REVIEW 762: BIG BROTHER

Release date:	January 16, 2020
Director:	Siddique
Cast: Language:	Mohanlal, Sarjano Khalid, Mirnaa Menon, Arbaaz Khan, Gaadha, Honey Rose, Siddique, Anoop Menon, Vishnu Unnikrishnan, Asif Basra, Irshad, Tini Tom, Devan Malayalam

When a man has spent 24 years of his life behind bars, adjusting to the world outside would obviously be a challenge. Mohanlal plays one such chap, 40-something-year-old Sachidanandan who was convicted for murder as a teenager and two dozen years later is now set for life outside a prison cell.

You heard that right: Lalettan, who turns 60 this summer, plays a character who has barely crossed 40 in Big Brother. That should have been the first warning sign that this film would turn out to be yet another embarrassing misadventure in the superstar’s filmography that has for at least a decade now been dominated by repetitive, unimaginative works desperately trying to convince audiences that he is forever young and forever attractive to women young enough to be his granddaughters.

Towards the latter end, Big Brother stars a baby-faced girl called Mirnaa Menon who falls for Sachidanandan and looks moony-eyed at him throughout a stereotypically shot song sequence in which she is dressed in flowy, frothy chiffon attire. You know the type of number that has been featured in formulaic commercial Indian cinema across language industries for about two decades? (Possibly to pre-empt all lampooning, the kid admirer’s feelings are described by one character as an instance of Stockholm Syndrome because of the circumstances in which she gets acquainted with Sachidanandan.)

Cliché is piled upon cliché, one dull turn of events is piled upon another in this film written and directed by Siddique.

Big Brother is about how Sachidanandan’s efforts to adjust to freedom are eclipsed by a faceless, omniscient drug kingpin called Edwin Moses. Why Moses is after him is a question the uninteresting answer to which comes in the climax. Through the inexorable 2 hours and 45 minutes that pass between the beginning and the end of this torturous film, we meet Sachidanandan’s brothers Vishnu (Anoop Menon) and Manu (Sarjano Khalid), Vishnu’s wife Vandana (Honey Rose), other family members with whom he is living and Manu’s girlfriend Gemini (Gaadha) in addition to three flunkeys played by Irshad, Tini Tom and Vishnu Unnikrishnan. The script gives none of these people anything to remember them by apart from the well-known stars playing some of them. And yes, I repeat in case you did not notice, little Sarjano Khalid from June has been cast as Sachidanandan’s brother in Big Brother, no doubt to further convince us of Lalettan’s eternal youth.

(Pause)

(Further pause)

Oops, Big Brother was such a sleeping pill that I dozed off while writing that last paragraph.

So where were we? Ah yes, Manu was instrumental in securing his elder sibling’s release from jail. When he and Gemini are attacked for unknown reasons by a violent gang, Sachidanandan is forced to circumvent the law to rescue the boy.

Another purportedly significant character in Big Brother is a north Indian cop played by Arbaaz Khan who has just been posted in southern India to hunt down Edwin Moses. This is the Bollywood actor’s Mollywood debut. Why Mollywood sought him out is a mystery. Khan brings nothing to this role except expressionlessness and gets nothing out of it except the challenge of delivering poorly written dialogues that awkwardly mix Hindi and English with Malayalam. Veteran actor Siddique too is cast in a pointless role in this pointless enterprise.

One of the few positives I could find in Big Brother is that stray Hindi dialogues are accompanied by Malayalam subtitles embedded in the print.

One of the few innovations I can recall from this film is the villain sending explosives-laden toy cars to chase the hero and his sidekicks in a godown. But that high lasts just for a few seconds. There is also a reference early on to an unusual natural ability Sachidanandan possesses. That too, after a while, plays little to no part in the proceedings. A rather sensational example of systemic police corruption revealed in the beginning again comes to nought.

For a film that is supposed to be a thriller, Big Brother offers zero excitement after the initial fleeting suspense over how the hero once used his extraordinary gift for an extraordinary purpose.

There is absolutely nothing by which to recommend Siddique’s Big Brother. Even Mohanlal’s acting here is meh, and considering how stiff-limbed he is, it is amusing to the point of being sad to see scenes in which he has to, among other things, single-handedly overpower a supervillain, fly through the air and send men flying with his fists.

Feel the “Lalhood” – that was the tagline flashed at the end of Big Brother’s trailer. Maybe “Lalhood” is a new word for the world’s most boring film.

Rating (out of 5 stars): 0.25

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	165 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/big-brother-movie-review-mohanlal-kicks-off-2020-with-the-worlds-most-boring-film-7915791.html

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

REVIEW 742: AADYA RATHRI

Release date:	Kerala: October 4, 2019 Delhi: November 1, 2019
Director:	Jibu Jacob
Cast: Language:	Biju Menon, Anaswara Rajan, Aju Varghese, Sarjano Khalid, Pauly Valsan, Vijayaraghavan, Sreelakshmi, Cameo: Anu Sithara Malayalam

An openly misogynistic film. Sub-conscious misogyny from a filmmaker who actually considers himself feminist. Or closeted misogyny from a filmmaker publicly faking feminism. Aadya Rathri fits into one of the above three slots. Which one, is the question.

