katha parayumbhol (malayalam) - a re-review

Mohanan's debut film Katha Parayumbhol scripted by Srinivasan is unmistakably a 'Srinivasan film' – for, it has all his trademark features stamped all over it. You have his self-deprecating humour, the references about his anatomy – height and skin colour, and the swarming population of stereotypical Malayalee figures that envelop him (and make him possible in the first place). Basically a Krishna-Kuchela story, where childhood, one in penury and the other rich and famous, meet each other after a long time, one needs a lot of courage to make a film like this. It has no action or an obviously captivating narrative, but it still holds your attention by working on a slender and mostly predictable storyline which has the poor local barber at one end, Balan (Srinivasan), and his childhood friend and superstar, Ashok Raj (Mammooty), at the other.

The Srinivasan magic is to fill the gap with bits of humour and characters, who are there only to keep the narrative going. They all in fact come from or are visitations from the world of Malayalam cinema: the typical wayside teashop owner, the customers hanging around, the nouveau riche barber, a gulf returnee and competitor showing off his new fangled ways to lure customers away from Balan, the local pest of a poet, the local moneylender and his cohorts, the pompous Christian manager of the school, the desperate parallel college principal, the jolly nun who is the school principal, the corrupt bureaucrat etc. Obviously, only in such a world of wild generalization and stereotypes can a Krishna-Kuchela story like this find its footing. Balan's wife, the only strong female presence, is a typical Malayalee middle class wife; like all Srinivasan heroines she is fair and originally from a rich upper caste family, who had eloped with him.

If all these characters are firmly placed in and around the Srinivasan persona, who occupies the centre of this Malayalee universe, look at the two characters who are tangential and who are its 'others'. One, the Muslim family staying next door; they are apparently rich and are defined by their gluttony. Their only preoccupation is food and talk about it all the time. The other character is the typical 'thekkan' character played by Suraj Venjaramoodu, the pompous member of the film crew, who struts around the village making purchases of food items. He is ultimately revealed to be a mere c(r)ook in the end. It cannot be a coincidence that the wily 'southerner' and the rich Muslim stand apart and against the 'normal' economy of the Melukavu population.

One interesting element in the film is the way the village crowd vacillates – it adores Balan when they find he is close to the star and readily dumps him the moment it is not proved by him. In fact, 'super stars' are also made and maintained by such blind adulation. So, naturally, the object of adoration has to be distant and faraway (like a star). Stars are faraway from the mundaneness of daily life, which is what Balan's life is all about, making for another distinguishing feature of the film. It has the courage to harp on the details of everyday life – subsistence, earnings, fees overdue, daily bread etc . The film looks at the redundancy faced by his vocation and the inability to 'modernise' his means of work, the desire to send the kids to a 'convent' school that one cannot afford, the impossibility of getting a government loan and the very 'ordinary' problem of making both ends meet. These days, seldom do Malayalam films dwell upon such 'boring' things.

But the film places all its hopes on the arrival of a Krishna to save Kuchela from his fate – the penury that he is mired in. Strikingly the milieu that surrounds Balan are all mere onlookers or witnesses to the miracle; they are left behind to wait for their own Krishna. It may be this undercurrent of social despair that attracts family-audiences to the film.

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.