Language: Malayalam
No single life event brings out the best and worst in families in quite the way marriages and deaths do. This is why wedding and funeral films are such thriving genres worldwide.
Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Ee.Ma.Yau (short for Eesho Mariyam Yauseppu, that is, Jesus Mary Joseph) is a brilliant recent example of the latter from Malayalam cinema. Last year’s Paapam Cheyyathavar Kalleriyatte (Those Who Have Not Sinned May Cast Stones) directed by Shambhu Purushothaman belongs to the former variety – it was an amusing and often insightful critique of Malayali Christian society, but its sense of humour was drowned out by noise along with too many instances of tacky writing and production design.
Thinkalazhcha Nishchayam (The Engagement is on Monday) is about the days preceding an actual wedding ceremony in a family in rural Kerala. The narrative covers the pennu kaanal (the practice of the boy coming to see the girl with his family members in an arranged marriage) and the brief stretch of time leading up to the betrothal, with all the attendant peculiarities in a patriarchal society dominated by emigrants and characterised by gender segregation.
Thinkalazhcha Nishchayam was premiered earlier this year at the International Film Festival of Kerala, and at the recently announced Kerala State Awards, won the Second Prize in the Best Film category in addition to the Best Story trophy.
The prologue is the only part of Thinkalazhcha Nishchayam captured entirely in a long shot. Although vastly different in tone and look from the rest of the film, it has multiple connections to the main narrative, so pay close attention to it.
Cut to Lalitha and Vijayan’s home, a crummy edifice housing relationships on a cusp between fragile and enduring. An NRI from the Middle East comes to ‘see’ their daughter Suja. When he okays the match, no one asks her what she wants. What follows is the chaos and tension involved in preparations for an engagement, with the politics simmering in the extended family for days, weeks, even years, finally boiling over in one furious climax.
The beauty of the best of the Malayalam New New Wave is that it is going deeper and deeper into the roots of Malayali culture with each passing year, examining the state’s three major religious groups with the cynicism that religion deserves, travelling further and further into our homes, into unexplored regions, into our beliefs and into sub-sets of larger communities whose stories have already been told.
If Angamaly Diaries (2017) was set among pork traders and thugs in Christian-dominated Angamaly, Sudani from Nigeria(2018) was a portrait of Muslims in Malappuram district’s football-crazed community, and this year’s The Great Indian Kitchen situated itself in the adukkala (kitchen) and bedroom of a Hindu household.
Thinkalazhcha Nishchayamis located in Kanhangad in north Kerala’s Kasaragod district. This is the birthplace of the film’s half Kannadiga, half Malayali director Senna Hegde who brings an insider’s eye to his storytelling. The distinct Malayalam accent of the local people may not be distinguishable from any other for viewers outside the state who are not aware of the spectrum of tonalities among Malayalam speakers, but for those who know, it is a delight and, I must add, often not easily decipherable even if you know Malayalam.
The loveliness of this film lies in the way it mines cultural and social specifics to tell a universal story –of flawed human beings with shades of gray, of a home where a husband/father’s whims, frustrations and outbursts of temper determine the mood, a home where children live dual lives because they are terrified of the patriarch, where a woman may be an enabler of patriarchy yet resent it, of normalised male aggression and women’s lack of agency, of sibling rivalries and bitterness that has festered down generations.
This is the story of Every Family as much as it is Lalitha and Vijay’s family. The screenplay pays equal attention to almost every member of this massive ensemble of characters played by an astonishingly convincing cast, such that each one of them and their sub-plots remain memorable. Even characters who appear for a few minutes or seconds are played by actors blessed with ridiculously good comic timing – in an early scene in which a character falls off a wall, I fell off my chair laughing at the brief conversation that ensues.
It is hard to pick one artiste over the other here, but I confess to a soft spot for Anagha Narayanan in the role of Suja, Ajisha Prabhakaran as the mother Lalitha, Manoj K.U. as the combustible father Vijayan, and most of all, Unnimaya Nalappadam as Surabhi, the other daughter whose choice of spouse has not yet been forgiven by a section of the family.
The acting and direction are top notch for the most part, which is why when Thinkalazhcha Nishchayam slips up, the slip is glaring.
A rank stranger intrudes on the family during a scene of bedlam. The writing of this over-the-top character is a strangely amateurish contrast to the rest of the film. She comes across as a bizarre conception of what a cool, independent-minded young woman would be. The artiste’s exaggerated, shoddy acting makes matters worse.
Earlier, there is a seconds-long scene in which a character’s exclamation appears to have been included as an acknowledgement of the presence of a small Christian minority in this district with a Hindu majority and a huge Muslim population. Unfortunately, the actor who plays that tiny part cannot pull it off, and that moment jars. The nod to the omni-presence of Bengalis and north Indians among manual workers in Kerala is well done though.
I found the writing of Suja’s proposed fiancé somewhat trite. It is well-known that the male partner’s opinions are given priority over the woman’s in arranged marriages in conservative Indian families, but Thinkalazhcha Nishchayam makes it too easy for the audience to side with Suja and her choices because of this fellow’s weirdness. It would have been a far greater writing challenge to keep us in her corner and against these regressive practices if this man was a regular, good-looking patriarchal jerk rather than the caricature he is reduced to. Sure the first scene with him and Suja is funny and credible, but the ending gives him short shrift although it is only fair to point out that she has treated him unfairly.
Fortunately for Thinkalazhcha Nishchayam, the memory of it that lingers long after the last credit has rolled of the screen is its wonderful comedic vein (a letter written by Suja is a killer), enjoyable music, its meticulous and detailed observations of both Kanhangad and family, and the largely excellent acting.
Sreeraj Raveendran, who co-wrote the film with Hegde, is also the cinematographer. He makes the architecture of the house in which the proceedings take place as important to the film as the characters themselves.
Malayalam cinema has had a splendid year already. Thinkalazhcha Nishchayam, warts and all, does the Malayalam film industry proud with its hilarious betrothal-eve pandemonium, that is as rooted and as universal as cinema can get.
Rating:3.5 (out of 5 stars)
Thinkalazhcha Nishchayam is streaming on SonyLIV
(Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad)
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