First Take | In a week of a mixed bag Dear Friend leaves you shattered with its equanimity

Betrayal is a lot like a terminal illness. There is no point in talking about it. The more you do, the more bitterly ravaged it leaves you. Betrayal is best left to itself. It is, to some like me, a crime worse than physical violation. Time heals the damage to the body. What about the heart?

The look that I saw in the character Jannat’s eyes at the end of Vineeth Kumar’s Dear Friend would stay with me forever. It said so much that words cannot. Not that Dear Friend is short of words. It cannot be. With five flat-mates sharing space, thoughts, dreams, peeves and, yes, a pet too, words flow.

And yet Dear Friend is a very quiet film. Quiet and non-judgemental, even when one of the friends just leaves, quits, exits. Without prior notice. The friends, two of whom Jannat (Darshana Rajendran)and Arjun (Arjun Lal) are a couple, find their own way of dealing with the betrayal. Writers (Sharfu, Suhas, Arjun Lal) and director Vineeth Kumar refrain from probing into the raw wounds. It is a remarkably dry-eyed film. Where there is so much room for drama and hysteria, Vineeth Kumar chooses to internalize the hurt and wounded pride.

This is one of the most restrained projections of hurt and betrayal I have seen, and also one of the most dispassionate There is a wonderful lengthy sequence with the vanished friend’s mother where the four friends find out the truth about the filth of the fifth. The mother doesn’t shed a single tear. These are emotions buried too deep for tears.

Most critics have missed the point when they find the ending disappointing. What they see as a technical flaw is actually a manifestation of the four friends’ feelings. It is not the film’s ending that’s disappointing. It is the journey in search of the missing friends that is disappointing. It’s a classic case of missing the forest for the trees.

When the friend Vinod flies away from the coop, I expected an existential explanation for his disappearance. Here is where Dear Friend departs from all expectations. His disappearance has a far less complicated explanation (hint: money) than we hope for. Dear Friend is a film that refuses to pander to our expectations. It opts to go the way it wants to. And if we choose to take it the wrong way, it is our failing.

This is also a remarkable ensemble of exceptionally talented actors at work here, not only Tovino Thomas who today is one of the most interesting actors in India, but also Darshana Rajendran, Arjun Lal, Arjun Radhakrishnan (the angriest of the betrayed bunch of buddies) and Basil Joseph (who directed Tovino in the global hit Minnal Murali).

There is a Minnal Murali moment at the start of Dear Friend when Tovino is made to dress up like Superman by his friends on his birthday. It’s a moment that comes back to haunt the characters. Betrayal, you see, has so many indescribable offshoots. Dear Friend leaves you shattered with its equanimity and how the concept of betrayal really works when you are feelings the most vulnerable.

Rajeev Ravi’s Kuttavum Shikshayum is perhaps the most underrated film of the year so far. It has left our critics underwhelmed for the very reasons that make this real-life cops-and-crime story so extraordinary. It is based on a real-life jewellery robbery that took place in 2015 in the Kasragod district of Kerala. A five-member team of cops led by Sajan Philip (Asif Ali) is sent to an indeterminate North Indian village to nab the migrant criminals.

The point-blank police procedural eschews all thrills. More importantly, Kuttavum Shikshayum avoids all frills. We get to know very little about the cops’ life, and a lot more about how these five men look out for one another during times of crisis. And this is certainly a time of acute crisis, as the five Malayalam-speaking men head for a hostile alien territory that is as welcoming as a Jew rock band at a Berlin music festival.

Rajeev Ravi takes immense care in projecting the Malayali police squad as strangers in a crime-infested hostile town of North India. But I have a problem with the film’s linguistic aspirations. The locals in the North Indian village accent sport what seems to be a Bihari-Uttar Pradesh accent. But we are given to understand that this is happening somewhere in Rajasthan. Also, the actors portraying the North Indian police speak their lines in a stilted self-conscious Hindi. I am not sure if they are played by North Indian actors.

Having said this, the larger picture in Kuttavum Shikshayum tells another all-pervasive story. It is a film that has no patience with humbug. Not one frame is designed to invite viewership. This time Rajeev Ravi tells the story he wants to without looking anxiously over the shoulder to see if we are looking. The five Keralite cops in a strange sinister dangerous village actually play out the North-South divide as a toned-down tussle between civil(South Indian) law enforcers and the uncouth primitive(North Indian) villagers who as migrants come to the Dravidian purity to pollute it.

Luckily for us, the script plays out at a rational low-key level even when propounding cultural stereotypes. The five principal performers are constantly married to the ominous mood. Accordingly, the narrative never loses its grip over the grammar of a grim harvest during the time of tremendous stock-taking.

