Written and directed by: Chidambaram
Cast: Soubin Shahir, Sreenath Bhasi, Balu Varghese, Ganapathy, Jean Paul Lal
Runtime: 135 minutes
Available in: Theatres
In every Indian neighbourhood, located in any one of the thousand tiny towns, there exists a group of boys no one seems to find any value in. To the outsider, these boys are nothing but trouble, just one sip of brandy away from picking a fight with the world. They have nothing to do except land up at their usual hangouts with an urgency someone with purpose might find comical. And that’s pretty much the same outsider gaze with which we look at the boys from Manjummel, when we meet them for the first time in Chidambaram’s absolutely devastating second film. They are the type that land up en masse, when you extend an invitation to a party, strictly out of obligation. Yet despite the judgement we’ve already passed, we catch ourselves wanting to be a part of the gang, trying to latch on the one member we feel most attached to.
Manjummel Boys, based on a real-life incident revolving around the same gang, can be as deceptive as what we first think of them. Chidambaram writes a series of light-hearted sequences that introduce us to each of them. At times you wonder why they’re telling us something as innocuous as one of their obsessions with neatness (he doesn’t even serve water). Later, you get a scene written around a boy who has to deliver a photo album to their rightful owners. These details run so deep that you end up calculating the maximum number of people that can fit into a Toyota Qualis.
But when you look back at the final film, these are the portions that remain the most cleverly written. An example of this is in the way a whole sequence about a game of tug-of-war returns later on. In the beginning, you just see this as extra information or as the sport that makes a team out of them, giving them a purpose and a motivation to be together. But when the film adds meaning to this later on, you are caught unaware, defeated in the power of the moment.
These are the choices that make Manjummel Boys special. How else would you explain the volume of emotions we feel, even when they are written around a fairly straightforward rescue operation we have already seen in many films before? But it’s not just the writing; take for instance an important scene that makes us feel the gravity of the situation. It reminded me of the shot in Jurassic Park where the size of the dinosaur is shown to us by the tremors they leave behind on a glass of water. Similarly, in this scene, we’re made to understand the sheer depth of a gorge by the echo we hear when a stone is thrown into it. The sound design is as perfect as this idea and we feel the chills because this is so much more effective than numbers being thrown at us in feet or metres.
But Chidambaram doesn’t stop there. Like the surreal sequences in a film like 127 Hours, we get visual ideas that go beyond the moment and into an abstract space. This includes short flashbacks that take us back decades into a game of hide and seek and later when they go swimming in a lake as children. At once, you’re made to feel like these events really happened all those years ago. But if you want to think of them as the situation playing tricks on the boys’ minds, that is fine too. The rescue operation too is never treated as a moment of triumph alone, with an epilogue that discusses mental health and the effect such traumatic events have on the victim (his identity remains protected at the end).
Shyju Khalid’s cinematography and Vivek Harshan’s editing work in perfect harmony to give you the whole range of emotions as you go through this tense ordeal. At times Vivek chooses to cut back to wide shots, especially one that gives the cave the look of an eye, as though to show us just how insignificant we remain in the hands of mother nature. This sort of painstaking effort and intelligence seems to have gone into every second, not letting our attention slide for a moment.
This uncompromising attitude towards the vision extends even to how a large portion of the film is in Tamil. There are no tricks nor have they diluted the essence by forcing Malayali characters into a Tamil setting. This adds a further layer of authenticity and a feeling that there’s nothing added simply for dramatic effect. The performances are all equally arresting with each actor performing as well as the last. Despite their minimal screentime, each of them form as fully evolved characters, (Soubin’s micro expression when his friend’s mother embraces him, demands a study of its own), leaving us with envy for not being a part of this gang.
Yet eventually, it’s a film that belongs to its writer-director Chidambaram, who seems absolutely in control of a subject that could have gone anywhere. He was able to see so much more than a regular survival thriller, using a part of his soul to narrate a story about a group of misunderstood boys and the kind of inexplicable love that holds them together. It took a 300-feet fall into earth for us to understand the depth in the friendship of those useless, good-for-nothing neighbourhood boys.