REVIEW 510: BASHEERINTE PREMALEKHANAM

Release date:	July 21, 2017
Director:	Aneesh Anwar
Cast: Language:	Farhaan Faasil, Sana Althaf, Renjini Jose, Manikandan Achari, Sheela, Madhu, Joy Mathew, Sivaji Guruvayoor, Aju Varghese, Sooraj Harris, Sunil Sukhada  Malayalam

Basheerinte Premalekhanam (Basheer’s Love Letter) harks back to the days when televisions were not ubiquitous in India, when the only house in the neighbourhood with a TV or a radio (not as we know it right now, but those boxy thingies, remember them?) would become a social hub even in an urban locality, and when the absence of cellphones and limited availability of telephone landlines made forbidden romances a far greater struggle than they are today.

The story is set in a Kerala village in the 1980s, when the arrival of a TV from the Gelf becomes a talking point in the entire community. Usman (Manikandan Achari) sends one as a gift to the home of the haughty Hussain Haji (Joy Mathew), father of Suhra (Sana Althaf) who has been promised to him in marriage.

Hajiyaar’s radio has already made his home a star attraction in the area. From the first moment the screen of his new Onida TV comes alive with moving visuals, the locals are hooked. The radio is relegated to the interiors of the house while everyone gathers on the balcony each day now to watch films, sports and Chitrageet on the electronic miracle that one of them describes as a radio with pictures and a devout fellow resident labels a “cheythaanpetti” (satanic box).

 

Basheer (Farhaan Faasil), a tech-savvy polytechnic pass-out, becomes a mini neighbourhood celeb when he does the job of setting up the cheythaanpetti. He falls for Suhra, but of course her situation is complicated.

Basheerinte Premalekhanam is about the hurdles they face in their romance while the goings-on around them – party politics, the battle over a bridge that needs to be built, religiosity and more – provide a peek into the world as it was back then. The title is as much a reference to Vaikom Muhammad Basheer as it is to the hero of the film, since the latter plagiarises the celebrated Malayalam writer’s novel Premalekhanam to impress Suhra.

The opening 20 minutes or so of the film are pleasant. The set-up is promising, as director Aneesh Anwar hits the nail on the head with the tone, look and detailing, including the visuals accompanying the opening credits, injecting humour and nostalgia into his deliberately kinda-over-the-top narrative. At that point, to all appearances, Basheerinte Premalekhanam looks set to be an entertaining, slightly farcical representation of a time when technology had less of a role in our lives, when the current information and entertainment overload had not yet invaded our collective existence and when attention spans were not as limited as they are now, so that a phenomenon like the Onida devil could be the talk of the town for months.

Gradually though, what emerges on screen proves to be of limited depth, and the film settles into a lack of freshness and spark that it does not recover from. Even the nostalgia ride into the 1980s does not go far enough. For instance, for a film that features so much of Doordarshan-watching from back then, it is almost unforgivable that DD’s signature tune – a cultural fixture in those days – is not played even once with the logo. I missed it.

The only thing that remains pleasing from start to finish is Sanjay Harris’ camerawork, which seems purposefully not to capture the magnificence of the Kerala landscape, opting instead for its beautiful niches, thickly green corners and wooded country lanes.

Like director Jis Joy’s Sunday Holiday last week, it is clear that Aneesh Anwar too is aiming at giving us a slice of life, even if he frames Basheerinte within farce. Whatever Sunday Holiday’s failings may have been, it had more content than this one, plus it had Aparna Balamurali’s pizzazz and Asif Ali’s sweetness going for it. Farhaan Faasil, whose second film this is, remains as uncharismatic here as he was on debut in Njan Steve Lopez (2014). This Faasil – brother of Fahadh, son of director Fazil – does not even have age for an excuse, as his leading lady does. Sana Althaf is about a decade his junior and can do little to rev up an ordinarily written part.

The legendary Madhu’s grace and dignity, on the other hand, fill the screen with warmth every time he comes on as Suhra’s late grandfather, the watchful sutradhar and guardian angel of the narrative. Not that his role is any better written than the rest. It is intriguing at first but does not go anywhere, but Madhu… well, Madhu is always just really nice to watch, now and forever, Amen. 

Another legend, Sheela, does not do half as well in her over-cutesified role as Suhra’s spirited, supportive grandmother. To be fair, any star would most likely have struggled with a screenplay that requires the old lady to be amused and charmed on seeing a creepy chappie – namely, Basheer – removing rooftiles to peep into her granddaughter’s bedroom. Ewwww!

This is not the only instance of questionable behaviour towards a woman being normalised and humourised in Basheerinte, but then that is all in a day’s work for most Malayalam commercial cinema. At one point in the film, when a man says he does not drink from used glasses, a listener concludes aloud that the man’s runaway girlfriend then clearly does not stand a chance with him.

For me, Sheela and Madhu will always be Karuthamma and Pareekutty from Chemmeen, my all-time favourite Malayalam film. Oddly enough, despite having cast the two stalwarts as a married couple, Basheerinte does not give them a single scene together, unless you count a blink-and-you-might-miss-it joint appearance in a song.

Manikandan Achari has a much smaller role than Faasil and steals the show from right under the titular hero’s nose. It is a pleasure to see him play a character as different from the iconic Balan in 2016’s Kammattipaadam – his calling card so far – or even the simpleton Murugan in the lesser known Ayal Jeevichiruppundu (2017), as chalk is from paneer. There are those who felt that Achari was credited for great acting when all he did was play himself in Kammattipaadam. I disagreed back then, but it is still a relief to get proof of his versatility and a reaffirmation of his genuine talent in this film. The tenderness Achari brings to his character Usman is the closest this film comes to being worth the price of a ticket.

