Celebrating the end of inaneness in Malayalam cinema

Warning: The following article possibly is of interest to only Keralites or people interested in cinema. If you are a Malayali who loves cinema, read on and hopefully you will nod along in agreement!

Last night I saw what I consider to be the first good film to come out of popular malayalam cinema after probably two decades! Hopefully "Spirit", by Ranjith with Mohanlal as the lead actor, heralds the demise of an era best forgotten by any self-respecting Keralite - an era dominated by films with cliched scenes with inane conversations that somehow stumble along to a familiar climax like a drunk on his way home.

Even when dealing with unusual themes, in the typical Indian film, characters are usually sketched out rather two-dimensionally. Introductions to characters are standard across genres (or what passes for different genres in the Indian film industry). In the standard malayalam film we are introduced to the hero waking up in his home. Typical domestic scenes follow where you are introduced to his mother, his sister/ brother, his father and the woman of his dreams. Oh, and lest we forget, there would a sidekick or two as well. The order would vary, but the characters from one film could walk into another and start reeling off their lines without skipping a beat. Considering that is how Indian films are often made, perhaps that isn't really surprising. Actors usually juggle 2-3 films and minor actors do even 5-6 or more. Scenes usually are wrapped after a single take or two. So it was refreshing to see a very different aesthetic yesterday. The director Ranjith is no auteur, nor does he have any pretensions of one! But he has, in "Spirit" (pun intended), possibly come closest to resembling Padmarajan's directorial style. In some ways "Spirit" reminded me of malayalam cinema from the 1980s, which many people consider its epoch in recent memory and when film was a medium that dealt boldly with social issues. But even then, characters in most films were tired cliches. Padmarajan was possibly the only director who avoided this.

The first 60 mins or so of "Spirit" (Indian films usually are 130 min+) moved along quite rapidly and avoided the usual Indian cliches. There was no epic cast. No character was introduced in a typical fashion - barring one (who is the focus of the second half) and who, in my opinion, is the weak link in the script and by extension, of the whole film. If it weren't for that one actor and his rather cliched character, I'd have rated the script and the movie a 9/10. But I still enjoyed it. There was a healthy dose of realism that Indian cinema lacks. What I liked about it was that it was the portrait of a flawed man who is forced at some point to acknowledge his flaws, even as we see them from the very beginning. That is unusual in Indian cinema - a flawed central character with the spotlight on his flaws. I think it is a little premature to uncork the champagne (or the poor cousin that passes for it in these parts of the world) but I regard "Spirit" as a giant step in the right direction for Malayalam cinema.