A distinctive feature of Malayalam cinema is that the actors are so non-distinctive in looks, they re-define the concept of the boys next door. The bunch of guys who hang around together in director Senna Hegde’s interesting but loose-limbed Avihitham , have nothing better to do except gossip, drink and meddle in others’ affairs.
This aimlessness suits the plot. Hegde’s fervent rusticity needs the kind of characters who peep into their neighbours’ home hoping to see something exciting. One night Prakashan (Renji Kankol) comes across a couple making out in the darkness. He jumps to conclusions about the woman’s identity, takes his tailor friend Venu (Unni Raj).
The voyeuristic moment blows up into a full fledged village scandal. It is presumed that the woman caught redhanded is a neighbour’s wife and the daughter-in-law of a “respectable” family.
How to break this family-breaking scandal? That is the question Prakashan and the village tailor Venu ask, as whispers become louder, the women-folk also join in fuelling the scandal. There is lot of nudge nudge wink wink here which is amusing when it shouldn’t be.
There is a feeling of idle gossip posturing as something more vital in this adulterous plunge into the bowel of bucolic gossip. The men in the village seem happy being Page 3 byproducts. They have condemned the transgressing woman Nirmala (Vrinda Menon) as wanton. It is only a matter of time before Nirmala is ‘exposed.’
When the moment of exposure arrives there is a feeling of anti-climax about the couple’s public shaming. Here is where I realized what is lacking in Avihitham. The film, though sincere, avoids any truly revealing moments of insight on toxic masculinity.
The idle-chatter of the village guys seems relatively innocuous , not severe and toxic like , say The Girlfriend or Bad Girl. This film is more indulgent and forgiving about men demanding a certain code of confinement from their women. They boast, banter and blabber, but the bullshit never gets toxic. Hence, the impact of the masculine bullying is at the most, mildly rebukable.
This no-harm-done feeling is, to me, disturbing. By the time the stern matriarch gives the oglers a dressing down, the film’s tone sounds dangerously self-mocking.
Avihitham is not the film on male toxicity that we had been waiting for. But as a game changer it is not unwelcome. There are lots of actors here playing self-appointed guardians of village morality, who don’t look like actors although their action suggests plenty of experience in watching films about men who get cuckolded.
