Director: Dijo Jose Antony
Writer: Sharis Mohammed
Cast: Nivin Pauly, Anaswara Rajan, Dhyan Sreenivasan
Duration: 160 minutes
Available in: Theatres
Malayalee From India is the story of a youngster with right-wing tendencies being introduced to the world of tolerance and faux optimism, and being forcefully made to reckon with the possibility for different truths to co-exist. This is the third collaboration between director Dijo Jose Antony and writer Sharis Mohammed, known for their politically charged entertainers like Queen (2018) and Jana Gana Mana (2022). The duo known more for their homegrown blend of melodramatic and tonally exuberant didactic essay films, takes it further with Malayalee From India. The sappy and hopeful idealism of their earlier films is upended by a sense of meandering ideological stuffiness in this one.
This film might also be their most tonally inconsistent outing as of yet, that offsets the contemporary bite of its first half’s satirical setup with a weirdly judged second half that is busy dolling out self-absorbed rants about the need for secularism and a united spirit in times of political unrest. Malayalee From India deals with thematic ideas and general pointers that hold particular significance in today’s highly insular political climate, where religion divides, more than unites. However, the film, in an effort to take itself very seriously, undercuts the timely messaging with a convoluted screenplay that shrills and shrieks in its attempt to make itself heard.
Aalparambil Gopi (Nivin Pauly) and Malghosh (Dhyan Sreenivasan) are the village loafers, wasting away their youth playing roadside cricket, wooing women and half-heartedly following the local right-wing party that they believe will win the next election and change their lives. Right off the gate, placing a satirical comedy about religious bigotry from the perspective of a hero, who hails from the saffron-clad party lines in itself is a novel way to lend weight to Sharis Mohammed’s political critique of a system that has rendered its young generation ideologically muddled with no sense of real-world understanding of how social conditions and online hate-mongering pit one group against the other. The hapless, lazy hero living off his working mom and sister’s earnings, with no real political vigour or sense of direction in life, sets the stage for a different kind of film than the one we ultimately get.
The film makes passing references to the way the ‘unofficial IT cells’ of the right-wing parties work through the character of ‘Malghosh’, where online hate and misinformation are spread through fake profiles and how the ever-lurking threat of ‘Taliban and ISIS’ is coming to get you’ is made into a psychotic paranoid war cry by a certain clueless faction of the right-wing party, that never bothers to see beyond the seething duality of ‘US’ vs ‘THEM’ narrative, the most popular mode of today’s political strategy making. We get a passage echoing a similar stretch from the Mohanlal classic Guru (1997) involving children and the film painstakingly lays down how even the most throwaway misunderstanding is blown out of proportion to meet convenient narratives that drive religious disharmony and distrust of everyone around you.
Nivin Pauly is highly effective in the comedic portions and the actor effortlessly plays the loafer, stumbling upon life's real purpose with his iconic charm, and we can see a residue of his more popular screen avatars where he excelled in mining the comedic beats to its full potential. However, the part does not challenge him as a performer and the actor gets to walk away delivering a functional lead performance, in a film where ideological projection overshadows any real character work. Dhyan Sreenivasan is momentarily funny but the actor stays mostly away in the latter half.
Manju Pillai too ends up delivering a mostly one-note archetype, a result of a screenplay obsessed with representation over character dynamics. Salim Kumar is wasted in a character that ends up having just one good scene in the film. Jakes Bejoy elevates the film at places and bridges the tonal jumps with his music that understands the voluptuous ambition of the broad satire. However, in some portions, the score does overbear and lend moments with a sense of forceful dramatics. Sudeep Elamon effectively captures the gritty bite of the village portions and balances it with the rose-tinted optimism of the later half where the film shifts gears.
In a time when most films frame most of their political leaning sermons through heroes belonging to the far left, it is somewhat refreshing to see a Hindu extremist party member be the hero, who is put through the wringer of life, only to come out of the other side as a changed man. The film, however, does not make full use of this framing to drive home any novel story beats. Dijo populates each frame with a sense of shrill, loud and corny dramatic energy that labours hard to drive home the need for solidarity and religious harmony, but the didactic quality of the screenplay makes it hard to invest in anything that is transpiring on screen seriously. Nuance is hard to come by and when your political critique is diffused with too much ambition, the loudness becomes numbing after a point.
In the latter half, Malayalee from India further flattens out its own political acuteness, where the action moves to the Middle East. The film almost metamorphs into an uncomfortable comedy, about a right-wing fundamentalist stuck with a Pakistani captor, that borders on spoof-like affectations to a recently released Malayalam film. But, here the film does not take the hero’s predicament seriously and the screenplay slogs on in search of its next major story beat that we can spot a mile away. ‘Arbabs’ and “Khaleefs’ have never been represented with such hilarious energy in any film before and the accumulation of stereotypes starts leaving a sour taste and you start to wonder where you will get to see a major plot reversal or revelation, like the “shootout” scene in Jana Gana Mana, where the dramatic beats of the film are upended and turned on its head. But here, we feel bogged down by the excessive lecturing and ludicrous plot developments that take away the film's well-intentioned messaging.
Dijo Jose doubles down on the loud theatrics of his sensibility and the film moves into a corny wish fulfillment by the end. There are also some echoes of the Salman Khan blockbuster Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015) that tries to bring in the India-Pakistan angle with some faux “Bhaijaan'' energy thrown into the mix. Despite all the reservations, there is not a passing moment, where one questions the innate genuinity and sappy politics of the makers, whose heart is definitely in the right place and aspires to make some observations that are relevant to our current day India. However, the execution feels far-fetched and overdrawn and this affects any sense of engagement with the film’s flawed yet fascinatingly interwoven political vision.