REVIEW 587: PAROLE

Release date:	April 6, 2018
Director:	Sharrath Sandith
Cast: Language:	Mammootty, Miya George, Iniya, Siddique, Suraj Venjaramoodu, Prabhakar, Sudheer Karamana, Alencier Ley Lopez, Irshad, Muthumani Malayalam

Alex Philipose, played by Mammootty, is a model prisoner. He is a natural leader of his prison mates, the guards trust him, yet mysteriously, his son hates him to the core. What could such a nice guy have possibly done to invite such animosity from his own progeny?

After clichéd opening sequences of bonhomie among those confined with him and maudlin allusions to their backgrounds, Parole – inspired by a true story, we are told – spends its time on a flashback to Alex’s youth, the circumstances that brought him to prison and earned the wrath of his only child. The latter half is devoted to his activities in the outside world, when he finally gets a break from those heavily guarded walls.

To its credit, Parole does have a little more in terms of story than most Mammootty films of recent years. Another positive is that though director Sharrath Sandith is decidedly aware of the superstar on his team, he is not as embarrassingly gleeful about his casting achievement as too many others who have worked with Mammukka for a while now. Sandith, therefore, does not get the actor to preen and pose around as they have.

So it has to be said that though Parole is no great shakes as cinema, it could have been worse. Far worse. It could have been White or The Great Father. At least Mammootty – so splendid when he decides to surrender his stardom to a script, so self-conscious when his scripts surrender to his stature – does not disgrace himself as much here as he has in those two. Not quite as much, though he does for the nth time play the lover of a woman played by a female actor nearly 40 years his junior (Iniya) while his sister is played by another young enough to be his granddaughter (Miya George).

Give me a minute to recover from those amusing, saddening images, which bring up the memory of Aishwarya Rai as the sister of Amitabh Bachchan’s character in 2002’s Hum Kisise Kum Nahin, and numerous other legendary male stars who have made fools of themselves in a similar fashion down the decades.

Still, when it is slim pickings out there, Parole stands out for being better (read: less cringe-worthy) than the rest and Mammootty for being less studied in his performance here than usual. The film’s failing is its generic nature. First, Alex’s childhood is recounted as if some grand story is being told, though the grandeur is confined to Mammootty’s baritone, not the actual content. A sliver of Communism is thrown in because it suits the popular mood, I guess. A song and dance is initially made of the ideology, but it is pretty irrelevant to the character’s motivations, convictions and future.

Alex’s father (Alencier Ley Lopez) is a Communist leader. A mother and siblings are given short shrift. The focus is on his half sister – a daughter the old man had outside marriage – and a wife Alex himself acquires at some point.

I could give you details, but the truth is Ajith Poojappura’s writing feels tired. There is a scene in Parole exemplifying its predictability: Alex is talking to a priest in a church corridor when he hears the sound of women singing. As he walks slowly towards their voices, you know, just know that he will turn a corner, see the ladies and spot among them a much younger woman dancing in slow motion, waiting there for him to fall in love with her. She is. He does.

As for what happens to Alex when he is out on parole, it is such a contrived, strained attempt to build suspense and sympathy for the protagonist, that it is a yawn.

The only interesting part of Parole is the series of events leading to the crime that results in Alex’s conviction. They involve his wife Annie, half sister Katharina and her husband Varghese (Suraj Venjaramoodu). The dynamic between these four briefly lifts the film above its ordinariness. The fact that Annie is not demonised for her objection to the manner in which Alex indulges Katharina and Varghese is also unusual for a Mollywood in which the wife-as-a-nagging-yakshi is a beloved stereotype.

Here though comes the most simultaneously disturbing and gratifying part. Men whacking wives is par for the course in Malayalam cinema (as it is, tragically, in Kerala society) and filmmakers are rarely censorious towards such men. A man hits his wife in Parole with tragic consequences, but for most of the film he is projected as a paavam who is faultless in the entire affair. This disgraceful attitude underlines the casualness with which domestic violence is viewed by Mollywood and its core audience. Unexpectedly though, late in the film, the fellow acknowledges that it was wrong to strike his spouse. Since such an admission is uncommon, for those few seconds when he uttered those words, my glass was half full as much as it was half empty.

