Bhoothakalam

Shane Nigam knows his strengths and chose the right story, location and director for his production house - Shane Nigam Film's maiden(?) venture. - Bhoothakalam. The angst ridden, depressed, down on his luck, angry and scared young man from Kochi is a role tailor-made for Shane. He is not going to lose his Kochi accent anytime, why even take a risk when he has a stake in production?

Bhoothakalam (transl. The Past,) Rahul Sadasivan's second directorial outing after Red Rain (2013) is a slow burn psychological horror/ghost story.  Shane and veteran actor Revathy play the leads as a depressed mother and an equally depressed son who got handed a load of generational trauma on top of his helplessness. They both have outdid themselves in the acting department, although when it comes to Shane I felt that he just had to act as himself on a bad hair day. For her role in Bhoothakalam Revathy won the Kerala state award for the best actor (female) in a lead role for the first time in her career, which has spanned almost four decades. 

Bhoothakalam (2022) is one of the serious ghost stories I have watched in Malayalam after long, along the lines of Sixth Sense or The Others, but on a much lighter budget. There are no cheap tricks like jump scares or odd camera angles as it moves steadfastly towards a satisfying climax.

Just like Rahul Sadasivan's next film, BramaYugam (2024), Bhoothakalam too is plenty open to interpretation. Armchair psychoanalysts and hidden meaning seekers have the opportunity for the metaphorical peeling of a few psychological onions. This is considering both the lead characters have issues which need intervention by mental health professionals. Under those circumstances it is easy to explain away the supernatural as tricks of the mind, shared psychotic disorder, drug induced hallucinations and the like. 

But I would rather watch Bhoothakalam as a ghost story it is. We have not had a good one for long and Bhoothakalam builds up slowly but surely towards a flash-freeze spine-chilling end.

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Bramayugam

The age of black and white is here in director Rahul Sadasivan's The Age of Madness or BramaYugam. It was a brilliant idea to post-process the entire movie to monochrome black-n-white which not only elevates the story but also makes it easy for the production design team. If the mana (translation: mansion) in the movie was in color it would have looked like a stage prop strongly giving off western false-facade vibes. 

The cinematography by Shehnad Jalal is enchanting making the mansion a strong contender for the supporting lead. Here below is one of the powerful introductory shots from the movie where Arjun Ashokan's character, Thevan wandering lost in the jungle finally chances upon what looks like an abandoned mansion.

BramaYugam, while it may not be considered as a horror movie in the traditional sense, is a quality period-horror or psychological thriller. The tight setting of the eerie abandoned mana and its jungle environs, the three main characters who are pretty much the only characters in the story and a yakshi to add an extra dollop of Malayali authenticity, all hold the well directed movie together. 

The casting is on point. Mammotty essays the role of Kudomon Potty, the lord of the dark mansion with Sidharth Bharathan as the caretaker and cook of the mansion. Thevan is a paanan or a traveling folk singer who had escaped the Portuguese slave traders in this 17th century Malabar tale, who seeks refuge in the mana. 

Arjun Ashokan's portrayal of Thevan is raw and intense, capturing the essence of a man trapped in a world of shadows and secrets. With his half a century of acting experience Mammotty leads the charge of the trio of characters, while  Siddharth Bharathan's portrayal as the servant of the house is not far behind the other two either. Amalda Liz's Yakshi who has no dialog and a few minutes screen time in the entire movie is the only miscasting (in my eye.) She has a very modern face for 17th century female vampire. 

BramaYugam is a roller-coaster ride through a world where nothing is as it seems, and danger and dark secrets lurk behind every shadow. An atmospheric horror (or thriller?) movie that cleverly uses monochrome to take us back to a bygone era of yakshis and chathans, it is a successful cinematic experiment and a must-watch.

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Love and Loss: Amy Bloom's In Love & Netflix's One Day

Reading Amy Bloom's In Love helped me understand Robin William's final act. While there are nine states (Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii, Colorado, Montana, New Jersey, Maine and Vermont) and the District of Columbia which have right to die laws, you cannot have a physician assisted suicide without satisfying certain conditions. First, you have to be a resident of one of these states to have the right to die, more importantly you need to get medically assessed as having only six months to live. Which means you have to be almost at death's door to use this right-to-die card to have a physician-assisted suicide in the US of A.  Incurable degenerative diseases like Lewy body dementia (that Robin Williams had) or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's that will slowly hollow out a person over years are not excuses good enough to have the right to die in any of the nine states or DC. This is where Switzerland steps in.  Remember the name Dignitas and Pegasos, just in case.

