Over the last five years, I have realized one thing: Basil Joseph could have played Minnal Murli better than Tovino Thomas. Basil has a certain inbuilt insouciance about him, the ability to see through life, and how genuinely ridiculous it can be.
In Maranamaas, which Tovino has co-produced, Basil is a self-appointed ‘cool dude’: dyed hair, preposterous clothes with an attitude to match. Luke thinks he has all the answers when, in fact, he is clueless about the questions themselves. His neighbours are annoyed by his busybody gimmicks and have crowd-funded his migration.
When we first meet him his girlfriend Jessie (Anishma Anilkumar) has decided to leave Luke: she can’t take his strutting and preening anymore. How is Jessie to know that she would soon be in a bus with a dead man who she has accidently killed when he tried to molest her.
The dead man Kurup (Puliyanam Poulose) is a disgrace to old age: the repulsive man leers at and paws any woman of any age. I don’t mean to sound like a spoilsport, but it is rather dismaying that a character like Kurup, who deserves to be locked away for a lifetime, is supposed to be funny. Then again, Malayalam cinema has always demolished holy cows.
Also meant for comic consumption is a straitlaced serial killer, SK (Rajesh Madhavan, priceless), who likes to brutally slay old men and stuff their mouths bananas.
The kela instinct, so to speak.
Also on a droll stroll is a cop, Ajay (Baby Anthony), whose pet dog is missing. We are supposed to feel for him, but the narrative never lets us get close to the characters. Initially, the writing seems to have a fairly strong grip on these aberrant characters, but the comedy soon slides into a free-for-all, with the writers second-guessing audiences’ expectations and coming up with situations that get progressively befuddled and far from amusing.
That said, there is ample evidence of intended ingenuity in Maranamaas, especially in the way the characters respond to the presence of a dead character in their midst. What goes wrong, irreparably so, is the constant pursuit of irreverent laughter, which kills the tone of normalcy. It’s like you are forever dressing up for an imaginary party.
For instance, Jessie’s grandmother (Kudassanad Kanakam) is the kind of amplified liberal who encourages Jessie to go out at odd hours but insists she carries pepper spray.
After a point, the spray is the most peppery part of the plot. The storytelling hits the bland gland too often, and the climax in a garbage locality is so contrived it feels like the laughter is being served by rote rather by write.
It is baffling how the writers let the comic strain run wild after a while, thereby negating whatever advantage the laughs might have procured in the initial stages of the plot progression.
