It's been a long time since I had watched Kazhcha, and a week ago I watched Thanmatra. I had thought quite a lot about writing on these two movies. To be frank, I haven't liked them. Both of these films are good, both are untold stories, have good performances, but I didn't like the treatment. Somewhere I feel, things should have been made better, there's still room for improvement.
Kazhcha
Kazhcha is the story of a Gujarathi refugee boy, who reaches Kerala following the riots in Gujarat. He may have lost his parents, we don't know. Here, a villager, played by Mammootty, comes to his help. His family treats him like one among them. But in the end they have to leave him to his homeland.
The script is good. But as told before, I didn't like the treatment. It's not gripping. Mammootty is in his usual best, enacting his role with ease. Master Yash too gives good performance as the lost kid. Padma Priya has little to do. Others are as natural as they come in Malayalam films.
Thanmatra
This is the story of family bonding. The bonding between a father and a son, a man and his wife. The story, inspired by Padmarajan's short-story 'Orma', tells us how a family overcomes the challenges when its lone bread-winner succumbs to Alzheimer's.
Mohanlal enacts the role of the Alzheimer's patient wonderfully well. It couldn't be better. Meera Vasudev delivers one of the worst-ever performance by a newcomer in Malayalam. She has no expressions in her face and her dialogue delivery is ridiculously bad. She doesn't fit in to the picture, as such. All other performances are good.
The film is more about family bonding than about the disease. Some scenes are exquisitely well made, but some could have been avoided completely. Those scenes bring the film to a low. Kazhcha doesn't have such scenes. But all characters are very well sketched in Tanmatra. In Kazhcha you have certain characters which could have been avoided.
And now a word about Blessy
He claims to be Padmarajan's disciple. But in the two above films he doesn't show even the slightest hint of this. In Padmarajan movies there would be moments which could make you wonder how wonderfully he sketches human emotions. Padmarajan made 'innale', (if I m right), about amnesia, and here Blessy made 'tanmatra' about Alzheimer's. A striking similarity in both these movies is that the disease is just one single cause which changes the lives of the protagonists in the movie. The film is not about the disease, but what happens in the life of one suffering from the condition.
It's too early for Blessy to be labeled as Padmarajan's successor. He has a long way to go. And I hope he reaches that stage in life where his films would do the talking.
