REVIEW 720: THANNEERMATHAN DINANGAL

Release date:	Kerala: July 26, 2019 Delhi: August 9, 2019
Director:	Girish A.D.
Cast: Language:	Mathew Thomas, Anaswara Rajan, Vineeth Sreenivasan, Irshad  Malayalam

Just months back we first encountered him playing the most level-headed, only non-belligerent sibling in a fractured family. If the role of Franky from the iconic Kumbalangi Nights gave actor Mathew Thomas a dream debut, Thanneermathan Dinangal’s Jaison is a fantasy follow-up. There he was a crucial part of a fabulous ensemble, here he gets to be a solo hero in a perfectly written part.

Jaison is a muddled adolescent stumbling through life but showing unexpected maturity when we least expect it. Unlike most teen films, this one is not steeped in adult stereotypes of teenagers, it feels as if the story, situations and dialogues were drawn out of the skulls of real youngsters. The result of this understanding and complete lack of condescension is a highly credible, hugely funny film, another glowing addition to the great year that 2019 is proving to be for Mollywood.

The pimply post-pubescent Jaison is dealing with twin problems when we meet him at the start of Thanneermathan Dinangal: one, his affable classmate Keerthy (played by Udaharanam Sujatha’s Anaswara Rajan) does not reciprocate his love for her, and two, he desperately wants to crack his studies but struggles with exams. Enter: Problem 3 in the person of the new teacher Ravi Padmanabhan (Vineeth Sreenivasan) who gains instant popularity among the students and staff but picks on Jaison without reason at every available opportunity. Sweet relief from stress comes for the boy at the food shop next to the school where he routinely gathers with his close buddies for snacks (“puffs”, to be exact), watermelon juice, gossip and heart-to-heart conversations.

Thanneermathan Dinangal literally means Watermelon Days, an ode to their favourite drink. The film is as light as the fruit, but do not for a moment underestimate its nutritious value. Writer-director Girish A.D. and his co-writer Dinoy Paulose are bang-on with their depiction of the closing chapters of Jaison’s school years, that phase of pre-adulthood which in retrospect usually seems oh so carefree although in the here and now every problem feels like a matter of life and death, or as Jaison puts it melodramatically at one point, a “jeevitha prashnam”.

The earnestness and possible hyperbole of a youthful imagination are best represented by the characterisation of the loud, somewhat kookie Ravi Padmanabhan who everyone but Jaison considers fantastic. It is never clear whether the older man’s eccentricities and cruelty are real or a figment of Jaison’s nightmares. Similar is the effect of the chase scene close to the end.

The rest of the film, the classroom scenarios at St Sebastian’s Higher Secondary School, the banter between Jaison and his closest boy friends, his troubled equation with the school bully and his blossoming relationship with the remarkably sensible Keerthy are portrayed with absolute realism and biting humour in equal measure.

Like most Malayalam films of the pathbreaking New Wave, Thanneermathan Dinangal too tells a male-centric story through a male gaze (c’mon Mollywood, fix this lacuna fast) but the women are not lightweights. In fact, the sensitivity in the writing of the central young couple is what truly makes this particular film stand out.

Mainstream Malayalam cinema set among school and college goers tends to sexualise girls of all ages, normalise stalking as a form of courtship and dismiss women as haughty traitors as soon as they reject romantic overtures from a significant male character. If they are not mothers, sisters or irrelevant wives, the women of such films are treated as exotica, a distant other or juicy flesh that men salivate over. These are not merely accurate portrayals of gender segregation. From their antagonistic and/or lascivious tone towards women it is evident that they are products of minds that have not risen above the extreme gender segregation in Malayali society, minds that therefore can never see a woman as a regular person just like a man. Thanneermathan Dinangal is a lesson in how you can portray a problematic reality with humour yet without glorifying or humourising the worst of it.

Yes, Jaison and his gang are girl obsessed, but that is not a crime. Yes, at one point one of them does speak of how a friend has been “sniffing after” a particular girl, but for the most part their language is not crude. Most important, the film itself never degrades the women or behave as if they are showpieces. In fact, in Jaison’s defence of Keerthy and refusal to badmouth her beyond a Lakshman Rekha, in his non-threatening, non-obnoxious, childish pursuit of another schoolmate and in Keerthy’s open appreciation of his non-pesky behaviour towards her, we get a reminder that liberal minds emerge from even the most conservative social settings. Listen up, makers of awful films like Chunkzz and even critically acclaimed, troubling ventures such as Annayum Rasoolum and Premam. Listen up, ‘cos THIS is how it’s done.

The messaging is so unobtrusive that Thanneermathan Dinangal is likely to be widely viewed as a non-serious entertainer. That would be a mistake because Girish A.D.’s film is stomach-achingly comical but also serious as hell.

