ENAKSHI SHARMA says that Malayalam cinema is brimming with new ideas and talent
A couple of years ago, I was attending the screenings of national award winning films at Siri Fort. There were several options and I was not sure what to go for. After some contemplation, I gingerly walked into the auditorium that was showing a Malayalam film called Ustad Hotel. I knew that Malayalam films have always had a strong tradition of quality. From the heady days of Adoor, John Abraham and Shaji N Karun to the more recent Adaminte Makan Abu (which became India’s official entry to Oscars in 2011), they have maintained a steady stream of parallel cinema, a movement that did thrive all over the country at one point but is practically extinct nowadays in other parts.
However, Ustad Hotel turned out to be a completely different affair compared to what I was expecting to see. It was an out and out commercial venture with a young, good looking lead pair (one being a star kid), peppy songs, family melodrama and mild humour in equal doses. This is a world far removed from the minimalism as well as the socialist and humanitarian concerns of parallel cinema.
At the same time I found it to be far more entertaining and stylistically ambitious compared to the more expensive and bloated productions of Bollywood. The leads were effective and they were backed up by seasoned thespians in supporting roles. There is a clean family drama at the core but director Anwar Rasheed embellishes it with pop philosophy and feel-good exuberance that naturally comes with good food. In fact, I had not felt so good watching a food based film after Ratatouille.
After this film, I gradually started exploring other such films in Malayalam, mostly made by first or second time directors after 2010. I do not claim to have seen everything but the more I saw, more I was convinced that Malayalam Cinema along with their counterparts in Marathi are the ones driving the new age Indian cinema while their much more powerful neighbours are getting stuck in the stereotypes of their own making. This is such a new phenomenon that we are yet to coin a collective term for this group of filmmakers. While it would be unfair to put all these films in one basket and subject them to a set of new stereotypes, there were a couple of aspects that did strike me in particular.
Firstly, they seem to be thriving in genres where bigger industries in India have regularly failed at. Jeethu Joseph’s Drishyam is one such example and it is no longer an obscure regional film now. While its Tamil remake has been equally successful, the Hindi one turned out to be somewhat underwhelming. I was stunned by the original when I first saw it a year ago. It did take some time to build up but towards the end it reached Bong Joon-ho territory. There have been other good Malayalam thrillers in recent times and their frequency is striking considering the fact that the last critically and commercially successful Bollywood thriller was Kahaani (2012) and the previous one at least in my humble opinion was Jewel Thief from 1967!
Genre experimentations are not limited to thrillers alone. The next year I went to the same event and this time I picked another Malayalam film without any hesitation. It was Anil Radhakrishnan Menon’s North 24 Kaatham, a road movie which is another rarity in India. On top of that the male protagonist is sort of asocial awkward geek (in the mould of Sheldon Cooper). This is a character type I had never seen being handled successfully in India. They are too marginal a community to be considered by most mainstream film industries and even the society in general. But Menon, another rookie director, pulled it off effortlessly.
The second interesting aspect has to be discussed purely in terms of sensibilities. These films truly cater to the urban youth, the ones who are least constrained by the burden of “culture” and “traditions” that even the NRIs in most of our films cannot seem to break free from. Films like Ashiq Abu’s Salt n’ Pepper and Anjali Menon’s Bangalore Days etc. display that cosmopolitan sensibility of the urban, white collared youths where conflicts are derived from Individual personalities and choices rather than archaic rules and restrictions of the society.
At present Malayalam cinema is brimming with new ideas and talent. There is Jeethu Joseph pushing the boundaries of thriller, there are the likes of Rajesh Pillai (Traffic) and Lijo Jose (City of God) are experimenting with hyperlink cinema. The likes of Anwar Rasheed and Ashiq Abu can easily break into any market with their breezy, youthful romances while there is still space for someone like Rosshan Andrews who does not stick to one genre. The industry has also been helped by the return of home-grown talents who have honed their skills in bigger industries. That is why you can spot someone like Resul Pookutty in the credits of these films. Similarly, Rajeev Ravi (Annayum Rasoolum), a regular cinematographer of the Anurag Kashyap camp has also been directing films in Malayalam. Moreover, the best part in this whole story is that it has only begun!
