flash (malayalam) – a re-review

Flash by Sibi Malayil is a film that tries to mix an all inclusive cocktail and falls victim to the various tired and burnt-out formulae in Malayalam cinema. For instance, you have glimpses of an earlier hit Manichitrathazh( 1993) in the film as a psychological thriller, where at the climactic moment the possessed girl is exorcised of the trauma by reenacting the original event. It is also a murder mystery woven into a joint family drama, the family this time is not just a feudal palace, but one that also runs corporate business. In the character list, you have a patriarchal head, sidekicks including the glutton of a son-in-law (Jagadish), a servant-cum-driver who dares to love the lord's daughter, and the usual infighting within the family. At the centre is the good son, who had left home years ago, now returning with his adolescent daughter. You even have the ageing Mohanlal making an entry that reminds one of its original. If in Manichitrathazhu, where also he plays the role of a maverick globetrotting psychiatrist who makes his dramatic entry as a saffron-clad modern nomad, here he impersonates an Ayyappa devotee to startle his would-be employees at the bus stop. Here, apart from other things, he is 'also' running a software company! Just like the original, you have the huge structure of the joint family looming large and providing the setting, there is a couple that needs psychiatric help and there is a maverick outsider who comes to offer the same.

The adolescent heroine, Dhwani, is the centre of the storm, she is an IT Engineering student who has come back to stay at her grandfather's palatial house. Her comeback is obviously a penance. Years earlier, her father had left home following a love affair with a woman from another religion. After her mother's death, the daughter is making a dutiful comeback to set things straight - the only plausible reason why she is enraged at finding her cousin making overtures to the lowly driver. This return to the new family, the joint family she 'belongs' to, brings her into a ‘male’ world. Here, she is attached to the patriarchal figure of the grandfather, is the apple of her father’s eye and is the suitable would-be-wife of her cousin. To cure her and make her a good wife in this male world, comes the psychiatrist-hero.

Apparently, there seems to be a compulsive need to include everything to ensure the film does well. The film wants to address contemporary issues and situate the narrative in contemporary settings even while hanging on to the old and the nostalgic – the joint family patriarch, the feudal marriage norms (the heroine finds her marital bliss in her proper cousin), fear of breaking caste/class barriers etc . It has the obligation to keep the super star as a proper hero while trying to account for his relationship with the adolescent girl, one that traverses a thin line between love and a doctor-patient relationship. Thus the film does an uneasy balancing act between what a 'hero' ought to be and the age of the star, as it oscillates between audience expectations and narrative exigencies.

By the end one is totally confused. Whom or what is the film trying to address? Is it a youth film? The film in fact starts with a college campus and a dance programme there. But then the narrative leaves the campus behind to follow the family politics and the murders that happen there. Then you have this IT firm which Mohanlal heads and where the girl’s future bridegroom (true to Nair traditions), Indrajit, works and where the heroine also is an applicant. What follows is a complicated overloaded drama, where psychic, familial, monetary and romantic issues clumsily jostle and pull at each other. To top it all, the film ends firmly and traditionally installing the nuclear family at the centre, one, that of the heroine and her cousin, and the other that of the hero finally revealing his marital status to his patient-lover.

Dr C S Venkiteswaran, is a Kerala based film critic who has won state and national awards for film criticism. He is now Director, School of Media Studies, Kochi, Kerala. He writes regularly about film in various national and international journals.