None of this would been possible without the casting director’s brilliant choices, incredibly solid performances by Mathew Thomas and Anaswara Rajan, and the impeccable supporting actors – including the established artistes among them – who appear to have walked right out of a real school and on to the sets of Thanneermathan Dinangal. Vineeth Sreenivasan, for his part, is clearly having a lark playing the film’s most enigmatic, only OTT character.

Messrs Girish and Paulose’s sharp writing meets Shameer Muhammed’s concise editing and the naturalistic cinematography by Jomon T. John and Vinod Illampally to create a film in which every second, every word spoken, every shot is precious.

As unassuming as the storytelling is the soundtrack – Girish knows precisely when to ask music director Justin Varghese to step in and when to get him to stay low key. The end result of their collaboration and the darling leads’ chemistry is that jaathikkathottam (nutmeg groves) will forever now be an aching symbol of romance and teenaged innocence. 

Thanneermathan Dinangal is one of the best teen sagas to emerge from Indian cinema across languages in recent times. What an adorable, huggable film this is.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	137 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/thanneermathan-dinangal-movie-review-franky-from-kumbalangi-gets-an-omana-padam-all-his-own-7144191.html

Link to Anna M.M. Vetticad’s review of Thanneermathan Dinangal aired on Rajya Sabha TV on September 1, 2019:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZi5KLZxkLw&feature=youtu.be 

Visuals courtesy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10551608/

REVIEW 575: KALY

Release date:	February 23, 2018
Director:	Najeem Koya
Cast: Language:	Shebin Benson, Joju George, Baburaj, Shammi Thilakan, Aiswarya Suresh Malayalam

Kaly is a film with a split personality. The first half lolls about for too long establishing the six male leads, best buddies from a lower middle class background in a Kerala city, who shoplift and indulge in other petty criminal activities to sustain their obsession with branded clothing and shoes. The second half is devoted to a plan that goes completely awry with far-reaching consequences for them and a group of absolute strangers.

The former is just another clichéd storyline with clichéd characters featured so frequently in commercial Malayalam cinema. We have seen them even recently in films ranging from completely low-brow fare like Chunkzz to the more tolerable Velipadinte Pusthakam, these directionless Malayali youth (students or unemployed adults) hanging around doing nothing beyond drinking together, eating together, picking fights with each other or others, behaving as if sightings of women are rarer than visitations by Haley’s Comet, stalking women and having conversations steeped in sexism, parochialism and colour prejudice.

It does not help that in Kaly these roles are played by an ineffectual lot of male artistes, while an equally ineffectual Aiswarya Suresh contributes the token attractive female presence. 

The rest of Kaly is the part with potential, when a crime is committed, irresponsible behaviour has a ripple effect on everyone around and the effort to cover up one wrong leads to another and another then another, until you wonder how the persons mired in that situation could possibly extricate themselves from their self-created mess.

What the writer of Kaly needed to do was dispense with the first half almost entirely and invest just a little more thought in the writing of the second to chop out its predictable portions and the trivialisation of the leads’ earlier actions. It could then have been a taut thriller on how casual crime can have disastrous consequences and the differing police reactions to crime based on the financial status of the victims and perpetrators. Its flaws notwithstanding, it remains the tighter, better-written, better-acted part of Kaly.

The film takes too much time to get here. Once it does, it takes a while as a viewer to settle into the complete alteration in tone. That said, there is some fun to be had guessing where everyone’s misdeeds will ultimately lead them.

From the moment of arrival of the unscrupulous, conniving senior policeman played by Joju George, Kaly lifts off to another level. The impact of this corrupt cop is the combined effect of the interesting characterisation and George’s chameleon-like transformation from role to role. His portrayal of amorality here is in sharp – and intriguing – contrast to the stiff-necked, eccentric school principal he played just a few months back in the Manju Warrier-starrer Udaharanam Sujatha.

It is as if a completely new team is handling Kaly post-interval, or the existing team had a proper night’s rest and then proceeded to roll out the second half. Here is an idea, dear director Najeem Koya: how about catching up on your sleep before, instead of after, starting work on a film? Kaly is a half-baked affair that looks and feels as if there is a good film lost somewhere inside it.

Rating (out of five stars): *

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	162 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/kaly-movie-review-two-films-jammed-into-one-uneven-venture-redeemed-by-joju-george-4366255.html

Poster courtesy: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt7548378/

REVIEW 568: QUEEN

Release date:	Kerala: January 12, 2018 Delhi: February 2, 2018
Director:	Dijo Jose Antony
Cast: Language:	Saniya Iyappan, Eldho Mathew, Dhruvan, Vijayaraghavan, Salim Kumar, Sreejith Ravi, Leona Lishoy Malayalam

This is not a review, this is a protest against whoever allowed this kindergarten-grade project to come to mainstream movie halls.

