Language: Malayalam with some Hindi and English
When we first meet Shirley (Parvathy Thiruvothu) and Roy (Sharafudheen) in their Mumbai flat, they are preparing for a trip to her father’s home in Kerala. These are the early days of COVID-19, and masks and sanitisers are already the norm.
The steady rhythm in the couple’s routine belies their tension over Roy’s financial dealings with a close friend (Saiju Kurup, credited here as Saiju Govinda Kurup).
At his unflashy but comfortable Kerala home built on sprawling grounds, Sophie’s widowed septuagenarian Dad, Ittyavira Abraham (Biju Menon), manages his lands and his household. Ittyavira is a retired Mathematics teacher and a devout Christian. He is irritable with the domestic help (Arya Salim), but operates at a pace that mirrors Sophie and Roy’s lives. In comparison with the youngsters though, he seems not to be dealing with any specific stress. Or so we think.
Aarkkariyam marks noted cinematographer Sanu John Varughese’s directorial debut. In the first half, the deliberate languor affords the director time and space to establish Shirley, Roy and Ittyavira as regular people with regular problems who have faced the regular heartbreaks inevitable in any regular human being’s existence.
Nothing much happens pre-interval, but quite a bit is conveyed. We sense a deep affection in this family. The environment in Ittyavira’s kutumbam is easygoing and relatively liberal. One indicator of this is the level of comfort between Shirley and Roy when they discuss their past relationships; another is Roy’s commitment to their child Sophie (Thejaswi Praveen). Far removed from most Indian homes, work and leisure pursuits here are shared equally between the men and woman, cooking and cleaning are not assumed to be Shirley’s domain and no one makes a big deal of any of this or of the fact that Shirley and Roy take turns at the wheel on the Maharashtra-to-Kerala drive. Think of how rarely we see the woman driving when a man and woman are in a vehicle in an Indian film, and you will know why this is significant.
Further indication of Ittyavira’s politics comes from a scene in which he gets furious with an individual who bangs a thaali as instructed in real life last year by Prime Minister Narendra Modi right before the declaration of an all-India lockdown – it is amusing to note how much is said without saying a word in that moment.
And then, just as the inactivity in the narrative is becoming too much, a giant-sized disclosure sparks great anticipation – greater than it might have in a film that had been eventful until then. The uneventfulness of what ensues though simply does not work.
The writers of Aarkkariyam – Sanu himself, Rajesh Ravi and Arun Janardhanan – get a primary character to drop the mid-point bombshell so quietly, that it ends up being more of a shocker than if it had been done melodramatically. That, however, is the high point of the film. With the resolution of this mega problem and the revelation that follows, the script’s philosophical pretensions are never fully realised.
Throughout the film, Ittyavira speaks of an Avan (He/Him) to whom we must submit ourselves. This is an extremely religious man who is convinced that God has a plan and He can see a macro picture that we humans cannot. Shirley and Roy too are devoted to their faith. And the expression “aarkkariyam” (who knows?) is uttered more than once in confusing situations with the unspoken addendum, “God knows”. Belief in god and religion when deftly handled can translate into a rewarding film even for atheists and agnostics (no differently from how rationalists could well enjoy paranormal thrillers), but Aarkkariyam is unable to lend credibility or substance to the reasoning behind its focal point. And it lacks pizzazz.
The writing of Shirley is also a let-down. The casting of a star as major as Parvathy in the role and the opening scenes create an impression that Shirley, Roy and Ittyavira will have the same prominence in the plot. Post-interval though, it becomes clear that Shirley is important only in so far as she is important to the men. Until then too, while she gets as much screen time as they do, the men are the ones given an interior life. She is present throughout but Aarkkariyam is ultimately about the relationship that unexpectedly develops between Ittyavira and Roy over a burden they jointly bear.
This puts Sanu in a club of well-intentioned male directors in Malayalam cinema who seem unable to relate to their female protagonists and therefore unable to write them.
Parvathy does Everywoman better than most stars and effectively brings that quality to Shirley. This is why it feels particularly wrong that her character slowly recedes into the background as the men take centrestage.
As with the casting of the then 43-year-old Suraj Venjaramoodu as an old man in Android Kunjappan Version 5.25, here too the question arises: why was 50-year-old Biju Menon cast as a 70-something when male actors of Ittyavira’s age are active in the industry? A debate on the matter is tricky because of the complexity of issues involved. First, older men in Malayalam cinema are not denied opportunities in quite the way women actors are; second, senior male actors in Malayalam like to act as boyfriends, husbands and brothers of young female stars, so the decision to play Parvathy’s father could, from a certain angle, be deemed adventurous and/or progressive on Menon’s part – he himself, while in his late 40s, played the then 22-year-old Nimisha Sajayan’s boyfriend in Nalpathiyonnu (2019). (Unsurprisingly, Biju Menon has told the media that when he was approached with Aarkkariyam he initially thought he was being offered the role of Roy. Well, there you go.)
This in-principle discussion aside, Menon captures the gait, gestures, body language and demeanour of an old man with remarkable accuracy. The make-up team too does a first-rate job on his face. His performance is not confined to ‘playing old’ either; he captures the essence of the fond but largely inexpressive father that Ittyavira is.
The character who experiences the widest array of emotions in the film is Roy, and Sharafudheen a.k.a. Sharafu is up to the challenge although he is stuck with a mix of languages in his lines that he does not entirely pull off. This is as much a fault of the writing as the acting. On the one hand, the dialogue writing is authentic in its persistent use of Hindi in conversations between Roy and his friend Vyshak because neo-migrants from Kerala to parts of India outside the south do often – inexplicably – abandon Malayalam in favour of Hindi as a medium of communication even with fellow Malayalis and even when they do not speak Hindi well. However, Roy’s insistence on throwing stray English sentences into exchanges with Shirley doesn’t work because the language does not flow smoothly off Sharafudheen’s tongue and it is a fact that, unlike in the case of Hindi, Malayalis who are not fluent in English tend to avoid speaking it. The English in these conversations seems especially odd because Shirley responds each time in Malayalam, so clearly this is not an instance of Roy being compelled to speak English to a person who knows only that language.
The assortment of languages in Roy’s lines is perhaps meant to convey that he is a long-time Mumbai resident. As it turns out, the dialogue writing ends up being an unwitting metaphor for Aarkkariyam: it tries to make a point but just does not click.
In addition to actors with an excellent track record, Aarkkariyam has a lot going for it: superlative production design (by Ratheesh Balakrishnan Poduval who earlier directed Android Kunjappan Version 5.25), art direction (Jothish Shankar) and cinematography (G Srinivas Reddy) – the only thing I love more than Ittyavira’s house is the shooting of his massive property with its pond and thick vegetation. This is a lovely team let down by ineffectual writing.
Rating: 2.5 (out of 5 stars)
After a brief theatrical run during the pandemic, Aarkkariyam is streaming on Neestream, Cave, Roots, First Shows and other platforms.
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