While the established stars like Nivin Pauly and Tovino Thomas hit roadblocks with their latest offerings Malayalee From India and ARM, respectively, Malayalam cinema was not short of quality work this year.
1. All We Imagine As Light: What can we say about a film that has broken the glass ceiling twice over, first by becoming the first Malayalam film to reach audiences across India, and then by becoming the first Indian films since Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali to have grabbed global attention so unconditionally. Sight & Sound has recently named Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light as the best film of 2024. And now the garnered Golden Globe nominations!!! Indeed Kapadia’s elegiac ode to Mumbai’s desolate migrants is a wondrous pilgrimage through the heart of solitude. Dreamy and lyrical, it creates a new language for cinema where the spoken word is rendered redundant. The actors don’t speak like actors. They talk. They don’t spew lines. They say whatever they have to say, and not what we would like to hear. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are nurses in a low-maintenance hospital who are also roommates. Their life is no bed of roses for sure. The smell all around them assails us. Not that they are asking us to be a part of their lives. Still,there is no escaping the stench of a dying city, filling the empty spaces in the population’s heart with false promises and lots of noises. All We Imagine As Light is an experience that leaves us with mixed feelings. Its original fecund language of expression is incontestably exciting. But it can also be exasperating at times for the very same reason that it is exciting. The actors are all so oblivious of the camera, the film seems not to be aspiring to anything principally cinematic.
2. Aattam: A huge leap forward for the MeToo movement’s depiction on celluloid, Aattam is the celluloid equivalent of a smothered scream. It rips apart wounds that never heal—how can they, when all the wounded women get are reassurances and that “it” would never happen again—and probes masculine conceit largely through the conversations among the twelve angry theatre actors… like the jury in Basu Chatterjee’s Ek Ruka Hua Faisla, only far more casual in passing their individual judgement on the crime (for, groping is indeed a crime, lest we forget). Aattam tears through the veil of male empathy, gently exposing the hypocrisy and doublespeak underneath the we-must-give-her-justice veneer.
3. Ullozhukkuin: This is another certifiable masterpiece of Malayalam cinema. One of the many that have besieged our senses. It is a profoundly moving meditation on family obligations as opposed to personal needs. The habitually brilliant Parvathi Thiruvathu plays Anju, a salesgirl in a saree shop in the soporific town of Alappuzha, involved in a flirty erotic relationship with Rajeev (Arjun Radhakrishnan) – a bonding beyond the compromised marriage between Anju and her mother-in-law Leelamma (Urvashi). The way the two women look after the ailing Thomaskutty is a pitch-perfect portrait of compulsory kinship. Director Christo Tomy captures the sturdy gruelling solidarity between the two women tasked to take care of a man who is dying, with minimum fuss. This is not a film that favours over-punctuated emotions. What it does quietly (with a background score that chooses discretion over desecration) is to create a sublimated space for the two women to communicate a kinship beyond the traditional.
4. Manjummel Boys: The real strength of Manjummel Boys is far beyond its propensity to hurl us face-first into a tunnel of despair and then pull us back just in time. The real power of this blessedly virile and spontaneously eruptive survival drama is its deep and indelible bond with humanism. When called upon to rescue a friend from a near-fatal act of brashness, the Manjummel ‘Boys’(some of them above 30 and one of them, the most heroic of all, above 40) rise to the occasion by plunging so deep down into a pit, it feels like death. Manjummel Boys makes us believe in an afterlife. The lustrously written script, gives each of the protagonists a face, and yet huddles them in a group where they seem inseparable. The ‘Guna’ caves where the epic battle between death and human resilience unfolds, is a living character in the plot, just as much as the mysterious Marabar Caves in E. M. Forster’s A Passage To India.
5. Aadujeevitham: The Goat Life: Unquestionably, Prithvi Raj as a migrant labourer in Abu Dhabi stranded in wilderness to die, was the best male performer of 2024. Prithviraj internalizes the turmoil of a man thrown into an unimaginably horrific situation, not only for days weeks or months but for years. It is almost as if the actor forgets who he is. He becomes one with the shrunken smothered strangulated parched universe of Najib, a man so wronged you wonder, is there any justice left in this universe , especially for the poor?Battered, abused, wounded and left for dead, Najib yet conveys a certain dignity in abject adversity , a light at the end of his tunnel, which only an actor of Prithviraj’s calibre can locate and own. The actor has an exceptional grip over his character’s desperation. Director Blessy imbues the true-life survival drama with the colours of unvarnished splendour.
6. Kisikindha Kandam: In his new dark brooding film, Kiskindha Kandam, a dramatic but reined-in look at an askew family shifting dynamics, Asif Ali is exceptionally restrained in his portrait of a grieving widower, he is almost invisible. It can’t be any other way for Ajayan: his father Appu Pillai (Vijayaraghavan) dominates the family to the brink of bullying. He is at the cusp of what seems to be dementia . But he leaves Ajayan, and his newly married wife Aparna(the unfailingly spot-on Aparna Balamurali) with no option but to submit quietly to his dictatorial ways. There is something intangibly eerie about director Dinjith Ayyathan’s drama of self-deception. Writer Bahul Ramesh proves himself to be one of the most promising talents of Malayalam cinema. A sense of profound loss cuts through this ruptured symphony on domestic distress.Kiskindha Kandam is about the truth, and how we twist and bury it in our minds according to our convenience.
