Bheemante Vazhi(Amazon Prime, Malayalam)
Starring Kunchacko Boban ,Megha Thomas ,Chemban Vinod Jose, Jinu Joseph, Naseer Sankranthi, Divya M Nair and Chinnu Chandni
Directed by Ashraf Hamza
Rating: **
This overrated undernourished comedy of manners with a hero who tells his girlfriend he likes alcohol with sex—to which she replies she likes s*x with love—is exasperating in its circumlocutory execution of what could have been an engaging, if not engrossing, tale of a colony in a small town of Kerala trying to build a road in the congested locality.
The cement mortar and stones are all in place. The urge to make something out of the raw material is sadly undeveloped. I loved some of the eccentric characters(one of whom electrocutes a dog ) . But the overall picture that emerges from individual eccentricities is not in any way, edifying , let alone inspiring.
Perhaps this is the effect that director Ashraf Hamza aimed for . The workingclass has forever been shown in Indian films as sweet and kind. These people in Bheemante Vazhi feel neither sorry for themselves nor are they shown to be enjoying their semi-insolvent existence. Also, I felt that there was an unnecessary tonal shift from normal to satirical in some crucial sequences, like the one where the film’s protagonist Bheeman(Kunchacko Boban) goes visiting an influential personality of the locality about the road, with a friend Manjali(Suraj Venjaramoodu, the husband in The Great Indian Kitchen) and Manjali gets roundly insulted by the influential personality.
Probably amusing on paper, the episode such as the above,just doesn’t elicit any kind of amusement on screen. Like the road which the characters try to build, the narrative seems to be getting nowhere after a point. The people in the road construction mode, just keep growing increasingly intolerant and hence intolerable. The hero Bheeman’s mother(Shiny Sarah) whose fractured leg triggers off the ‘road trip’ (the sequence where she is put on a chair and taken to a car on the nearest road in the pouring rain , is my favourite) seems to be milking her accident to be pampered.No cine-Maa, this.
Everyone is imperfect , and like perfection, imperfection too gets boring after a point.By the time Bheemante Vazhi reaches its climax it doesn’t know what to do with its cauldron of quirky characters. So they throw the villain’s wife into the ditch. Then they throw the villain into it. You fear the plot too will land in the same ditch. Providentially the film saves itself from doom by just being able to laugh at the characters without ridiculing them.
