Movie Review – Annayum Rasoolum

As mundane as life

With some films, even though you don’t like the film, it’s tough to say it out loud, it puts you in a spot of bother and the film ends up in “it didn’t work for me” instead of “I didn’t like the film”. ‘Annayum Rasoolum’ is one such movie. May be a little less towards “it didn’t work for me” and little more towards “I didn’t like the film”. And it’s a tough watch by any standards. May be this is how slow foreign films would feel if you know their culture. Even though nothing happens there you get to see the surroundings, their culture or at least their faces to be different to that of what you see every day.

In ‘Annayum Rasoolum’ its everything you already know. There are no surprises at all. In a way it feels like ‘one act’ film because nothing ever so happens in the film. May be that’s his intention, he wanted audience to wait and wait to see something happening but nothing of that sort happens. There was one other movie which I had watched very early in my film career, called ‘Elippathayam’. Even there, nothing happens, absolutely nothing but it is so so beautiful, for few of the scenes I was exploding with joy, I couldn’t contain my excitement. And, on top of it, when people around you were fed up with mundane activities in that film, I felt even more awesome.

But here in ‘Annayum Rasoolum’ I felt the movie to be plain boring, wish something had happened instead of people looking at each other for whole three hours. In a way it felt like ‘’96’, another movie which I didn’t largely like, thanks to its slowness which looked forced, especially with “Vasantha Kaalangal” song where nothing interesting happens. Even if slow it could have been lot more interesting. The slowness can be achieved even in a one-and-a-half-hour film and fastness can be achieved even in a three-hour film. But with films like these it only looked the director wanted to increase the length of the film without any activities and make it look slow.

In fact, the most interesting thing about the film, as a non-Malayalee, was figuring out the title of the film. All the while, while watching the film we were thinking that it’s a film about Rasool and his mother. ‘Annai’ – meaning mother in Tamil. But funnily here ‘Annayum’ meant ‘Anna and’. That was the only high point of the film.

I was thinking or rather afraid that the movie would end up in a ‘Sairat’ mode because all was going well once they come out of their house, which got me scary. Luckily it didn’t, even though there were similarities. But the director was very careful in not letting even this emotion go to crest.

For a movie which was plain, the intimate scenes were really intriguing. Maybe it’s the only thing which worked. For some reason I got reminded of ‘Kaatru Veliyidai’ while watching the intimate scenes because it was another film which I hated but the scene in front of the mirror was one of the most sensual one in Tamil cinema. The silence is ripping there. Similarly, here too silence worked as a great tool during those intimate scenes.

For a film like this Andrea was an interesting choice. I’m not sure whether she did her job right. Fahad on the other hand was impressive. He does his job by staying rooted to the character and not overdoing anything. With Andrea it felt as if she couldn’t express herself properly. It didn’t feel like she was acting restrained but rather felt restrained, acting for that character.