyline and the usually reliable Nivin Pauly’s natural charm. To make matters worse, Pauly’s expanding girth is distracting in the fight scenes. The actor had somehow managed to be convincing while playing a rustic bandit recently in Kayamkulam Kochunni, but here in Mikhael it is hard to digest passages in which his character wallops and overpowers various men, including the trim, evidently fit Unni Mukundan especially since the latter’s well-muscled frame is put on display throughout the film.

Mukundan, who is more a muscular mannequin than an actor here, offers one of the few pleasures of watching Mikhael, when he bares his body at different points in the film. In case that sounds like a criticism, let me be clear: it is not. (Cue: laughter track playing in the background.) Glamour industries across the world tend to objectify women incessantly and in a degrading fashion (unlike the manner in which they objectify men), so it always comes as a relief and a pleasant change when a film puts the shoe on the other foot and focuses its gaze entirely on the male physique (it goes without saying that men are rarely demeaned in such visuals).

In this over-stylised, self-conscious crime thriller, I am certainly not complaining about Mukundan’s character Marco aiming, for instance, to intimidate an adversary by randomly deciding to bathe in the man’s bathroom in boxers and exiting the house while still in those boxers, offering us a full view of his nearly nude body. Giggle, giggle. I swear I am not kidding, this is an accurate description of the scene, and far from objecting, I insist instead that it had a profound meaning, as profound as Marco’s constant talk about potty – and I say this with the same conviction with which a very dear gentleman friend from my teenage years once told me that Baywatch “has a great plot”.

Mukundan’s posing about is one with the rest of the goings-on in Mikhael including all those slow motion fisticuffs, and wise-sounding conversations conducted between men in a low, wise-sounding tone. The pace of the film greatly hampers it since even the occasional interesting reveal is vastly diluted by the time it takes in coming. The final twist is not bad at all, but accompanied as it is by more posing and musical hollering, its impact is lost.

While much of what goes on must be blamed on Adeni’s “see what a clever dude I am, c’mon applaud me” style of writing and direction, Pauly too cannot but be faulted for not pulling off the intended twisted facet of his character. To be fair to him though, he is not insufferable and offensive in the way Mammootty was as he preened like a peacock through the story of a serial child rapist in The Great Father. And to be fair to Adeni, although he carries forward his man-as-ultimate-protector-of-the-family theme here too, unlike the women of The Great Father who were almost irrelevant to the action, the hero’s sister in Mikhael is not only essential to the proceedings, she actually has some agency.

That said, as mentioned at the start of this review, to say that a film is better than The Great Father is hardly a compliment. I wonder why Pauly could not foresee how Mikhael would turn out after watching Adeni’s earlier works and reading this script? Did even the puns and philosophising around faeces spouted by Marco not give him pause? The instincts that led the star to sign up for the likes of Action Hero Biju and Njandukalude Nattil Oridavela have clearly betrayed him here.

Rating (out of five stars): 3/4

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	150 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/mikhael-movie-review-nivin-pauly-struggles-through-a-pretentious-pompous-affair-5926961.html

Poster courtesy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhael_(film)

REVIEW 646: KAYAMKULAM KOCHUNNI

Release date:	Kerala: October 11, 2018. Delhi: October 12.
Director:	Rosshan Andrrews
Cast: Language:	Nivin Pauly, Priya Anand, Mohanlal, Sunny Wayne, Shine Tom Chacko, Sudheer Karamana, Manikandan R. Achari, Sidhartha Siva, Thesni Khan, Sudev Nair Malayalam

Kayamkulam Kochunni is a grand film. Its grandeur is not merely physical though, but a factor of its worldview, political sensibilities and sensitivity. An impoverished Muslim child who, in his adulthood, was brutalised by wily Brahmins and ultimately driven to crime, stealing from rich upper-caste Hindus and providing to poverty-stricken Dalits – at any given time in India, a film based on this story would be significant. The 19th century Malayali Robin Hood’s biopic is particularly relevant though in India of 2018, where Muslims are being marginalised, degraded and lynched by right-wing Hindutva forces while the Dalit community is on the boil.

This big-screen interpretation of his life is reportedly the most expensive Mollywood venture till date. Comparisons between Kayamkulam Kochunni and the Tollywood epic Bahubali are inevitable, so let me get this out of the way. Bahubali 1&2 are fantasy dramas, this one is based on a true story. The Bahubalis were ostentatious films about wealthy kings, Kayamkulam Kochunni is opulent in its own way but it gives more space on its massive canvas to the poor than to the rich, to the oppressed than to the oppressors. The Bahubalis were socially and politically conformist for the most part, Kayamkulam Kochunni is a celebration of non-conformism and social rebellion.