On most days, I would not have bothered to write about a non-descript film of such abysmal quality. Queen, however, must be discussed because its arrival is a symptom of what continues to ail India’s distribution and exhibition sectors where so many good films – including some that have earned awards and critical acclaim at festivals – struggle to get a theatrical release for various reasons including, either that they are not big-banner, star-dominated ventures, or their producers do not have the clout or conviction to persuade theatre owners to give them shows.

I had read about this Malayalam film before I watched it this weekend. The Times of India, in a report dated January 31, 2017, thought it fit to devote a whole article to Queen although it has no particular credentials to recommend it for such space. This was even before the casting, a time when indies by unknowns never get written about in the serious film press because critics are, rightly, waiting for the film to speak for itself. Yet TOI helpfully informed readers an entire year before Queen was out that it “is inspired from a real-life photograph which was floating around the internet once, of a girl in a sari walking the street before an entire group of her boy classmates. The director, Dijo Jose Antony, says that he himself is an engineer and he visited the college in the photo to learn more about their lives.” (sic)

What inspired The Times to expend so many words on Queen? Had they read the script and been convinced of its potential? If yes, could they tell us who on their staff displayed such godawful lack of discernment in not dismissing the script as the worthless potpourri it was/is. The nation – to borrow a line from one of this media group’s most famous ex-employees – wants to know.

A day after the TOI report appeared, there came one in The New Indian Express (TNIE) dated February 1, 2017, with more details of the project. TNIE went so far as to call Queen “a fun-filled college movie” although it was, as mentioned in the same sentence, yet to be made.

Now that I have seen Queen, I can assure you it is no fun at all. The story begins in a setting now familiar in Malayalam films: a college campus where male students fight with each other, harass women students and behave as if female homo sapiens are rarer than Yeti and the Loch Ness monster. This obnoxious scenario where over-wrought masculinity plays out was most visible in last year’s Chunkzz. That film was deeply offensive, but had a better cast and production values. Queen looks shabby and washed out in addition to being creepy.

The writing team’s focus is the college’s Mechanical Engineering course where the men break out into a testosterone-induced frenzy when they hear that a woman is joining their class. This leads to further disturbing scenes of stalking and harassment projected as comedy. I am not bothering to spare you from spoilers here, because this film does not deserve that effort.

So anyway, next the woman wins the men over with her sunshine smile. Once they stop misbehaving with her, they fight with others who do. Once they are done with that they discover she has cancer. Once the film is done with that episode, she heads straight out of the hospital and on to the college campus to dance in a bright red sari surrounded by hordes of her male collegemates and – for some reason I did not bother to wrack my brains over – an elephant. Next she is raped and killed. Next her character is assassinated in court, in the press and on the streets. Next, her classmates fight for justice for her. Next, they win. Next, the film ends.

The tragedy is that in the courtroom scenes, a lawyer (played by veteran Salim Kumar) does make a couple of pertinent points about the victim shaming flying around. Those questions do not matter though because for this film, rape is not an issue of grave concern as much as it is yet another masala item to throw into the mix to spice up a screenplay.

Come to think of it, calling Queen a film is a compliment. An uncharismatic lead cast and some established character artistes have come together in this non-film to act out an amateurish screenplay on sets that might not pass muster with the drama team of a respected school.

What is infuriating is not just that Queen was made but that it somehow travelled to theatres in Kerala and from there has even travelled outside the state. This is no mean feat.

One of the films on my list of Best Mollywood Films of 2017 published on this website last month was Dr Biju’s Kaadu Pookunna Neram (When The Woods Bloom), a gripping tale of the troubled equation between oppressed tribal communities and the state as represented by the police. It starred Rima Kallingal and Indrajith Sukumaran (both marquee names), it boasted of world-class cinematography, it was intelligent, politically courageous and entertaining. Biju is a multiple National Award winner. Kallingal has won several prestigious awards. None of this was enough to recommend Kaadu Pookunna Neram to distributors and theatres outside Kerala. Even getting to a theatre within Kerala was tough.

There are so many great films that audiences are deprived of seeing because their producers do not push them enough, and when they do, India’s distribution companies and theatres do not want to risk backing them, if not because they lack star value then because of their unconventional themes. In a scenario where the likes of Kaadu Pookunna Neram struggle to get to us, it is almost criminal that Queen has come so far.

Rating (out of five stars): None (I refuse to rate this film)

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	157 minutes

This review was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/queen-movie-review-this-is-not-a-review-this-is-a-protest-4334535.html#comments-section-4334535

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