The film uses mental illness as a blueprint for its screenplay, but two-and-a-half hours of free-association and absurdism is a lot to handle. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
In Njandukalude Nattil Oridavela, Althaf Salim proved that you could tell a cancer story with comedy. In Odum Kuthira Chaadum Kuthira, the writer-director gets even more ambitious. The narrative revolves around a bunch of severely dysfunctional people. Some of them are depressed and lonely. Someone has weight issues. Someone says that they exist in a state between dreams and reality. The stars on the poster are Fahadh Faasil and Kalyani Priyadarshan. They play Aby and Nidhi, who are soon to be married. But the real star of the film is a broad spectrum of mental health issues. Aby’s brother calls Nidhi “completely insane”. He might say the same about everyone, from the major character Lal plays to the lady at a dining table who just can’t stop laughing. The film did not work for me, but before I begin to say why, HUGE respect for everyone involved for even trying such a thing!
When does a movie become… too much? Or let’s break it down a bit. When does a sequence become… too much? This is very subjective, of course, but take the opening stretch where Nidhi comes to Aby’s home at night, because she has had a dream that Aby should arrive at their wedding on a horse and wearing a floral sherwani, North Indian-style. Finding this combination at the last minute is itself a possibility for madcap humour, with emphasis on the “mad”. But Althaf keeps adding to it. We get references to Ranbir Kapoor and Ranveer Singh. We get a bout of diarrhea. One way to look at this is to say that Althaf is building a world that is as “mad” as his characters, which allows the characters to do whatever, whenever, however. That bout of diarrhea could be a metaphor for how uncontrollable everything is. Another way to see Odum Kuthira is to wonder whether screenplays need to be medicated. Just like people with mental health issues require external help, does a screenplay need to be reined in (heh!)! Otherwise, isn’t it just indulgence?
Depending on your sense of humour, some of the jokes might just work. Aby works at a furniture store, and after he assembles a dining table, the man who has made the purchase climbs on it and crawls across it as though this were the most natural thing to do on a dining table. Much later, at another dining table, this time at a Chinese restaurant, a family crawls under the table and holds a mini-convention. I laughed loud at the way a silly kulfi joke was delivered. Now, the following is not exactly a joke, but I loved the stretch where a magic lollipop ends up creating a Christmas miracle. It’s like reading something Charles Dickens wrote while high on meth, and you’re going to realise the fullness of the design only later. A lot of Odum Kuthira might come together in hindsight, but while watching the film, I felt restless. I wished I’d cared about something or someone. At one point, we hear about the yellow dress code for a wedding and we know about Aby’s dream of a mango milkshake. I wished that these colours had connected in a way that was more heartfelt than just… “clever”.
Althaf keeps all the reveals for the final stretch, and until then, we are left with bits like this. Aby exercises in the middle of the night. Nidhi faints in Aby’s arms, and someone thinks it is dance practice. Nidhi’s father says he is a javelin thrower. Aby’s father cracks a pun using the words “coma” and “comma”. Just like Nivin Pauly’s weight became a source of humour in Njandukalude, Fahadh Faasil’s hairline becomes the object of a few cracks. In the middle of all this, the sudden death of a character passes by as randomly as everything else. I don’t want to be left in tears. But I do want the shock that comes with the realisation that not everyone who smiles is really happy. After all, mental illness does not announce itself with a label on the forehead.
I didn’t know what to make of the performances because everyone seems to be doing their own thing in their own metre, but the main thing in Odum Kuthira is the structure. Towards the end, we get a line that says there’s no logic to dreams. Well sure, but a screenplay needs at least “dream logic”, if not the real thing. The dream logic works beautifully in the scenes set in an amusement park. Each time, the scene gets bigger and we understand more, to the extent that we can hope to understand dream logic. Had the film not been so long, it might have worked. But two hours of non-stop absurdism is a lot to take before arriving at the last half-hour of explanation, when a lot of the loose ends get tied together. This is where you say things like: “Oh so that is what those binoculars are supposed to signify!” But by then, you may be too tired to care.
