Bhavum

I am amused that this film won the Best Film award at the Kerala (in South India) Film Awards--either the Malayalam cinema has withered or the Awards have lost its value. Malayalam cinema's bar of quality was raised by the works of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, the late Aravindan, the late John Abraham and Pavithran to name four stalwarts.

This film is a debut of a young Malayalee (an individual with roots in Kerala) who has lived some time in Canada. He is to be lauded in raising critical issues--modernism represented by westernized advertising hoardings in Kerala--in the early few minutes of the film. The website on the film mentions that in the film "Streetcar named desire" meets "Crime and Punishment." Unfortunately neither Tennessee Williams nor Dostoyevsky would have appreciated the comparison if they were alive.

The film meanders into idealism, ennui, corruption, sex, a brief sketch of a gay individual who do not behave as such early in the film, all of which have some remote strand of semblance to the Williams and Dostoyevsky characters. But as a film, the work is unimpressive on all fronts.

Imagine making a film where the camera zooms on a phone before it begins to ring...Imagine a Mita Vasisht (an accomplished Hindi Movie actress), wearing northern Indian clothes in Kerala and acting a Malayalee Hindu when she emotes as a northerner..

Satish Menon deserves credit for his effort to bring on the Malayalam screen gay issues, and a certain level of social commentary that does not end up in flippant jokes and escapist dance and music. But does these facts alone deserve the Best Film award from Kerala?