That said, even Achari and Madhu cannot save Basheerinte Premalekhanam from its overall limpness. It is not unbearable or any such thing, what it is is blah.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	130 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/basheerinte-premalekhanam-movie-review-manikandan-achari-steals-the-show-from-a-lukewarm-hero-in-a-tepid-tale-3843111.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/BasheerintePremalekhanam2017/

50 YEARS OF CHEMMMEEN / COLUMN PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

JINE CHEMMEEN NAI VEKHYA

Fifty years since Chemmeen’s release, could we please ponder over why more Indians outside Kerala have not seen this landmark National Award-winning film?

By Anna MM Vetticad

The story goes that Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai wrote Chemmeen in eight days. But even a lifetime is not enough to process this 1956 novel by the legendary Jnanpith-winning Malayalam writer, or its film adaptation from 1965.

I was introduced to Chemmeen early in life although as a child growing up in Delhi in the pre-DVD, pre-Internet era, non-Hindi cinema was always difficult to access. It is a measure of the success of Hindi language politics in our country that it was (and still is) hard to learn to read and write our mother tongues — unless that mother tongue is Hindi or English — if we attend school anywhere other than in the state of our origins.

Sadly, as a result, I still cannot read or write Malayalam, and though I have read Anita Nair’s English translation of Thakazhi’s book, I have not yet read the novel in its original language (I will, some day). My parents, fortunately, ensured that Malayalam was extensively used at home, so I speak it with confidence and understand it well enough. I am telling you all this to help you fully appreciate the circumstances in which I was introduced to this screen epic by Doordarshan.

Set in a fishing community in Kerala, Chemmeen revolves around a lower-caste Hindu fisherman’s daughter Karuthamma (played by Sheela), her love for the Muslim fish trader Pareekutty (Madhu), and her subsequent marriage to the Hindu fisherman Palani (Sathyan).

Never before or since has the ocean been so beautifully captured on screen as a benevolent yet fearsome creature. In Chemmeen, the waters of Kadalamma (Mother Ocean) are intrinsically linked to a belief among fisherfolk that Her largesse is tied to the sexual conformism of women in their society and that She would swallow up a man whose wife was unfaithful to him while he was at sea.

Years after watching the film, I read that Thakazhi was criticised in his lifetime by rationalists who felt his book perpetuated superstitions. To me though, even as a child, Chemmeen was an indictment of society’s determination to curb a woman in every conceivable way including using the fear of divine retribution and linking her family’s fate to her morality as defined by society.

Karuthamma is ridden with guilt all her life and is treated as if she cheated on her husband, when all she did was have feelings for a man long before she even knew of Palani.

Chemmeen is also about how the threat of ostracism and the fear of religion/nature are used to restrict people’s choices; and how superstitions can be a weapon to those who do not necessarily buy into these delusions but will cite them when it suits their convenience, as “the devil” might “cite scripture for his purpose”.

In Chemmeen, Karuthamma’s people seem not to care so much about her affair with Pareekutty until her father’s rivals get jealous when he purchases a new boat and nets. Likewise, when women in Palani’s neighbourhood feel threatened by her success at selling fish, they initiate a boycott of her, claiming to be concerned about how her morals could affect the entire community.

Thakazhi’s story is so layered, that it seems to be speaking of the times we live in as much as about eras gone by. Note for instance that the Hindu in his story is the heroine, not the hero. What point might that literary decision make to today’s ‘love jihad’ campaigners who object to mixed marriages mostly if the girl in the relationship is from their community? Note too that the fisherfolk in Chemmeen make no mention of a woman’s fate if the husband cheats on her.

The brilliant book was supplemented by the film’s team of geniuses. Director Ramu Kariat’s collaborators included Hrishikesh Mukherjee as an editor, Salil Chowdhury as music director and Manna Dey as a singer, making Chemmeen a rare, truly pan-India project.

Why then is this National Award-winning film barely known outside Kerala? Several factors are at play here. First, Malayalam cinema has not promoted itself across India as well as Hindi. Second, the Malayalam industry’s defeatist attitude on this front is compounded by the fact that it has lower budgets (ergo, lower marketing budgets) than India’s three richest industries: Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Third, a mix of political propaganda and irresponsible journalism has led to false notions that Hindi is India’s national language, that the Hindi film industry i.e. Bollywood is India’s largest industry and rightfully deserves more attention than the rest.

Which came first, the poor marketing or the misconceptions, the misconceptions or media indifference? It’s hard to tell, but there is no doubt that if Chemmeen was a great Hindi film marking its golden jubilee, it would have been universally celebrated by the so-called ‘national’ media across India rather than almost entirely on Malayalam platforms and southern-India-based English outlets.

That Chemmeen is not better known to Indian audiences outside Kerala is the country’s loss as well as the film’s. Allow me to borrow an old Punjabi saying to let off steam on the subject: Jine Lahore nai vekhya o jamya-e-ni (if you have not seen Lahore you have not lived). Jine Chemmeen nai vekhya…

(Anna M.M. Vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. Twitter: @annavetticad)

(This column was first published in The Hindu Businessline newspaper on November 21, 2015)

Original link:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/chemmeen-marks-a-golden-milestone/article7899728.ece

Photo captions: (1) Sheela and Madhu as Karuthamma and Pareekutty on the cover of Chemmeen’s music album (2) Sheela as Karuthamma on the poster of Chemmeen

Photographs courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemmeen

Previous instalment of Film Fatale: “It Matters, Naseersaab”

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/watch/it-matters-naseersaab/article7742604.ece