Just in case was the reason why I decided to read Amy Bloom's In Love after I chanced upon a blurb about the book somewhere. Memoirs focusing on a single event in a writer's life and its aftermath is not my favorite form of non-fiction, but the information provided by the author and her style of writing kept In Love engaging for me.

During the same period I was going through Ms. Bloom's love-n-loss heavy memoir I also accidently started watching a chick-lit(?) series One Day on Netflix. Like Amy Bloom, Ambika Mod's Emma Morley is a bookish ethnic girl who becomes a writer and finds a soulmate in handsome, British upper class Dexter Mayhew.

Emma and Dex in One Day

One Day is based on the book of the same name written by David Nicholls, and tells the story of Emma and Dexter who meet and spend a night together on their last day at the university in 1988 and decide to meet each other every year afterwards, on the same day. There was also a 2011 movie based on the novel, starring Anne Hathaway as Emma. 

I loved the way Emma's character is written. Her one-liners are profoundly deep and funny. Leo Woodall's Dex is hurtlingly handsome and posh. They are from the opposite ends of the spectrum, both socially and intellectually and we, the viewers, desperately want them to be together, to see how it will all turn out. The writing and the script makes sure the audience are invested in Emma and Dex although the plot line of boy and girl from different sides of the track is an over-used one.

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Reading Ramayana in the Roaring (Twenty) Twenties

Ramayana and Mahabharata are two great epics from the Indian subcontinent. Many of the thirty three million Hindu gods and goddesses make guest appearances in these two epics. Some like Vishnu gets to play the main characters in his two popular avatars, Rama and Krishna, in these two mega mythological texts in Sanskrit. Bhagvad Gita, the best known Indian scripture, is a part of a section of Mahabharata called the Bhishma Parva.

In my mind Hinduism is the contemporary of Greek religion (Hellenism) and Indians worshipping the million gods is how West would have been, had it not been won over by the trinity of Jesus, Allah and Yhwh. Both Hinduism and Hellenism are polytheistic featuring their main players in two opposing teams - Devas and Asuras for Hinduism corresponding to Olympians and Titans for the Greeks. 

Like Hades, Zeus and Poseidon, Hinduism has Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver) and Shiva (the destroyer), a slightly different yet similar take as the Greeks' dividing the Big 3 by assigning them the three realms of the heavens, the oceans and the underworld. If the monotheistic Abrahamic religions had not overrun and relegated Greek and Roman gods to the mythical pavilion in the western world, I am sure we would have wished Zeusspeed instead of Godspeed.

Why are we talking about these epics now? Recently in my search for coffee-table books, (that is what I mainly use the local library for these days,) I chanced upon an illustrated Ramayana. The last time I heard Ramayana (def. Sanskrit: Rama's Journey) in full was when my mother narrated me the whole story every evening over several months during my grade school days. Two score years seemed to be the right interval for a refresher.

The Illustrated Ramayana published by DK is a well written, well put together, well illustrated book, suited for both the advanced Ramayana scholar, who can find plenty of things to nitpick or for a beginner like me.  The illustrations which range from Raja Ravi Varma to Pahadi to Mughal paintings to glorious temple art from South India or Angkor Wat to Indonesia to performances and native art forms by artists from Thailand or Rajasthan(India) or  Nepal, makes every page a visual treat leading the narration forward.

Like every great epic, there are thousands retellings of the epic in every region and every language South-East and East Asia. The book also draws from these alternate story paths and present them in conjunction with the original narrative, supposedly written in Sanskrit by sage Valmiki. Valmiki, known as the first poet (adi kavi), because Ramayana is the first poem, like Alfred Hitchcock, has a weakness for cameos. In Ramayana he is a an important character in the seventh and last canto (or kanda in Sanskrit) called Uttara Kanda and he is also present in Bala Kanda as the narrator and the live-in tutor for Rama's twin boys - Lava and Kusha.

The oldest retrieved manuscript of Ramayana only contains 5 kandas and are missing the first kanda - Bala Kanda and the last one, Uttara Kanda. Because of the stylistic differences and narrative contradictions many scholars believe that these two were later additions to the epic and therefore Valmiki didn't write himself into the story. The five kandas, excluding Bala Kanda (1st canto) and Uttara Kanda (7th and final canto) are Ayodhya Kanda, Aranya Kanda, Kishkinda Kanda, Sundara Kanda and Yudha Kanda. 

Almost every religion that started in India - Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism have their versions of Ramayana. So does almost every country in South-East and East Asia, except perhaps Vietnam. Every one of them highlights the same ultimate and supreme ideal Rama stands for - "Dharma"  which is what every human being should try to achieve - the right way of living through moral and virtuous conduct. Practicing dharma is the only way to get rid of our karmic baggage and attain salvation. A heavy message, nevertheless, a beautiful book.

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