Writer: No screenplay
DOP: Prathap Joseph
Cast: Rajshri Deshpande, Kannan Nayar, Sujeesh KS, Baiju Netto
Language: Malayalam
Two smalltime gangsters pick up a couple on the run, leading to a long, claustrophobic road trip in Malayalam cinema's perennial vehicle villain, an Omni van.
The lady in the couple is a North Indian who doesn't speak or understand Malayalam. This language barrier gives a license to the gangsters to say whatever they want. The film had no screenplay and I suspect the instruction from the director was to be really lewd. Film was made in the context of increasing reportage of gruesome rape cases from India. Still, Kerala is not a place that you normally associate with it. So my default expectation was that nothing terrible would happen. The language that they use is very crude and I'm pretty sure that subtitles wouldn't have conveyed the tone quite correctly in the festivals that they showed it and won many awards. They would've perceived it as an extremely dark film while I found plenty of humour in it, albeit being pretty dark and cringy.
Kerala is a place whose streets go to sleep pretty early and film can be seen as a portrayal of how behaviour changes with it. Night belongs to the nanny state police, moral policing dickwads and other people who you normally associate with it. For the couple alone at night the first two are a threat and it is only natural that they ended up with the third kind, repeatedly so in a surreal fashion. One solution is to change the law so that shops can operate any time of the day. That will help to bring more people to the night streets and thereby make it safer. Apparently, the gulf streets are very vibrant during the Ramadan month.
Film is pretty ambiguous and surreal towards the end and I found it to be a great watch. The screening that I went to was its Kerala premiere which was organized to protest against its exclusion from IFFK competitive section. This week also saw it being excluded from IFFI by the I&B ministry after getting selected by the jury. The main storyline of the film is juxtaposed with scenes of male Bhakts enduring 'Ichi the Killer' kind of body horrors in worship of Goddess Durga. Director is kind of contrasting, in a non-subtle way, the day and night behaviour of a typical Indian male.
Rating: 4.25/5
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