Movie Review – Iyobinte Pusthakam

Visual retreat

For anyone who had read Brothers Karamzov, this movie would be a treat. Not in my wildest imagination did I think that a Dostoevsky novel would be adapted this good. May be it’s not really an adaptation and has only few elements from the novel, it still passes down as one of the best ever movies made which employed the visual storytelling technique to a great extent. Best thing about the movie is even if you know none about it, it’s still appealing. A movie made on grand scale which has an impact like that of ‘There will be Blood’ is not something which comes quite often in Indian cinema.

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Grandeur is what happens in ‘Iyobinte Pusthakam’, not the seven wonders in Shankar song. ‘Iyobinte Pusthakam’ spells grandeur in each and every frame. With an excellent cast, topping with Fahadh Faasil, there is never a dull moment in the film. It’s good to see a maker making movies in such vast canvas and succeeding in it too. People mostly associate big budget movies with that of action adventure or epic movies or may be even war movies. But period flicks are never given its due when it comes to budgeting. In fact, of all, the eye pleasing stuff happens more in period flicks than the remaining. Just look at the cars in the film. It was such a treat to watch them in slow motion.

The only problem I had in the movie was the way it opened. With a voice over narrating too many stories, it was a tedious watch. But maybe they wanted it to be Dostoevskian too. Even though a lot of details were infused, the film still holds our attention. Just in those few minutes, there is a superb graph for Iyob (Lal). Someway the feel of a Dostoevsky novel gets into us and we start to follow the film curiously.

Fahadh Faasil takes his own sweet time to enter the screen and once he does, he’s ravishing. Ivan (Jinu Joseph) and Dimitri (Chemban Vinod Jose) too are excellent as his brothers. Especially Jinu Joseph who looks like a WWE star. Bray Wyatt to be precise. He carries on the charisma like a wrestler and was a pure evil faced person. It’s good to see such characters nowadays in cinema, where all we see is grey and boring.

The film is rightly titled ‘Iyobinte Pusthakam’ because even though Aloshy (Fahadh Faasil) is the hero, it’s still a film about Iyob. He’s the one who comes to power, then goes powerless and there is a proper character arc in his story, both through self-realization as well as from the outside. That’s why it makes for a great character. Except for him, most of the others are straight forward characters. Rahel (Padmapriya Janakiraman) is another interesting character who deals with a lot of men. A truly vicious character who manipulates men till her death. I thought Padmapriya was a wrong choice but she did really well.

Kazali (Lena) and Martha’s (Isha Sharvani) character too was well written and superbly shot. Kazali was given a great Indian make up and Martha had a halo around her face. Her presence meant angelic divinity in the frames. Isha Sharvani’s casting was a master stroke because she has this weird goddess daughter face which works for the movie.

It’s good to see Malayalam cinema trying out new stuffs rather than doing the same things again and again. And this was one movie where the experiment worked wonderfully for me. So it was a double joy of watching something new as well as watching something solid. It truly was a mesmerizing watch.

Movie Review – Sudani from Nigeria

A film which you can’t hate

‘Sudani from Nigeria’ joins the league of this one object film which Malayalam cinema has been doing off late. Maybe I watched the films in wrong order but if ‘Driving License’ was about the license, ‘Sudani from Nigeria’ was about passport. The majority of the film revolves around it and the object appears out of the blue like a rabbit out of the hat. Only thing is we don’t feel cheated, we love it, like magic. I guess keeping the screenplay apt to make us love is what makes films like this tick.

Right from the start Mr. Samuel Abiola Robinson (Samuel Abiola Robinson) gets called by various names. First Robin Singh, then Sudani and then even more sweetly as Sudu. Something which generally happens with foreigners whose name we couldn’t pronounce. I thought the film would take a different side. Good that I noted the genre to be comedy, otherwise it’d have been disappointing. I expected a rather serious film which would tell a story about a migrant settled in India. But the film was much light hearted than I thought.

The film starts with Manager Majeed (Soubin Shahir) and his football club MYC Accode winning a match against one of their rivals. The environment gets slowly established. I wonder how they get so many different settings in Malayalam. When you talk about the environment, it’s pretty simple in Tamil films. The same template gets repeated again and again. But here in this film we see a whole new world. A Muslim family, sevens tournament, foreigners playing for the local club and a whole lot of passion for the sport. It’s not the regular rags to riches story you see usually but a story which you feel like something which truly exists. So, we quickly delve into this world.

Unfortunately, my next guess about the film too went wrong. I thought the film would deal with Sudani’s football heroics but he breaks the leg in bathroom. As a matter of fact, everything in the film happens matter of factly. There was no great drama. People and their needs are simple too. When Sudu gets injured, Majeed doesn’t really get irritated, he genuinely feels that he should take care of him. At no point does the thought of getting rid of him comes to Majeed’s mind. Same thing with his family too. They too take care of him genuinely. The friends, staffs and everyone would be of same opinion. The one dialogue where Majeed says that he too doesn’t have money and someone gives him was too deep. His friends too are ready to mortgage their wife’s jewels. It’s not a depressing movie where one doesn’t have money but just a fact. Even the t-shirt gesture in climax wasn’t blown out of proportion.

Everyone in the film are do gooders, even the villain lends Sudani some money. Majeed’s father doesn’t have any complaints with his son. It’s a great move to have cast him as an apartment security. Generally, only this kind of people are there are security. People who are weak and have no other way to earn money in old age. Like how Visu would have worked as watchman in ‘Samsaram Adhu Minsaram’. Majeed’s mom is not the complaining type, she’s rather happy to serve Sudani. Even her neighbor comes to help her and offer prayers for him.

I thought at least during the climax something dramatic would happen like Sudani’s family coming here or Sudani getting back to football again but he just gets into the cab and goes off. We don’t know much about how Majeed got money for his tickets as well. But we know he’d have made some arrangements.

The single highpoint of the scene was the passport scene, it comes at quite unexpected circumstance. Superbly written scene that one, as the SI would have previously talked to them about a foreigner being there in their club and would again appear for checking license. So, we think only in that angle but ‘bam’ comes the surprise.

‘Sudani from Nigeria’, I thought would be some film on the lines of ‘Separation’. A heavy film about a foreigner but ends up being a feel-good film. Nothing to complain but it could have been a greater film but ends up being a film which you can’t hate.

Movie Review – Driving License

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.