In fact, the female characters are given the scope to react according to what they themselves might judge to be beneficial to them. Their own mother who ‘abandons’ them to seek the divine path is not judged for her failure to do her duty, but is compassionately allowed to be. It is the mother-in-law who straightens her posture when her son-in-law enters the room that decides he needs to be driven away. It is fitting, hence that what completes the family is not a son, but a single mother and her (female) child. What makes them a family is not the lineage that the brothers themselves do not all share, but the love and support that they provide each other. Saji, played by Shoubin Shahir and his brothers in Kumbalangi Nights live in a dilapidated/unfinished house, but one which is always open to welcome the abandoned. In Kumbalangi Nights, it is this singular hero that must be vanquished – whether by way of a lower-caste character standing up for himself instead of carrying around his friend’s wireless speakers, or through a group of Latin Catholic brothers using their ‘traditional’ occupational skills to get the better of a caste Hindu patriarch. In both cases, the impetus is provided by love towards women characters who are shown to be strong and independent – it is the male characters who have to step up to deserve them. If the singular (upper-caste) male hero in the conventional Malayalam film is a performance of domination over the upper-caste woman, the popular chiri padangal created a hierarchy of masculinities from different social locations competing with each other to prove their manhood.
#Review kumbalangi nights movie#
In Nadodikkattu (1987), one among a series of films that revolve around the classic bromance between Mohanlal and Sreenivasan, caste differences were wished away to depict a homosocial bond, even as movie after movie made a laughing stock out of the lower-caste character. In fact, it is the (uncomfortable) reactions of the women here that let us know that they are not so. His control is established not through overt violence, but through gestures that past films would goad the audience to read as sacrificial, protecting and upholding honour. Shammy here literally takes the seat of the male patriarch in a household of women. Lost ‘tradition’ and ‘manliness’ are what films of this period mourned and sought to rebuild, even as society shifted towards individualism and consumerism. A slew of films of the period followed the same pattern – a harking-back to a feudal culture and a religious revivalism as an antidote to the fetters of a modernising society. The nostalgic imagination of the tharavadu (ancestral home) is combined with the regressive idea that men have to know when to put a woman in her place. In Vatsalyam (1993), Mammootty is the sole provider for a Nair joint family, upon the death of his father. In fact the movie itself, with its use of contrasting characterizations, tones and scenes, is a commentary on this history. This is appropriate as it alludes to the two things that Malayalam cinema has historically shaped on screen – the image of the ‘traditional’ Malayali man and the erasure of Kerala’s matrilineal past.
The first shot of the self-described hero and ‘complete man’, Shammy, played by Fahadh Faasil is his reflection in a mirror admiring his mustache, a marker of masculinity, and scraping off the (feminine) bindi that dares blemish it with his shaving blade.