Narasimham

By Ravi Shankar

Title: Narasimham
Director: Shaji Kailas
Lyrics: Girish Puthencherry
Music: MG Radhakrishnan
Cast: Mohan Lal, Aishwarya, Kanaka

Even a lion's roar can provoke a yawn. Watching Shaji Kailas' films can be extremely taxing to both one's eardrum and the brain breathing close to it. (The guys who got injured in the scramble for tickets are lucky; at least they are safe from brain damage.)

Narasimham, Shaji's latest offering, which is claimed to be breaking all box office records and in the fourth week is full of sound and fury (rightly animalistic). Rather than a cross between man and lion (the original incarnation), Shaji's film looks more like a lion with multiple human heads borrowed from umpteen number of Mohan Lal films like Devasuram, Kireedam, Ustaad, Sphadikam, Aaram Thampuran... the list is endless.

So we have the omnipresent Bharatha Puzha, from the depths of which our hero emerges from time to time (which must be a Herculean task considering the depth of this particular river) with a roar that can put to shame even the most ferocious lions in heat. And, since he does not believe in overdoing things, Shaji insists on showing us a real lion padding across the famed Nila sands in interspersed shots. One is left wondering why he did not attempt morphing and actually turn Mohan Lal into a lion or vice versa, like Kalabhavan Mani did several times in a recent super hit that had him turn into a dog and later into a buffalo.

The story is all about the son Mohan Lal (Induchoodan Menon) pitted against father Tilakan (Justice Menon), as they have been doing ad nauseum in film after film. When Lal, the first rank-holder in the IAS Exams, is wrongly implicated in a murder case, his father Tilakan, the local judge, refuses to help him. While Lal is in prison, the father too goes away to Bangalore and nothing worthwhile happens in the state of Kerala till Lal resurfaces by the inland water route with the lion as his alter ego. Now, we would expect him to go about settling scores. But no, the maximum punishment he can dole out is to let the daughter of one of the villainous characters fall in love with him. But then, the father returns complicating things.

Things go into a whirl when a young girl too, surfaces claiming she is the daughter of Justice Menon, which he promptly refutes. The girl gets killed and the hapless Justice is implicated. If you didn't know, this was all a conspiracy hatched by the local villains. The IAS rank holder's brain fails him and even his brawn can't help him. So, the only solution, as anyone in Kerala would gladly tell you, is to import a better brain from Delhi. Mamootty (the famed criminal lawyer Nandakumar Marar), thus makes his appearance and in a jiffy solves the murder and flies back before Lal could bat his eyelids or rather say 'here's your fee' or Shaji could go in for a second take. We are lucky that the next film of Shaji titled 'Supreme Power' is going to revolve around this very same Marar who, even before this fascinating case, was on the covers of India Today none the least.

This film, though shot beautifully in parts by Sanjeev Shankar and breezily edited by Bhoominathan, features some of the most listless songs heard recently in Malayalam cinema. Mohan Lal, as expected, dominates the proceedings with consummate ease. The only problem is that while covering himself in glory, he has also covered himself with such an amount of fat that his love-mate Aishwarya (a thin reed of a girl), while cavorting with him, looks like a grasshopper frolicking around a road-roller.

Which brings us to the script, a prime example of locally brewed kitsch. The problem is that the recipe was written long back. 'Po Mone Dinesha' could be a trendsetter slogan. But this cannot turn us away from the fact that this once again is a story of Menons and Marars steeped in the so-called Nila Samskaaram and the rest of the communities are but jokers dancing in the background like all those luckless Poothans and Thiras and the mandatory Theyyakkolams.

We can only fervently hope that Shaji Kailas will not, in his next film, feature a lion-tailed macaque as the alter ego of the upper caste hero. If he does, that could well be a different kind of trendsetter altogether.

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