Language: Malayalam
Certainly, it is odd to call a thriller ‘charming’, an adjective usually plonked alongside the romance side of genres. But Operation Java, which had a theatrical release in Kerala in February this year, now streaming on Zee5, breaks with conventions of the thriller genre so easily, so effortlessly, it takes you a while to reorient yourself to figure out exactly what kind of movie you are actually watching?
At the heart of it are two friends Antony George (Balu Varghese) and Vinay Dasan (Lukman Avaran). Both have completed their B-Tech, given a slew of mug-up-spit-up examinations, and yet, like the many flailing engineering educated youth in the oversaturated job market, find themselves unemployed or underemployed. They want a stable job, worthy of the decades of pain endured of searing sentences and concepts into their memory. This job is both to secure oneself financially and emotionally. To prove to others that they have a worth, and to prove to oneself that the worth they once imagined for themselves can be realised.
They are certainly intelligent, intuitive, and capable of using their knowledge of technology and metadata analysis to do good, do better. It’s only a matter of being recognized for the same. They find an excuse around the controversy of Premem’s piracy. The Cyber Cell of Kochi had written off the case because their suspect was in New Zealand where piracy isn’t illegal. But both Antony and Vinay walk into their office noting with evidence that the original illegal stream came not from New Zealand but Kerala.
Thus begins the first of three big chases throughout the 2.5-hour movie. The chase is always meandering, swerving from one suspect to the next to the next. The chase often threads itself across more than 5 suspects, and so each suspect is visited, interrogated, and used to mine next steps. The first victory of the film, then, is that this motion never feels tiring or repetitive. Each suspect visited feels like the last suspect and when they get further information, the next suspect feels like the last suspect. It’s tightly written to produce doubt at every step, packed into economic sequences with clear eyed editing, fluid cinematography and a sledgehammer-like tense background score.
Antony has a love track that foregrounds the narrative (with the only looming female presence in the film), while Vinay has a tragic family story which gets seeded in the beginning to be masterfully unraveled towards the end. It’s the kind of logical, economic writing that you know was organized and discussed on a white board. The camera sometimes dances, showing its flexibility, but its distracting allure is limited to the scenes where not much is happening — like the 360-degree tracking shot when Antony and Vijay are introduced to the entire cyber cell, with the camera, seemingly moving through small crevices in the latticework to close its dance-loop.
There are two other investigations — each more serious than the previous one, first financial scams, then murder. The progression of crimes too is intentional. It begins with piracy which hurts the moneyed in their pockets. The discussion here isn’t about innocent people cheated off their craft and money, but about how the Malayalam industry might have colluded to make sure Premam doesn’t break Drishyam’s record. The second crime is scamming innocent, working class people out of their money. The third crime is scamming innocent people out of their lives. Antony and Vinay, you hope, will become a staple at the cyber cell. For the sake of Antony’s mother who has blabbered through the whole town that her son is hired by the government (inflating his salary). For the sake of Antony who needs a permanent job to prove to his lover’s father that he can provide a secure future. For the sake of Antony who is growing disillusioned with ability.
In between there are smaller investigations — like the couple whose wife’s face was pasted on a pornographic clip sailing through the gurgling circulatory system of the internet, like the old man who gave an OTP to a stranger and lost 60,000, like an old lady who lost her debit card on which she also wrote her pin, like the young guy who wrote on Instagram that he and his mother would be away in Goa while someone licked his house clean of valuables. There are strange moments of comedy — an old man has a password 123456, and in a few scenes we have a young boy’s password as motherfucker123. If the generation gap is anything, it is this.
In between these smaller investigations and the buddy-story, the movie plots along, with each new investigation feeling like part of an anthology, with seemingly very little except for the main players connecting them. Even so, the film has an emotional continuity that doesn’t let the long-running time feel too heavy, or the disparateness of the story feel unwieldy.
Operation Java, though, isn’t the smartest thriller around. The clues that help crack a case come as intuitions as Facebook results are scrolling, or as an arbitrary photo’s blurred background is investigated. It certainly isn’t the kind of thriller that you could crack as a viewer because often the main culprit is introduced with the crime — there is little lead up or let down. In that sense, this film flouts the thriller genre spectacularly, like a Jagga Jasoos but more rooted. (Despite Zee5’s spectacularly inadequate subtitling, where T. Nagar becomes Tea Nagar, and songs remain unsubtitled.)
With a lot of Malayalam cinema, at least the ones rooted so deeply in the world they represent, it takes a few minutes, maybe more, to settle in. They throw you as a viewer into a situation in the same, if not similar way they throw a character into a situation — without priming or providing too much. It can get a little overwhelming as details are spewed with an alarming casualness — you don’t know which detail will develop into the story and while will be left by the wayside. You’re just there for the ride.
Rating: 4 (out of 5 stars)
from Firstpost Bollywood Latest News https://ift.tt/3ypjqUe
No comments:
Post a Comment