The debutant director struggles to compact the superstar to fit the size his screenplay demands, and therefore scales up the narration to match Mammootty’s stardom. So, while he tries to keep his tone real through large parts of the film, he feels compelled to give Alex a conventional, all-drums-beating introductory moment, and S. Lokanathan’s cinematography is needlessly flashy, delivering repetitive and irrelevant aerial shots of the gorgeous landscapes Alex inhabits in his lifetime.

It is hard to believe that an industry churning out films of the calibre of Sudani from Nigeria and S. Durga (formerly Sexy Durga), both of which are in theatres right now, only has such qualitatively abysmal or average scripts to offer a stalwart. Parole is not Mammootty’s worst, but if you have seen him at his best, you have to wonder what on earth he is thinking when he picks scripts these days – or whether he is thinking at all.

Rating (out of five stars): *

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

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/parole-movie-review-as-generic-as-most-mammootty-films-these-days-but-not-his-worst-4423639.html

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

REVIEW 555: VIMAANAM

Release date:	December 22, 2017
Director:	Pradeep M. Nair
Cast: Language:	Prithviraj Sukumaran, Durga Krishna, Sudheer Karamana, Alencier Ley Lopez, Saiju Kurup, Leena, Anarkali Marikar Malayalam

 

Imagine being in love and being denied the right to choose the person you want to spend your adult life with. Imagine the ache of a lifetime spent wondering what became of her or him. Imagine your career taking flight sans the one you want to fly with.

Director Pradeep M. Nair’s Vimaanam (Airplane) is a good, old-fashioned (I mean that in a nice way) tale of friendship, romance and the pain of separation in a conservative milieu where families resort to politicking and even violence to keep young lovers apart. Prithviraj Sukumaran here plays the renowned aeronautical engineer, Professor Venkateshwaran, who receives a call one day from a girl identifying herself as “Janaki’s daughter”. The mention of that name gets the lonely old man emotional and he decides to head for his hometown in Kerala where this Janaki is waiting.

Much of his train journey is spent in a flashback to a time decades earlier when Venkateshwaran was Janaki’s Venkati. They grew up together and now spend their youth in each other’s company, initially blissfully unaware of the prejudice and negativity that will ultimately tear them apart.

Janaki (Durga Krishna) is a pre-degree student from a well-off Hindu family, the daughter of a powerful lawyer whose word is law in a home where his wife cowers before him and his child is punished for not cowering. The hearing-impaired Venkati, on the other hand, is the offspring of a Christian-Nair marriage who has grown up with financial struggle and now, as a high-school pass-out, earns a living as an automobile mechanic to support his widowed mother and sister while working on the side to fulfill his dream of building a plane with his bare hands.

The structure of Vimaanam is such that we pretty much know how the flashback will end from the moment it begins. The joy though is in the treatment of Venkati and Janaki’s journey. Prithviraj and Durga imbue their characters with innocence and clear-heartedness that is alluring. Despite the anger, bias and scheming all around them, they somehow manage to remain pure and clean. Their seeming incorruptibility makes them protagonists you root for (even when they break the law at one point, in pursuit of his dream). I wanted him to make that plane, I wanted her to have her freedom, I wanted them to be together.

The story is told from Venkati’s standpoint, but this is not a conventional male-centric romance. Janaki takes centrestage with him and if I have a grouse it is that while we get to know her, her family, Venkati and his allies, the screenplay neglects his mother and barely shows us his sibling. 

Comparisons are inevitable between Vimaanam and the 2015 Parvathy-Prithviraj-starrer Ennu Ninte Moideen about a Hindu woman and a Muslim man in love in 1960s Kerala. At the risk of being reviled by fans, I confess that although ENM’s theme itself was gripping, I found the film inexorably stretched to manipulate the audience. Vimaanam gets its tone just right most of the time and its occasional descent into maudlin, melodramatic territory (the airport scene, for one) is forgivable because its drama and scale are at no point allowed to dwarf the intensely personal portrait of the couple at its core.

