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Release
date:
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Kerala: November 15, 2019
Delhi: November 22, 2019
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Director:
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Mathukutty Xavier
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Cast:
Language:
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Anna Ben, Lal, Aju
Varghese, Noble Babu Thomas, Rony David, Binu Pappu, Bonny Mary
Mathew, Cameo: Vineeth Sreenivasan
Malayalam
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On
the face of it, Helen is a survival
flick. The protagonist gets stuck in a dangerous space where no one knows she
is trapped. Watching her desperate effort to stay alive is a chilling
experience made all the more so by the text in the end revealing that her story
is inspired by true events. But the film is so much more than just that.
Helen
Paul’s life choices and every aspect of her identity play a role in what happens to her here. The fact that she is a woman, an independent woman, a woman whose
work and social engagements often keep
her out of the house late at night, a woman with a boyfriend, a Christian woman
with a Muslim boyfriend – all these factors combined result in the tension that
ultimately leads to her disappearance and the response to it.
Helen
is a nurse keen to migrate to Canada to improve her financial prospects. Her
widowered father Paul dotes on her.
Helen juggles English language classes with a job, home management, commitments
in the neighbourhood and her love life. She is affable and popular, so when she
vanishes, there are many people anxious on her behalf.
This in
itself distinguishes Helen from most
successful survival dramas revolving around solitary figures – usually, their
central characters have been individuals whose absence is not felt because they
are either loners or away from their families or they had unwisely taken off
without informing loved ones. The most high-profile of these in recent times,
British director Danny Boyle’s Best Picture Oscar-nominated 127 Hours, was about a man who goes hiking
in a treacherous canyon without intimating anyone about his plans. The
spotlight in that film was inevitably on the mental strength and instincts that
helped the hero get back home. Helen is as attentive to the heroine’s decisions
within her prison as it is to the chauvinism that led to her plight and even
affects the search for her.
Helen
is written by Alfred Kurian Joseph, Noble Babu Thomas (who
also plays Helen’s boyfriend Azhar) and Mathukutty Xavier. It is
Xavier’s first shot at direction, a novel choice for a debut and an
unusually perceptive film for its genre. (The next four paragraphs analyse
an episode in the film in detail. They contain no spoilers, but please proceed
at your own discretion.) Without giving anything away about the the leading
lady’s exact situation, let us scrutinise a single episode that illustrates the
entire narrative’s subtle but meticulous dissection of Malayali society in
particular and Indian society at large. Azhar is out drinking with his male
buddies one night when Helen phones to fix up an impromptu date. He is
not a very responsible chap, so it is not surprising at all that he drives a
two-wheeler without a helmet. This violation of traffic rules is what causes a
police squad to stop them, but what makes the greasy cop Ratheesh Kumar
stay fixated on them is his objection to two people of the opposite sex
out together, and worse, the realisation that they belong to different
religious groups. This is why he phones Paul to inform him of his daughter’s
whereabouts.
Note
how Ratheesh treats the woman as a protectorate of her family. A genuinely
liberal parent would be appalled at the infantilisation of his adult daughter
in this manner, but Paul is furious with her instead. Helen’s reaction is just
as telling: instead of questioning her father’s right to be angry, she is apologetic. But for what?
Of course none of this would have happened if Azhar had not been a jerk
who rode a scooter without wearing a helmet and after consuming alcohol beyond
the legally permissible limit, but the point is that Ratheesh makes those contraventions
of the law his excuse to bat for gender segregation and parental supremacy,
lash out at social non-conformism and intrude on people’s personal lives.
It is unclear whether
Paul is just opposed to inter-community liaisons or balks at the mere idea of
his daughter picking her own partner irrespective of community. Either way, it
is important that Helen chooses to
feature a Christian-Muslim couple rather than a Hindu-Muslim pair, serving as a reminder that while no doubt the
communal biases of the majority community ought to be condemned, minority
communities too need to be called out for their biases against each
other.
All this emerges from an incident that takes only a few minutes in the
film, so you can imagine how insightful Helen
is in its entirety.
Anna
Ben, the charming curly-haired debutant from Kumbalangi Nights, proves here that she has the acting muscle to
carry a film on her slim shoulders. Her confident turn as Helen is especially
impressive since she spends half her screen time all alone and the rest mostly
with a seasoned performer like Lal who plays Paul. The latter, in fact, is the
only cast member who raises Helen’s pitch a notch a couple of times. For the most part
though, he makes Paul believable and loveable despite his flaws.
Among
a capable team of supporting actors, the most significant performance comes
from Aju Varghese playing the slimy policeman Ratheesh. The actor should give
himself more such breaks in a career dominated by comic roles that are often indistinguishable from
each other. His rendition of pride and prejudice in this film froze me to the
bone.
The writing of Helen dips
only occasionally, but these instances do adversely affect the
narrative. (Some people may consider this paragraph a spoiler) That accident in
the middle of the search for Helen, for one, needlessly piles melodrama on top
of already nerve-wracking melodrama. Producer Vineeth Sreenivasan’s cameo
feels superfluous and gimmicky. (Spoiler alert ends) The background score
needed some turning down. And hey, we understood early in the film that Helen
and her Dad are a snug twosome, so there was no need to lay it on thick with a
mushy flashback to her childhood and their life-long friendship, underlined
with loud music. That stretch and the over-dramatised moments assigned to Paul
as the film draws to a close are completely unnecessary.
These
departures in tone aside, Helen is clever
in the way it never allows its socio-political inclinations to override its
fundamental goal of being a survival thriller. This is a consequence of some
shrewd editing by Shameer Muhammad post-interval and Anend C. Chandran’s
matter-of-fact camerawork combined with a largely focused screenplay.
Helen’s
real triumph though is that even when it separates the heroine from everyone
else in the second half, it does not suddenly conjure up a male saviour for her
in keeping with commercial cinema’s tendencies nor does it ever stray from
being a film about her. I cannot vouch for whether Mathukutty Xavier and Team got
their scientific and medical facts right, but I can tell you I almost chewed
off my nails worrying about that young woman’s fate. In a year in which the
Malayalam film industry has outdone itself, Helen
is right up there with the best of 2019.
Rating (out
of 5 stars): 3.5
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CBFC Rating (India):
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U
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Running time:
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117 minutes
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This review has also been published on Firstpost:
