A police jeep speeding through palayam flyover at dawn - the chilling wind is blowing to jeevan's face as he looks out. He observes the street light lit roads of vellayambalam- kowdiar road and musuem-vellayambalam road. There is a loud thinking, rather a narration - which forms the entire backbone of the story later.
Season - The timeless padmarajan saga of revenge kicks open with mohanlal's rustic bearded face through the roads of capital city. When i first watched this movie in local cable at my uncle's place at EKM sometime in the nineties, this opening sequence itself was captivating enough to keep me watching till the end. Looking back today from a period of city of god, traffic, saroja , amorres perros, ayutha ezhuthu and the likes, season is clearly a movie way ahead of its times - a cult classic by all means, it remains quite a surprise to me that this was box office dud in 1989. But then again many of padmarajan masterpieces were not commercial wonders of their respective times.
Unlike his earlier associations with Johnson, padmarajan uses maestro ilayaraja for the songs and most importantly for the the vibrant BGM. "Swapnangal than theeram" by chithra and "poyi varoo" by yesudas are not exactly some of the memorable works of ilayaraja , but he makes up for that with the Background score - which itself evolves through the screenplay. What starts as a melancholic violin score when jeevan is marched through the poojappura central jail courtyard, gradually progresses to the dark guitar tweaks portraying kovalam and emerges in full swing with a thrilling jazz beats mix bearing a typical ilayaraja signature. The jail break scene with gaavan and the fight scene at the end remain memorable to this day with the amazing BGM's.
The film opens with jeevan's entry into the central prison and progresses with mohanlal's classic voiceover which constitutes a good part of the screenplay. The viewer is left to ponder about jeevan's past as he befriends the foreigner Fabiyen Remenez at the prison and plots to escape. It's at this point the film whizzes back to jeevans earlier sentence time and from there to the prime flashback at the beaches of kovalam. Maybe this is one of the reasons season remains a favourite - the natural trivandrum slang used throughout (not the horrible, most artificial verbal diarrhoea of made up trivandrum slang spoken by mammootty in rajamanikyam or the bafoonish mockery made popular by suraj venjarammoodu). Poojappura Radhakrishnan, Maniyanpilla Raju and Jagathi Sreekumar etch out some of the most memorable supporting roles as the beach locals - be it the lusty half blinded broker jagathi or the small time drug pusher kanthi (raju).
Apart from the screenplay and direction, the highlight of movie is obviously the super-cool jeevan who is an enigma to the other characters of the movie as much as he is to the viewers. Mohanlal gives one of his best performances after memorable outings with padmarajan in namukku parkkan munthirithoppukal and kariyilakkaattupole in the past years. A loner- Calm and composed, in a typical beach dress or the 80's denims and with a beard that he sports so rarely in his movies, lal never ever reminds you of any other of his characters that he has done before and is doubtful to repeat the act again as jeevan stands out very differently from all the sethumadhavans , neelakantans, sagar alias jackys or other characters that he's blown life into. The prisoner in poojappura flashes back as the hotel owner at kovalam and takes you through the rest of the story with interesting incidents. As is quite expected with an urban tale like this, padmarajans spins the entire events around greed, treachery, drugs and violence. Adding to the uniqueness of his work, padmarajan maintains a foreign character as the main villain of the movie, perhaps largely unheard of in that time. Jeevan does not have a heroine to himself throughout the movie, maintaining his loner, Clint Eastwood-like image quite convincingly. Opening promisingly and carrying on quite interestingly, the movie tends to lag a bit at those portions where jeevans friends are murdered and he's ultimately accused of the crime. But from there the film jumps into its most interesting part, the jail break and the subsequent showdown between jeevan and Fabien. The climax is largely unconventional, but at the same time heroic, with jeevan returning the murdered Fabien's body back to the prison after using the money he got from him to pay for the family of his murdered friends.
A small group of supporting characters makes the film more interesting to the viewer- azeez as the jailor, prempraksh and valsala menon as the couple who came to buy smuggled goods, oduvil unnikrishnan as the thirumeni prisoner, and krishnaprasad as the young housekeeper lad all play their brief parts well as characters who don't play a major part to the thread but entertaines the viewer well.
A highly recommended watch for all those who missed it, Season easily tops my all-time favourite list of movies.