The other inevitable comparison would be with this year’s Vineeth Srinivasan-starrer Aby, the release of which Vimaanam’s makers unsuccessfully tried to stop in court. Aby was about a mentally slow, socially awkward young man without an aviation background who builds an aircraft in his hometown. Both are reportedly inspired by the same true story. The thematic similarity notwithstanding, Aby was tedious whereas Vimaanam pulsates with dreams and regret.

The film’s achievement is that although it has been made on a lavish scale in spectacular locales with eyecatching visuals by DoP Shehnad Jalal and top-line VFX (barring the clouds in the final frame), it never diverts its gaze from Janaki and Venkati. Despite the grand aerial views of cliffs and sands and the vast ocean, it remains from start to finish an intimate saga of heartbreak.

One complaint: while Jalal shoots his hero well, he is needlessly determined to emphasise his heroine’s looks. Yes yes, we get that she has large, attractively droopy eyes, but there was no need to give us so many close-ups of those eyes from so many angles, all with the purpose of capturing her looks rather than her sentiments. Interestingly, he pulls away and gives that lovely face space whenever his attention shifts from the physical to the emotional.

Both actors bring their A game to this film. They have a warm on-camera equation. Despite being a debutant, Durga Krishna shares the weight of the film with Prithviraj and carries it on her shoulders with confidence that is not intimidated by his experience. He effectively alters his physicality to signify the advancing years. Although he is too much of a man to look like the boy he is supposed to be in the flashback, he gets halfway there through what appears to have been considerable weight loss in addition to his body language.

In their later years, he gets good ageing makeup, hers leaves her looking much younger than she could possibly be when we meet her as an old woman. Considering the money that has clearly been invested in this enterprise, it is also disappointing to see the lack of detailing in this department.  Hands and the sides of necks age too, you know. The makeup team missed that point.

Vimaanam’s supporting cast is led by the always excellent Alencier Ley Lopez playing Roger, Venkati’s mentor and co-conspirator in the business of making his first plane. Sudheer Karamana too turns in a neat performance as the hero’s comrade in arms. It is particularly nice to see the two let their hair down for the scene featuring the song Meghakanavinu. The usually dependable Saiju Kurup though opts for overstatement in his role as one of the spokes in the Janaki-Venkati romance.

Gopi Sundar’s songs work well when they are woven into the narrative. Meghakanavinu in particular is entertaining and unusual in the way it uses two female voices and the sounds of the tools in Venkati’s workshop in its instrumental arrangements. Here too, we get evidence of the director’s intent to stay equally focused on his male and female leads. He is working, she is assisting him and his team, but the song is hers with the others singing in chorus in the background. It is an atypical musical choice that subtly reflects the filmmaker’s mindset.

The song that should have been dispensed with is Vaaniluyare, melodic though it is. It is one of those stereotypical numbers to be found in commercial films across Indian film industries where the hero and heroine sing and dance at archaeological sites and locations of exquisite natural beauty. Though Durga’s grace and considerable dancing skills are in evidence here, Prithviraj’s personality is not a fit. Besides, while there is a certain kind of film in which this kind of diversion works, Vimaanam is not that film.

What it is is a brooding depiction of great achievements overshadowed by great sadness and a sense of emptiness, when your being remains forever chained to a past not of your making. Prithviraj as Venkati and Durga Krishna as Janaki embody yearning and heartache. Whatever the film’s missteps may be, I found myself cheering as Venkati’s first plane took off, but most of all, I really really wanted to see Janaki with him. Sweet simplicity is not easy to achieve on screen. That’s what Pradeep M. Nair delivers with Vimaanam.

Rating (out of five stars): ***

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	147 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/vimaanam-movie-review-prithviraj-sukumaran-durga-krishna-embody-heartache-and-yearning-4273579.html

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