Asif Ali, seen recently as the kidnapped star in Innale Vare, plays his part as a fractured but well-meaning cop. Alencier Ley Lopez as the seniormost member of the surgical squad is brilliant too, and the way he mentors and protects a junior in the team at the risk of losing his own job, is the most emotional strand you will find in this dry-eyed flab-free frill-free thriller that abjures dramatic thrills to adopt a measured, straight tone of narration that is both unwaveringly unsettling and untried.

While Kuttavum Shikshayum is not really reliant on any one actor for its impact, were it not for the wonderful Fahadh Faasil, what would Rajeev Ravi’s debut film Annayum Rasoolam be? The kind of implosive energy that the actor brings to his role of an obsessive, unrelenting lover (if the film was made today, he would be called a stalker) transports the sneaky romance to the stratosphere of extra-specialness. This extraordinary level of commitment, seen in the film's hero Rasool, is fluently transposed to the narrative, which never falters even as Rasool's passion gathers momentum.This is a man in love, who ferries every single day from Kochi so that he can be on the boat with the girl of his dreams Anna (Andreah Jeremiah), as she travels home. The ritual becomes so rigid that the other passengers on the boat begin to recognise Rasool.

'Don't you have a job?' an elderly lady asks.

Rasool is not embarrassed. He is, after all, in love. The narrative unfolds through the voice of Rasool's friend Ashley (Sunny Wayne). The characterisation of Rasool's friends is in a league of their own. They are committed, quirky and querulous. They gave Rasool sound advice: 'Why do you want to fall in love with a girl, whom you follow every day on a boat and who doesn't even look at you?'

Fahadh Faasil, that magician of an actor, expresses Rasool's earnest feelings of love with a blend of rhapsody and reality. He knows he is on slippery ground, especially because of their differing religious beliefs. But he also knows that if loses Anna, he loses his chance to be happy in love. He would rather take the chance.

Like all the great love stories, Annayum Rasoolam has a tragic end. But not before we are transported into a world of furtive glances and hurried touches. Director Rajeev Ravi gives a languorous feel to those moments between Rasool and Anna as he catches her in her workplace (a sari shop), on the boat, in the church and at home.

By the time Rasol's romantic dreams have had their fill, the film is so suffused with the aura of love and 'foreverness' that you pray it won't take the tragic route. Alas, what is a good love story without a tragic finale? And what is a routine romance without Fahadh Faasil to uplift its mood from the mundane to the meditative and melancholic?

Rajeev Ravi, who is a first-rate cinematographer, leaves the luminous lensing to Madhu Neelakandan, who captures the working class rhythm of romance with the same fluency and anxiety as Mani Ratnam's Alai Payuthey. It's a dream-like world inhabited by sweaty commuters and idlers, who pick fights because they have nothing better to do.

Vivek Athreya’s Telugu dud Ante Sundaraniki! is so awful that it left me physically sick at the end, not only because it is aesthetically improper. As a matter of fact, this is a snazzily mounted film with plenty of vibrant colours and excessive zeal to match.

No. The problem lies elsewhere. Writer-director is constantly trying to create powder-puff magic, zigzagging fashionably through a silly but unnecessarily tangled labyrinth. We meet Nani and Nazriya Nazim trying to make ‘n’s meet in a plot that is constantly sleep-deprived.

After a point, I couldn’t figure out the need for so much restlessness and in the plot, as though the screenplay was written by a 6-year-old/young. No one behaves like an adult in this adult-rated comedy. The hero’s grandmother says nothing, she just plays the Rudraveena loudly, probably hoping that the silly annoying youngsters in the film would acquire some sense in their chaotic universe.

The hero’s father is constantly hyperventilating from the time his son was hoodwinked into believing he was going to play Chiranjeevi Junior in a film that was just a scam.Just like Ante Sundaraniki!. The absurd goings-on spin a wacky web where the wit is wasted in a pointless plot about a loser who wants to go to America to pursue his dreams and a semi-loser who wants to accompany him. This is what I gathered to be the core of the plot.

Then I realized something really sorrowful about this comedy: it has no core. Ante Sundaraniki! seems to be an improvised script. As the narrative lumbered forward new ideas, evidently funny on paper, were pushed into the plot. Sadly, even the actors don’t seem to be genuinely enthused by the amateurish material. It’s like sinking your teeth into undercooked meat.

Even more sadly Nani and Naziya Nazim seem to share no comicstry. Can’t blame them, when the comic timing depends on jokes about impotence and unwanted pregnancy. Yuck.

I never followed the sinfully successful Downtown Abbey series, though now after seeing the film version of the series, I wish I had.

There are so many unforgettable characters in this outstanding depiction of British mores circa 1920s when aristocracy ruled the social structure and being rich and snobbish was not considered improper. Into this world of aerated aristocracy, the series’ creator Julian Fellowes has introduced numerous characters, so many and so vivid, each comes to us with a sumptuous history in this elegant and imperious saga of a crumbling culture held together by an immensely gratifying sense of pride at what was and what is.

