Moothon

Moothon (The Elder One) Ten minutes in, i was low-key invested in this lost kid's impending doom. Two hours later? That knot in your gut hasn't loosened. This ain't your feel-good flick nor your escapist fare; this is a straight-up shattering that leaves you silent. It's vying for top spot this year, right up there with Ram's "Peranbu" (Mamuka's a legend, go check my review) and keep an eye out for the weird delicacy "Aamis" dropping on Nov 22nd.

But on the other hand, Shout-out to the indie/arthouse scene doing the left-field stuff with good titles coming from experimental filmmakers like Prantik Basu, Aditya Vikram Sengupta, Amit Dutta, Achal Mishra, Ronny Sen, Arun Karthick and many more with their own style and ethos. While Malayalam cinema has been flourishing with good experiments and filmmakers taking up many sensitive issues like LGBTQIA, feminism, radical or leftist themes etc. Ligy J. Pullappally's Sancharram to mediocre films like My Life Partner (2014), Jayan K. Cherian's bog-standard Ka Bodyscapes (2016). With mainstream actors like Jayasurya doing Njan Marykutty (2018), Prithviraj Sukumaran in Mumbai Police (2013) and Manju Warrier's recent Aami (2018), a really pathetic film, should've never been made. I loved Don Palathara's Shavam (2015) and Lijo Jose Pellissery's Ee. Ma. Yau. For the record, the cinematic trash (Jis Joy's "Bicycle Thieves", Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's "Sexy Durga," Vipin Vijay's "Chitrasutram"), straight to the digital dumpster, i really wish they take these cockroach films, and dispose it into the nearest cesspool. Point is, the graph of Malayalam cinema has it's share of brilliance to bin-worthy.

Coming to "Moothon" itself? A visceral experience, hard to articulate. Geethu Mohandas clearly poured everything into this. Nivin Pauly anchors it, though his romantic-hero fans might be thrown. The film Opens visually strong, then swerves hard. We're thrown into the story of a gender-nonconforming kid chasing a ghost of a brother, innocence clutched like a fragile butterfly. Bombay's underbelly becomes the backdrop. From then on, the film travels to the slums of Bombay with the kid and we meet Akbar (Nivin Pauly) whose intro is treated with the template of a mass superstar but with a melancholic score. He is a meth-head with buried humanity, a local goon teaching kids to fight, and making them butcher animals. Then the reveal drops, and it's a raw dive into lost souls, messed-up love, and sibling bonds in the concrete jungle. Bombay's slums? Claustrophobic hellholes populated by the beautifully broken. Flashbacks give us glimpses of Akbar's past: family, rituals, a hesitant sexuality that blossoms into a longing for someone he can't quite communicate with.

Director Geethu uses the location like a weapon, handles the taboo with a sharp edge. The climax? Intense. Akbar's unravelling, no easy outs, just a final, haunting shot that'll stick with you. Props to Geethu and the whole crew , they definitely deserve all the appreciation and the accolades. There's a realness here, no sugar-coating. I could break down "Moothon" more, but why? Go see if you can handle it.

No words to say stunned by nivin pauly bold attempt by the team too

A teen boy idolizes his older brother, who was a star in a Moslem ritual dance. However, his brother has left mysteriously for Bombay, and, chafing under his guardian, steals a boat and escapes the island, with only a phone number to make contact.

Getting into Bombay, he falls into a society that is darker than depicted in Lion, There is the orphanage with child abuse, human traffickers, prostitutes, and eunuchs. Along the way, themes of homosexuality, gender identity and gender expression are also explored.

Much as I wanted to like the film, I have reservations. Like Lion, the boy does not speak the language of the city he ends up in, and subtitling loses that distinction. There is a long flashback sequence explaining why the elder brother left home, but not why he did not choose a better path for his exit. Finally, the coincidences that are needed to make the film work are unbelievable.

Great acting and direction. Very dark but excellent making. Intense scenes and great camera work. Best of malayalam industry.

There's a tiny, surreal sequence involving a green mermaid right at the start in Moothon (The Elder One) which made me jump a little. And I had no idea I would do that a couple more times as this raunchy crime drama played out in front of me giving me multiple layers and themes to work with. Geethu Mohandas's second feature film is a tough nut to crack (read review) and every time you will see it, you are going to describe it in a different way. That the story of a young street-un-smart boy literally swims across the ocean from Lakdhadsweep to Mumbai in search of his elder brother and gets entangled in the rustic dirt of the millennium city's red light area of Kamathipura pays an ode to the lives of the gangland and its adjacent brothels and its dwellers is very clear. But Mohandas does not stop at one theme, she flipflops between them even as she explores cross-dressing, gender and identity, and the validity of fate. She also does not let you indulge in any one sequence for more than a few seconds as the scattered plot goes back and forth with its timelines showing the characters in both their best and the worst. The twists, or the realities that I would like to call in film's context, come out of nowhere and are going to make you jump a little too for when you realize its symbolism and how all of that has derived from real life stories a smacked gob is going to take some time to come back to its normal position. There's a high degree of realism in Mohandas's direction whether it is Nivin Pauly's transformation from the chocolate boy Georgie-like charm to this corroded personality that now rules the chawls of a fireless inferno while being on smack all the time or it is the raw Hindi dialogues filled with just enough expletives to show you the deal. The reality meter always keeps ticking. I am finally starting to see Pauly extend his range and Moothon is a step in the right direction for him, but I'm not too sure about the film's commercial run for the themes actually spectrum from sexuality to forbidden relationships to the bond of families. The characters are refined and more so are the actors who play them. Shashank Arora and Sobhita Dhulipala somehow tie with Pauly in the performance department even with their extremely smaller characters, which together with that by Dileesh Pothan and Roshan Mathew (who plays a dumb character flawlessly) just hits a high note. Moothon mostly works because of the nontepid writing and brilliant performances by its cast, and even if I leave out the ambiguities involved up in the air it is still going to be a visual treat. The score by Sagar Desai is haunting and so are the shots Rajeev Ravi concocts for you to see and be mesmerized by. There are flying fish, Pauly performing the Islamic practice of tatbir (or self-infliction using knives), bits of tasty surrealism, and one of the best depictions of the Mumbai crime scene. Moothon rules. It reveals. TN.

(Watched and reviewed at its India premiere at the 21st MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.)