Moments after the film opens, young Kochunni of Kayamkulam town gets an early Les Miserables-style lesson in inequity and injustice when his father is beaten to a pulp for stealing grain to feed his starving family. On leaving home, the little Muslim boy encounters unexpected kindness from an upper-caste Hindu gentleman and, despite his bitter childhood memories, grows up to be a happy-go-lucky youth, popular among locals and generous to a fault. His schooling in caste tyranny among Hindus and British colonialism, his love for the Shudra woman Janaki, his encounter with the dreaded dacoit Ithikkara Pakki and his own journey to banditry are all chronicled in considerable detail in this film snappily edited by Sreekar Prasad.

Like Rajeev Ravi who directed the blockbuster Kammatipaadam and so many other wonderful Malayalam directors, Rosshan Andrrews too does not assume that films on marginalised communities must perforce be artsy, niche, small and underplayed. Kayamkulam Kochunni is, among other things, an imposing spectacle. The river that runs by the town and the natural splendour of the region are beautifully shot both by day and by night by DoP Binod Pradhan, as are the lushly lit Kalari scenes led by veteran actor Babu Antony. The most powerful image from the film to my mind though is of Kochunni getting married inside a giant pyramidical tower created by poor men standing one on top of the other’s shoulders. That evocative picture combined with the throbbing chants of those people forms one of the most impactful passages from Kayamkulam Kochunni.

Such carefully crafted imagery ensures that despite its visual scale, heart-stopping action, high-adrenaline chases and Gopi Sundar’s pulsating music, the dominant takeaway from Kayamkulam Kochunni is its politics and humanity.

That said, a film that represents the country’s lowest castes, the poor and a beleaguered religious minority with such sensitivity is surprisingly neglectful of women. The female characters are all present here either to be loved, protected or exploited by the men and not as individuals in their own right. The ultimate irony is that Kayamkulam Kochunni features an item song during which the camera remains fixated on Nora Fatehi’s bottom.  Only one woman gets significant screen time, prominence in the plot and any kind of agency. Even the crowd scenes and the musical choruses are dominated by men. This is not what one would expect from a film directed by Andrrews and written by Bobby-Sanjay, considering that their most successful recent collaboration was Manju Warrier’s comeback film after a 14 year hiatus, How Old Are You. That film was woman-centric but did not erase men. In this one, it is as if the team could not envision crucial leadership or participatory roles for the so-called weaker/gentler sex in an action adventure. (On this front alone, Baahubali 2 scores over Kayamkulam Kochunni with Anushka Shetty’s atypical Devasena.)

The cast is packed with known names. Priya Anand does a decent job of playing the unpredictable Janaki, as does Sunny Wayne in a meaty role as Kochunni’s bete noir Keshava – neither of them is great, but they are fair enough. Mohanlal appears late in the film as that other legendary highway robber, Ithikkara Pakki, and lends an animalistic touch to his performance as a brigand with a heart of gold. The camera is careful not to pull out too far when his character is throwing punches, which is a good thing because it has been a long time since Lalettan has looked convincing in action scenes. However, his screen presence and star stature give his character the weight it deserves despite this being only an extended cameo.

Shine Tom Chacko stands out among the able supporting actors, playing a Brahmin with empathy for Dalits. (Possible spoilers ahead) The only off-key performance comes from Thesni Khan as a woman Kochunni considers family. At arguably the most important turning point in the leading man’s adult life, her ambiguous facial expressions leave a question mark over whether she is helpless and scared or intentionally traitorous.

In fact, the writing itself becomes thoroughly awkward around the final betrayal of Kochunni. The screenplay attributes what feel like contrived motivations to every single person who lets him down.

(Spoiler alert ends)

Nivin Pauly is an unusual choice for Kochunni since he does not have the body type conventionally associated with action heroes (read: Prabhas and Rana Daggubati). Yet, despite his increasing bulk, Pauly is surprisingly agile in the fight scenes. He also does a remarkable job sans gimmickry of capturing the protagonist’s transformation from innocence to seething, volcanic fury, from that simple young man called Kochunni to Kayamkulam Kochunni of folklore in whose name a shrine exists attached to a temple in Kerala. 

Pauly is currently one of the poster boys of middle-of-the-road Malayalam cinema. Kayamkulam Kochunni is a reminder that he is as adept at headlining a humongous, overtly massy project as the delicate little gems he is so closely associated with. This is a film that is large in every conceivable way – large to look at and large of heart. Its strength lies in the fact that its soul overshadows the spectacle at each turn, and the lasting memory from it is of a poor Muslim man who soldiered past his hellish beginnings to become a messiah for the most downtrodden of India’s people.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	143 minutes

A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/kayamkulam-kochunni-movie-review-nivin-pauly-excels-in-a-period-epic-that-outshines-bahubalis-scale-with-its-sensitivity-5376361.html

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