Urumi - The plight of a postmodern narrative !
I went to see 'Urumi' the much hyped big budget Malayalam movie directed by Santosh Sivan and scripted by Shankar Ramakrishnan without much expectation as the initial comments from my friends were not that encouraging. And that helped me a lot to digest the embarrassing moments and to appreciate the glimpses of visual imagery at times. It gives me a consolation that the popular culture has not rotten much to get overwhelmed by these kind of big budget productions.
The movie as a whole is nothing new or path breaking in either film grammar or its aesthetic, political or historic or contents. To speak about the positioning and presentation of historic characters, it made me to think that the film crew conceived them as hallucinated, semi& lunatic or arrogant mortals.
The central character 'Kelu Kotthuval' is presented as arrogant,daring, and conscious of his destiny. There are excess melodrama in all these characterizations so that we will fail to translate the character to a historic lattice.
Almost all the characters are living in a state of fantasy or erotic hedonism. And that makes it lesser modern, not at all real, and for worse a semi- cooked postmodern narrative.
Post-modern narratives will aim to negate the basic building blocks of society such as economy, class contradictions, productive relations, natural dialectics and will amplify the superfluous, secondary, derived relations of the social fabric. Here the senseless depiction of sexual anarchy takes over the movie ad a whole and reduces the freedom struggle to a mere patriarchal revenge.
Here European invasion of Kerala is presented ad the historic pretext or prelude to the environmental exploitation of the multinational corporate driven - government auded collaboration to loot the natural resources. The NGO - civil society inspired, indigenously mobilized resistance wins their land rights at the end. So far so good, though I pity the rationale and cognizance of this point if view.
As usual in commercial cinema , the movie progresses without exposing any of the thematic elements. No worries, no compliant as I don't expect this much cerebral efforts from them.
May be we can forgive Prithviraj for his whims and fancies of s new actor turned producer. But I am sad to see this sort of an infantile film sense from Santosh Sivan again and again, an icon if Indian cinematography. And it reinforces my belief that technology is not a replacement for cerebral aesthetics. Film may be a power language but at the end what matters who speaks it out and what do we say.