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.)
