What’s also striking about Kumbalangi Nights is the quality of its writing and its contiguity with the surroundings, which is brilliantly captured by cinematographer Shyju Khalid.Įxcept the youngest boy, who is a footballer supported by a state scholarship and hence exposed to a marginally better quality of life, the men practically do nothing and seem to be stuck in a socio-cultural stasis. Closely associated with their lives is another family, from where one of the boys find his love-interest. The only economic engagement the stranded inhabitants of the island can undertake is fishing, ancillary work for tourism and probably some unskilled labour in the city. For people in the mainland, it’s a shit-hole that they use to dump their rubbish in. The movie is primarily about three young men and their school-going brother living a pathetic life in an incomplete hut in a small island near Kumbalangi on the Western coast of the state, which otherwise looks breathtaking.
But Kumbalangi Nights breaks away from this new stereotype. Although many of them were celebrated because they looked different, they mostly appeared inspired by City of God and were similar in form and substance. Their themes mostly centre around the urban lumpen, contract killers (called quotation gangs in local parlance), slums, sex workers and unemployed youth, with some political colour and Sufi Rock thrown in to make them look both intense and cool. In the guise of contemporary cinema, a lot of city-based youngsters, mostly from the state’s movie capital of Kochi, have been making quite a number of thug-films, films that deal with the hard life of the urban underclass depicting a lot of violence, foul language and even sexual permissiveness with practically no perspective or purpose. What makes it special or rather endearing is that despite its dark milieu, it’s a hugely transformative movie. It’s rooted in reality, deals with the lives of the subaltern that both the arthouse and mainstream movies have made look contrived, addresses a number of contemporary socio-political issues in a highly nuanced way and is a moving essay on human relationships, loss and redemption. Kumbalangi Nights is not the first breakthrough in the generic transformation that Malayalam cinema is currently witnessing, but is certainly a movie that has moved closer to truthfulness and perfection. Kumbalangi Nights is primarily about three young men and their school-going brother living a pathetic life in an incomplete hut in a small island near Kumbalangi.
0 kommentar(er)
