Padavettu movie review: Nivin Pauly and the case of the vague wanderings

Cast: Nivin Pauly, Aditi Balan, Remya Suresh, Shammi Thilakan, Sudheesh, Shine Tom Chacko, Indrans, Sunny Wayne, Vijayaraghavan

Director: Liju Krishna

Language: Malayalam

Barring that terrible misadventure called Mikhael in 2019, it’sbeen clearfor several years that Nivin Pauly wants to go beyond the tried and tested. It has also been clear for a while now that he is struggling with his instincts for the right writing married to the right director. The struggle continues with writer-director Liju Krishna’s Padavettu (Battle), that has an interesting core concept but flails about while expanding on it.

Nivin plays Padavettu’s Ravi, a young man in Kerala’s Maloor village whose sports career was cut short by a tragedy, after which he withdrew into himself. This ex-athlete who can no longer run lives with his aunt Pushpa (Remya Suresh) in a house falling apart at the seams. Their application for a government loan to renovate the structure has been repeatedly rejected. One factor going against them is that Ravi stays unemployed out of choice. He lazes around at home, lifting himself out of his inertia only to referee cricket matches played by local youth and to deliver milk from the cow they own to an establishment where Shyma (Aditi Balan) works.

Meanwhile, Pushpa labours day and night to keep their home running. Enter: the netav Kuyyali (Shammi Thilakan) who hatches deceptive welfare schemes to control the lands and the people of Maloor and its surroundings, with the long-term goal of monopolising the sale of their produce. After repairing Ravi and Pushpa’s house gratis, he begins treating them as his vassals and their property as his fiefdom.

In the first half, Ravi and Kuyyali’s intersecting strands are substantial, and the detailing in the portrayal of Maloor’s people – a drunken Govindhan (Sudheesh) on his personal loudspeaker, an eternally suspicious Mohanan (Shine Tom Chacko) – give Padavettu colour and life. Soon though, the film wanders, making abortive attempts at being philosophical and metaphorical.

Two elements stand out through all this: the music and cinematography.

Govind Vasantha’s songs and background score blend earthiness with an indefinable ethereal air. The instrumentation, the inclusion of the sounds of nature and human activity, the choice of voices, all combine to deliver a goosebump-inducing experience. It is especially exciting to hear C.J. Kuttappan’s magical singing simultaneously soaring up to the heavens and hugging the soil on which the characters stand. Sound designer/editor Renganaath Ravee’s work on this film is a perfect accompaniment to the music. That said, the soundtrack has a disappointingly limited female presence, mirroring the limited presence of women in the film itself.

Deepak D. Menon has rolled outa parade of painterly portraits of the countryside in Padavettu. Thatlong shot of Nivin against a clear skyline with a massive boulder outlined against the horizon should be framed for museum display. The beautiful aerial views of the landscape running alongside the opening credits and surfacing periodically till the end reminded me of Sujith Lal’s camerawork in the climactic moments of Jeeva K.J.’s Richter Scale 7.6, a film that was on my mind as I watched this one because it too had so memorably used Kuttappan’s voice and was about the displacement of indigenous peoples in the name of development.

Great camerawork and music require scripts on which to pin themselves. Sadly, the writing of Padavettu is too defused to serve this purpose. The first half is solid, but leads into a second half clouded by mixed metaphors and hazy philosophising, among other things. The imagery of the hunter playing in the background while Kuyyali preys on Maloor’s innocents in the foreground is pretentious and confused.

Characters that were introduced with gusto implying that they would play a crucial role in the proceedings later disappear. There’s Sunny Wayne, for one, in a brief, impactful but ultimately irrelevant appearance. Worse is the way Aditi Balan is reduced to being nothing more than the delicate-looking, pretty object of Ravi’s affection who barely speaks.

Ravi’s relationship with Mohanan is symbolic of what humans can achieve if theyunite against destructive forces, but when combined with the staged representation of hunting, it adds to the film’s lack of clarity. I concede that the scene with the wild boar and the two men offers a bit of an adrenaline rush, but what’s the point if it is not all sewn into a cohesive whole?

At one point it looked like the film would delve into Ravi’s mental state, especially in a poignant scene with a friend (Vijayaraghavan), but the writer skims over the surface of Ravi’s concerns and soon steers away from them. This is a contrast to the sensitivity and depth with which the Malayalam New New Wave has been treating mental health in recent years, most expansively perhaps in Kumbalangi Nights and #Home.

Nivin is at his best when Ravi confides his fears to his friend. Elsewhere, he is adequate, like the rest of the cast. The exception is Remya Suresh who is a fireball in the film. It’s odd though that such a young woman has been cast as Ravi’s aunt. A quick Net search reveals that she’s younger than Nivin. Give her more roles but more age-appropriate roles, please.

Padavettu features scenes of domestic violence in its broadest sense as not only being confined to spouses and partners, but glosses over that theme. (Spoilers in this paragraph) Ravi strikes Pushpa repeatedly, she is hurt and furious, but once he becomes proactive against Kuyyali, she seems to completely forget the mistreatment. It’s not that women do not behave thus in reality, but that the film itself appears to have forgotten Ravi’s cruelty towards her by then. This is why a Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey is important despite all its flaws – because it’s so uncommon for Malayalam cinema to condemn domestic violence outright.

(Spoilers in this paragraph) And no, the visuals of Pushpa joining Ravi in that climactic scene of mob action against the villains is not compensation. If anything, closing on Pushpa standing facing the camera next to Ravi alongside a group of like-minded men serves to emphasise the fact that she is the only woman there, and that there are precisely two identifiable women characters in the entire film, of which one has faded away by then.

Liju Krishna has taken on more than he can handle within the space of this film. In trying to say too much, Padavettu ends up being vague when it’s not rubbing its messaging in our faces.

Rating: 2.5 (out of 5 stars) 

Padavettu is streaming on Netflix

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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