The Elder One

Though the film tells the story in Malayalam and Hindi, this is an International movie. The direction, Acting, Screen play and cinematography deserves to be seen by International audience to understand that Indian Cinema is not cliched Bollywood but beyond that. Please watch and appreciate good movies.

Very dark but a great watch it kept me on the edge of my seat really intense story

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.

This film really deserves its due credits. The narrative itself is so much touchy that the dark and raw essence of the emotion is still intact in it. A beautiful love story taking such a dark turn. The first thing which is to be appreciated is the performances. I would say each and everyone were great but Nivin Pauly took his dark character seriously to the next level. Playing a guy who hides his pain in the first part and then as a drug addict in the second one. Its unbelievable that it is the same guy I witnessed as a tamed personality in Bangalore Days. Roshan Mathew too, in a short screen time without uttering a single dialogue beautifully potrayed a character through his spellbound expressions and his eyes. The camera work too is phenomenal. The panning of the camera for recording the rain sequence and atlast the distorted camera work during the outburst of the character was something brilliantly done. Moreover, the messaging of the film is very much touchy and surely one of a kind. I will surely recommend this movie. Do give it a watch. Its something which probably you have never witnessed with such an ease.

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.)