Lately the mighty Fahadh Faasil, whom many, including me, regard as the Dilip Kumar of Malayalam cinema, has been floundering with project choices. A sense of smugness has seeped into his performances, as if he knows that he knows it all, which of course is an illusion. No one is perfect. Except maybe Lata Mangeshkar.
But oops, I am straying! Just like the film. Odum Kuthira Chaadum Kuthira does it all the time. Its 2.5 hours of playing time doesn’t so much slip by, as trudge past one self-consciously capricious episode after another in the protagonist Aby’s life.
As Aby, Fahadh thinks his comic timing makes him the Woody Allen of Malayalam cinema. But just quirky is not what Woody Allen’s comedy is about. That feeling of humour at the epicentre of doom eludes Fahadh by a wide margin. Where Aby should have been endearing in his indecisiveness, he is plain annoying.
When we first meet Aby, he is about to marry Nidhi (Kalyani Priyadarshan, who sadly delivers a turkey right after the successful Lokum). Nidhi demands that Aby reach the wedding on a white horse (which, she specifies, should look like halwa, whatever that means).
Aby falls off the horse and goes into a coma.
This, mind you, is supposed to be funny. The misguided humour never gets back on track. The more writer-director Althaf Salim tries to quicken the pulse of quirkiness, the more the comedy sinks into an irredeemable embarrassing morass.
For example, when at the start Nidhi gets to know her boyfriend was cheating on her, in a highly concocted sequence, the other characters stifle giggles.
At least three characters are captured in a suicidal mode: we are meant to be falling off our chairs with hilarity. Just recently we had Fahadh Faasil being part of a film Mareesan which trivialized and formulized serious issues such as paedophilia and dementia. Now, Faasil wants us to giggle about depression, suicide and comfort eating.
Which brings us to the second phase of this fuzzy satire, where everyone is eccentric in varying degrees. In the second half we meet Aby’s new love interest Revathi (Revathi Pillai), who is somewhat overweight (which is not uncommon among Malayali actors). She eats to feel good about life. Then she meets her neighbour, a chef named Itty, played by Dhyan Sreenivasan, who gives the most credible and likeable performance in a film where everyone, including the great Faasil, is overdone.
The Dhyan-Revathi episode in this chaotic misfired comedy is the most likable bit. It ends abruptly, just like most of the unfinished half-baked happenings in a film which thinks chaos is a virtue.
Fahadh and the normally dependable Lal as son and father try hard to look like a chromosome-challenged pair. During a rare moment of affection, Lal puts his hand where no father would think of.
Which just about sums up the derring-do mood of the off-key presentation.
“Is there a logical flow in my story?” a character wants to know.
No. Sorry.
