Roy is an exasperating excursion into a cerebral chaos

Sunil Ibrahim’s Malayalam film Roy, now streaming on SonyLIV is the kind of seemingly somber drama that purports to say a lot, but ends up saying nothing. A section of the audience gets taken in by such atmospherically pressurized films, heavily redolent of a drama that it has no intellectual access to…Not unless all the heavy breathing and a background score that perpetually begins on a blithe note and ends on an ominous note,impresses you enough to call this pretentious drama a winner.

The eponymous Roy is played by a very fine actor Suraj Venjaranmoodu, whom we didn’t pay much attention to in that great film The Great Indian Kitchen, as feminist dramas normally don’t allow us to look at male characters as anything but a tool of misogyny. I mean, who noticed Kulbhushan Kharbanda in Arth?

In Roy, Suraj Venjaranmoodu takes centestage and he doesn’t disappoint even when the screenplay does a slow dance of death over film’s grave tone. Suraj, we are told(not that we care) suffers from rare sleeping disorder whereby dreams and reality make equal sense, or no sense at all.

His wife Teena (Sija Rose) is one of those absentee wives who is always bustling with an ersatz energy. I had an editor once who pretended to be constantly talking into three or four landline phones, just to look busy. Teena reminded me of her.

To my relief, she soon disappeared from the plot, kidnapped or dead, I won’t say. Find out on your own if you like, though I won’t advise it. Teena is helping a well-known writer with his biography. Her disappearance has to do with revelations in the biography that may not suit some people.

Books and literary references rare their rarefied head constantly. Roy is one of those films that believes people who read books especially with spectacles on, are to be taken seriously. The first time when Roy sees Teena at a doctor’s clinic he is reading Nicole Krauss’ The History Of Love. This impresses Teena to no end. She immediately starts google-stalking Roy, trying to dig up information about his past.

She awakens. We yawn. Their relationship has a strangely sterile inert core, as though the stars had conspired to make them as dull for one another as possible. Dull and uninteresting. I thought of focusing on the suspense aspect of the plot where some interest is created when Shine Tom Chacko one of the more interesting Malayalam actors today, shows up as an investigating cop. Chacko seems to have worked on his character, something that no other actor seems to have bothered with.

The lack of involvement of the players is very unusual in Malayalam cinema, especially one that has pretensions to a life beyond what we see. But what lies beneath in Roy is just lies. Skip this pretentious homage to man who doesn’t know his wife beyond what she tells him.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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