Charm and warm
I was saying that I’d want to get converted as Malayali after watching this film. Such has been Malayalam movies off late. For some past 4,5 years. Taking a nothing story and making it neat and crisp. A lot of movies have come out this way which makes a great evening time watch instead of being a soupy tear jerker.
After seeing favorable reviews for the most part, I decided to watch the movie. Also, it has Prithviraj so it was an added advantage. When I saw that the film was about a superstar’s journey and it was being produced by Prithviraj I got even more interested. The opening scene where he comes a star and bashes up the villains increased the curiosity one notch up.
But with all that coming to an end and somewhere into the movie when I got to know that it’s a comedy, I was slightly disappointed. It’s not one of my favorite genres. The first half in fact was not really great. What started as a great standoff between a superstar and common man slightly fizzled away with time. There is only this much one can do when you have two people fighting. So, it became kind of monotonous.
The premise of the movie was simple as it can get, yet it’s an interesting one. I loved the way it was handled by showing Hareendran (Prithviraj) as not so great a man and not so great a villain. Even though he’s a superstar he values his commitment, loves his wife, a beautiful Deepti Sati, and at the same time a practical person too when he tells that no one asks him for license while driving, and shouting at the MVI when he sees media. Instead of him saying that he’d want to get license no matter what or going by the heroic way of procuring license only in legal manner he goes the common man way.
Similarly, MVI Kuruvilla (Suraj Venjarammoodu) is not someone who takes bribe and allows people with license and the same person is the one who is okay in giving license for someone with predated form. It’s not a big juncture where he breaks the rule. He knows the chaos it’d lead to if the actor had to come there. That’s the beauty of the script. We don’t see angels and demons as heroes and villains. We see common people. We are so used to seeing things as black and white in cinema but when it comes to real life, we don’t even know what all wrongs we are doing.
In ‘Driving License’ its people like us whom we see on screen. At some point we are judgmental but we let them be as such. It’s clear writing which makes us accept the people with real plus and minuses rather than something invented just for the sake of it. Credit has to be given to the actors too to have made it possible for us to accept them like that. Especially Prithviraj for being in negative characters who is not outright villainous but someone whom we’d love less likely between the two. He first did it in ‘Ayyappanum Koshiyum’ and now in ‘Driving License’, in the order of movies that I’ve watched.
There are scenes which was boring and slow but nothing was bad scene. The only bad scene if I’ve to knit pick would be the one was Hareendran runs to save the Kuruvilla. That was the only heroic moment where he was projected like being a hero in real life. That was a little true literal. The other scenes where he gives speech were more heroic like the film association head comments. It’s a great move by not letting Prithviraj show his acting powers even in the climax. The scene in car where Kuruvilla cries could have been easily used to showcase Prithviraj’s talent, something which Kamal would do but here he underplays even that and restores normalcy.
constantscribbles 