Language: Malayalam
Director Nadirshah struck gold at the box-office with the comedies Amar Akbar Anthony and Kattappanayile Rithwik Roshan in the past decade. Love them or hate them, the one thing you could not accuse them of being is hollow. His new film though is running on empty.
Keshu Ee Veedinte Nathan (Keshu Is The Lord of this House) stars Dileep – who appears to have changed the spelling of his name to Dilieep, going by this film’s credits – and Urvashi. Both are known for their comedic talents. Here they play Keshu and Rathnamma, a bickering married couple living with their two children and the man’s mother (Valsala Menon) in urban Kerala.
Keshu is an eccentric old fellow who runs a driving school. Early on we are introduced to his sisters and brothers-in-law who are as wary of him as he is of them. They are not excessively fond of each other either, but bond over their demand that the family property should be partitioned. One thing leads to another and the entire extended family takes off on a rather long road trip.
If you are in the mood for some light fun, Keshu Ee Veedinte Nathan initially holds out some promise and offers a few laughs, not the least of them coming from Keshu’s absent-mindedness when he is lost in a phone conversation. The script by Sajeev Pazhoor is, however, unable to build on its ideas or successfully sustain Keshu’s strange habits as a motif through the rest of the proceedings.
It is hard to believe that this film is written by the same person who wrote Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum, but well, c’est la vie.
Packed though the cast is with actors who are capable of being incredibly funny (Jaffer Idukki is among the supporting players), Keshu Ee Veedinte Nathan gets progressively duller with each passing minute, until the crux of the storyline rolls around with a twist about 45 minutes into its running time. For 45 whole minutes until then, hardly anything happens on screen.
The fact that the film is stretched should come as no surprise considering that a warning sign was issued even before the opening credits when almost three minutes were wasted on showing a red sports car racing down city streets with the identity of the driver undisclosed.
(Spoiler alert) That’s three entire minutes of nothingness, after which the occupant of the vehicle is revealed to be Dileep – playing himself, not as Keshu with false teeth and a gray wig on his bald head. The star announces the credits through a conversation with a traffic policeman and finally addresses us, the audience, directly. Breaking the fourth wall can be a powerful cinematic device, but here the moment leads into such ordinariness that in retrospect it feels like it was slapped on as an afterthought because Keshu Ee Veedinte Nathan has little else to offer. (Spoiler alert ends)
Songs are stuck into the narrative without much thought given to their placement.
In one scene, Keshu lifts up a woman’s skirt at a clothing store without realising that it is on a real person and not a clothing rack. His character is not written as a creep, nor does the actor play him that way, so we’re actually expected to buy into his supposed absent-mindedness. Yeah, that’s meant to be funny.
Nadirshah’s problematic attitude to women was evident in his last film, the highly offensive Mera Naam Shaji. In Keshu Ee Veedinte Nathan what we get is not a running thread of contempt as much as episodes of antagonism and distrust that are, for the record, a refrain in many male-star-led commercial Malayalam films: the notion that women are intrinsically traitorous creatures who will, inevitably, ditch a man they supposedly love when a more commercially viable option comes along. In this case, an entire song is devoted to an ex-girlfriend’s treachery.
Another equally alarming element in such films surfaces in this one too: I lost count of the number of times in Keshu Ee Veedinte Nathan a man raises his hand threatening to hit a woman as if it is the most normal thing in the world.
These instances of trivialisation of women and violence towards them are casually inserted into a film that, ironically, features the protagonist demanding that his mother be treated with respect by the family. That double standard apart, the over-arching issue with Keshu Ee Veedinte Nathan is its declining momentum from the very first scene.
Some fine artistes are completely wasted here, the most disgraceful waste being that of Kerala State Award winning actor Swasika Vijay who not only has almost nothing to do apart from being leered at by her brother-in-law (Kalabhavan Shajohn); at 33, she is cast as the sister of Keshu played by 54-year-old Dileep, which I suppose pales in comparison with One earlier this year in which 24-year-old Nimisha Sajayan played the sister of a politician played by the then nearly 70-year-old. Oh well.
The thing about Keshu Ee Veedinte Nathan though is that it is neither consistently loud nor consistently soft. Even its crudeness comes only in flashes. It’s neither here nor there, it’s all over the place yet nowhere. In short, it’s meh.
Rating: 1.5 (out of 5 stars)
Keshu Ee Veedinte Nathan is streaming on Disney+Hotstar.
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, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial
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