Jithin Isaac Thomas and his co-director Ananthan Raju—yes, two directorial credits for a film that doesn’t seem to have a proper director—had me flummoxed with Pattth, a Malayalam film short of breath but with no dearth of ambitions of being a ‘superior’ kind of cinema that disregards the rules of moviemaking to look and feel different, somewhat like a teenager getting a crew cut to piss of his parents.
Rebellious, Pattth (three Ts only please, thank you) certainly is. But not in the way that the art films of the 1970s by Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahane used to be with each shot being of no less duration than a minute, or maybe more. Those films were self-indulgent but had a core of authenticity to salvage their obscurity.
Pattth’s self-pleasuring torpidity has no hope of redemption. It dwells on characters’ grave faces as they speak about an obscure song that the film’s vblogger hero Unni (Ashik Safiya Aboobakker) heard his grandmother sing. Unni and his live-in Anupama (Gauthami Lekshmi Gopan) decide to trace the origins of the song.
I wish the couple had something better to do. Their research takes them down a dead end trail meeting all sorts of eccentric interviewees, who are meant to be….quirky and interesting? Alas, the mock interviews which occur one after another in a tumble of wasted words, do nothing to assuage our sense of being trapped in an amateur film-school project with as much imagination on display as a wedding video shot by a drunken guest.
The two leads were probably instructed to act “casual” throughout. This, they do with annoying obedience, just hanging around with a dog for company (who seems as lifeless as his owners), either talking about THE song or not talking, just staring at the blank walls.
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This couple is as interesting as a barbar and his apprentice on their day off. To put a final stamp on the purported seriousness of the film, we get a long black-and-white endgame on hunger with impoverished people digging out edible roots from the ground to get food to film their belly.
If there is a connection between finding roots from the farmland and searching for the roots of a song, then it is lost on me. I haven’t seen a more self-indulgent pretentious, less interesting film in a long time.