I thought a film version of something so vast and sprawling would be impossible. But writer Julian Fellowes has proved me wrong twice over. The first feature film based on the series was released in 2018. Downtown Abbey A New Era is an independent free-flowing high-flying achievement with impeccable credentials and an even more persuasive plot than the first film.

I have to confess that it was impossible for me to keep track of all the actors in this brilliant updated version of the enthralling series. In just over two hours the polished narrative opens up a vibrant and robust vista of aristocratic men and women, and their househelp who are like the chorus in a Greek play.

While there are paternity and homosexual issues in the fringes, the main attraction this time is a British film crew that descends on Downtown Abbey to shoot a silent film. What follows is at once funny and heartbreaking, revealing a star-struck side to British aristocracy, and at the same time indicative of the socio-cultural upheavals in England in the post-World War 1 scenario when many of the sacred cows were demolished.

In this cauldron of cultural confusions, the film crew seems to represent a strange turning point in the relationship between the British upper class and the working class. The film crew’s presence at the Downtown Abbey reminded me of The Crown where a film crew makes itself comfortable in the royal family.

Sometimes one just has to surrender to the flow of history. This is what Downtown Abbey says in such a gently undulating language filled with delicate punctuation marks and poise that is at once gratifying and self-mocking.

In the midst of the hectic disruptive shooting, the silent era in cinema ends. The shooting crew at the Downtown Abbey are asked to convert to talkies. The film-within-film’s heroine Myrna Dalgleish (Laura Haddock)'s confusion at suddenly having a voice on screen and her inability to cope with the change, are identifiable rumblings of reconstruction which are used with judicious humour and subtle sensitivity, you feel for all those who are unable to cope with the end of an era and the beginning of a new phase in cultural history.

Every performer, big or small, contributes to making Downtown Abbey: A New Era a new yet familiar experience flush with funds of warmth humour and even a hint of sadness somewhere underneath all the posturing.

When the magnificent Maggie Smith, the matriarch of the family is told that the actors in the film being shot in their home cannot be heard on screen, she quips, “It would be even better of they cannot be seen.” If only she could see Downtown Abbey.

Once upon a time, Santosh Sivan was an accomplished cinematographer. He then decided to direct films. Why do cinematographers make such inept filmmakers? The more brilliant they are, the harder they fall. One of the country’s most brilliant cinematographers Binod Pradhan directed something called Wedding Pullav which put me off both weddings and pulao dishes. Another ace-cameraman Anil Mehta directed Aaja Nachle; nothing was heard of his directorial ambitions thereafter. Another compelling cameraman Ravi Chandran caved in as a director in Bhramam a very poor Malayalam remake of Andhadhun for which the original director Sriram Raghavan should have been sued. Santosh Sivan outdoes all his peers from the province of lens-peering. His directorial disaster Jack N Jill should never have been made, It’s a blot in Sivan’s distinguished career that he would find impossible to live down unless he wants to plead temporary insanity. Or maybe an April Fool’s joke a couple of months late? So what is Jack N Jill about? It is about artificial intelligence. I have to concede it is an extremely artificial endeavour with not one moment seeming authentic. As for intelligence, the quality is gravely lacking in the treatment. Santosh Sivan, the waylaid director, treats every scene in Jack ‘N’Jill as an extended joke. The purported laughter is lost in translation as the film’s hero Keshu (Kalidas Jayaram, the promising young actor doesn’t deserve this) an expert in robotics return to his ancestral village in Kerala with a robot-sidekick, played by Soubhin Sahir who is usually a competent performer. Here Soubhin is a casualty of the film’s fetid fetish for flinging a futuristic farce into our flushed faces. It is horrific to watch a bad film involving a talented cast and crew. But it is even worse when all involved with the show think they are creating something pathbreaking when all they are doing is creating a mess. See this film, and you will know what I mean. Santosh Sivan has committed a crime against humanity. Jack ‘N’ Jill reeks of smugness and a misplaced attitude of superiority about the creative team’s skill. There are oddball characters littering the frames including a foreigner named Charlotte (probably played by a Kochi tourist looking for some fast bucks) who breaks into songs and dances with the eagerness of a monkey being offers peanuts. I certainly hope she was offered more than mere peanuts. The worst offence created by this objectionable quick-money scheme is what the talented actress Manju Warrier is made to do. She plays a woman who has lost her memory and whose brain is redesigned for artificial intelligence. My sympathies for Ms Warrier. Everyone makes mistakes. But this film is a massive blunder. Santosh Sivan should be banned from directing a film for the next five years.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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