1 week Ago By Subhash K Jha
Among the post-Mohanlal/Mammootty generation of Malayalam actors, Tovino Thomas stood out. He was brash, passionate, adventurous and not afraid to fall. When Tovino did a workingclass superhero film Minnal Murali, conch shells rang in the stratosphere .
A new talent had arrived! Just a few year later, Tovino has become his own fan. His latest film is a lavish but vacuous costume drama emblazoned in narcissism (Tovino plays three roles), and splattered with selflove , with galloping horses and glistening swords impaling the excursion into the epic zone. Epics, as any filmmaker worth anything would tell you, are not deliberately made.
They just happen. ARM (Ajayante Randam Moshanam) is constructed as a largescale epic. It is like a desert park in a snowscape.
You don’t do that. Having broken the first rudimentary rule of agenda-less high-flying , the self-referential cinema fails to take off on its plastic wings. There are very few honest moments in this lengthy storytelling.
The screenplay (Sujith Nambiar) is purposely puzzling. It gives the audience an abundance of head-scratching opportunities. By the time we gallop to the “GRAND”(in capitals) climax, the storytellers have exhausted every trick in Rajamouli’s Book Of Wannabe Baahubali.
The plot is a mess of aspiring magnificence. The sets are erected in stately splendour and the high-falutin tribalism, so much favoured in South’s cinema after Kantara, assails us from everywhere. Behind all the brocade brouhaha, you sense an epic emptiness at the heart of this ambitious yarn.
Not that it is not interesting. Some of the less impetuous episodes are involving. When director Jithin Laal doesn’t oversell his product, he has more of our attention.
But most of the tri-tiered costume carousel is big on promise, truant on delivery. There are some fabulous supporting female actors like Aishwarya Rajesh and Rohini wasted. They should have known better.
This is a man’s world where women are the trigger for action sequences. There is one especially nasty police brutality act where a spunky women is pressed down when our hero shows up in snarling rescue mode. Not bechari anymore but still a tool of titillation.
Strangely the invaders (the outsiders, plundering the pristine local culture) speak Hindi,x hile the locals of course grace their tongues only with Malayalam. Even the villain played by Harish Uthaman and Basil Joseph playing the hero’s sidekick, are wasted. This is a one-man show and Tovino Thomas gives his three characters his best shot.
He is not unimpressive when the script gives him more to do than posture in the messianic mode. If only Tovino had grown a real moustache , as the first of his three characters Kunjikeli, seems to be twirling in the abyss. Much like the film.
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