Aadya Rathri or First Night is headlined by Biju Menon, a fine actor whose inconsistent filmography shows a seeming lack of discernment. Just this year he was the lead in the darling Sathyam Paranja Vishwasikkuvo shortly after Mera Naam Shaji, which was so viscerally antagonistic towards women that it was unnerving. Menon’s new film purportedly puts across the message that a woman’s assent should be given primacy over all else when families, brokers and communities seal marriage deals. The catch is that the road to that life lesson is lined with sexist humour and a trivialisation of marital rape – not just by the character who is reformed in the end, but in the tone of the film itself. And that’s not counting the ageist casting in Aadya Rathri.

Menon here plays Manoharan, a marriage broker who doubles up as a moral policeman to terror-struck couples in the village of Mullakkara. When the film cuts from his youth to the present day, he has been arranging marital alliances for 22 years and boasts of a 100 per cent success rate. His arch rival Thresiamma (Ee.Ma.Yau’s Pauly Valsan) has been gunning for him for as long as he has been in the business. His big test comes when he is called upon to find a match for Aswathy Ramachandran a.k.a. Achchu (Anaswara Rajan), a college-goer from a prominent family.

A bulk of Aadya Rathri is devoted to the hurdles Manoharan must cross to find a husband for Achchu. The film meanders considerably, but swatches of humour keep it going till the interval, and well, Menon has the ability to evoke laughter with just a twitch of a muscle, a twinkle in his eye or a word. Post-interval though, none of this is enough.

The leading man’s innate acting skills and immense charisma combined with a moral position taken by the film towards the end cannot possibly compensate for all its narrative weaknesses, the under-utilisation of a fine supporting cast, lack of novelty in the treatment and confused politics.

Despite running barely over 2 hours, Aadya Rathri feels too long. It does not help that a couple of its songs spring up instead of blending smoothly into the proceedings. And a conventional fable-like, moral-of-the-story structure cannot work if storytellers unwittingly reveal their deep-seated illiberal true colours from the start.

In an episode right after the credits, a bride tells Manoharan’s sidekick that she is not yet ready because the beautician has not arrived although the hour of her wedding is closing in on them. He finds the beautician doing up her mother’s face and makes a terribly ageist comment about Mum. Filmmakers when confronted with questions about such scenes often argue that they are merely depicting a reality, not glorifying it. In this case that would amount to claiming that a sexist character was portrayed cracking a sexist joke to illustrate the regressive nature of the society in which this story is set. No excuses please, there is no ambiguity here – that scene is designed as comedy.

Marital rape too is tapped as a source of amusement in Aadya Rathri, except that it is not considered rape at all. A man incessantly impregnates his wife against her will, but when she complains about the creep, Manoharan says: How can I stop a man from expressing his love for his wife? Ugh. Again, such a scene could well have been set up to throw light on the meaning of consent in sexual relations, but the narrative here is too light-hearted for it to serve that purpose. In fact, the flippant tone of that scene in which a woman with a swollen belly is shown struggling to juggle her expanding body, children of varying ages and her housework, is disconcerting to say the least.

And then of course there is the casting. Considering the massive age differences between male superstars and their female romantic leads in most commercial Malayalam cinema, I was dreading the possibility that sweet little Anaswara Rajan from Udaharanam Sujatha and Thanneermathan Dinangal would be shown here as the nearly 50-year-old Menon’s girlfriend or wife on screen. Thankfully, that does not happen, but Aadya Rathri’s idea of age-appropriate casting is to make her, a 17-year-old with a child-like face, the potential bride of Kunjumon P.P., the character played by Aju Varghese who is 34 in real life. That scene in which Kunjumon fantasises about Achchu romancing him feels weird.

And get this: Achchu and Kunjumon were once schoolmates and are about the same age.

Sexism and misogyny are not Aadya Rathri’s only characteristics. Kunjumon is repeatedly fat shamed. Bangalore’s youngsters are viewed through the lens of clichés that conservatives reserve for societies where gender segregation is not the norm. And Aadya Rathri is not even committed to its regressive views. It wants to be seen as progressive. The tonally patchy narrative fails at both.

In a scene early in Manoharan’s journey, as he watches a bedroom door close on a traumatised woman on the first night of her forced marriage to a sexual pervert, it is apparent that it has begun to dawn on him that what is happening is not right. Yet 22 years later, the same Manoharan tells a pregnant woman that her horny husband’s sexual aggression is, in fact, an expression of love. Huh? Character graphs and consistency in characterisation seem to be alien concepts to this team.

This is disappointing because director Jibu Jacob’s last film, Munthirivallikal Thalirkkumbol, though completely accepting of a patriarchal social structure, did take some progressive forward steps, and was certainly not so poorly written. Writers Sharis-Jebin, on the other hand, have lived up to their track record as the team behind the bizarre, mixed-up 2018 film Queen that was supposedly anti-rape. Do us a favour, gentlemen. Stop claiming to care and try genuinely caring instead.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	129 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/aadya-rathri-movie-review-biju-menon-anaswara-rajan-starrer-is-all-mixed-up-about-marital-rape-7596481.html

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