I didn’t know what to expect from the Gautham-Mammootty combination. But they’ve given us a movie where the characterisation of the protagonist is so good that the rest of it goes down easily, even the minor flaws. The rest of this review contains spoilers.
By this time, we don’t need to say what a good actor Mammootty is; it’s a bit like saying Federer is a good tennis player. But Mammootty makes us say it all over again, and again, in Gautham Vasudev Menon’s quirkily titled Dominic and the Ladies’ Purse. As a two-bit detective named Dominic, Mammootty goes the gamut from dry humour to serious drama. It’s such an “invisible” performance that it hardly seems to be a performance. One standout bit has him facing someone who asks him this question: “You are completely on the wrong track.” Gautham gives us a frame that’s somewhere between a mid-shot and a close-up, and we see Dominic’s mind working. Mammootty says nothing, but his face says these words: “Maybe I am on the wrong track, because as I keep saying, 20% of my guesswork could be off. But somehow, this time, I don’t think I am on the wrong track.” His mind is putting it all together, and we actually see the process of thinking without a single facial movement.
Gautham’s strength is his intensity: the intensity of his love scenes, the intensity of his action scenes, the intensity with which love and action come together. But the Gautham we see in Dominic and the Ladies’ Purse is very different. With the help of his leading man, Gautham gives us the most relaxed film of his career. I’m talking about the laid-back storytelling, which gives us the feel of reading a book (as opposed to watching a frantically paced movie made in these attention-deficit times). The quirkiness of the title extends to the whimsical tone of the film. When we first meet Dominic, he’s in a bathrobe with a logo that suggests it may have been stolen from a hotel. There are similar clues about Dominic all over. The curtains in his room are actually saris. Did those saris belong to his bitter ex-wife? Or are these memories of someone else? There’s a chessboard in the room, a badminton racquet. Was Dominic a sportsman? He says he quit the police force because he was too honest. Someone says he took bribes. What’s the truth?
The mystery that this local Sherlock Holmes takes up is brought up beautifully in the writing, by the director and Dr Neeraj Rajan and Dr Sooraj Rajan. The case begins when Dominic’s landlady (Viji Venkatesh) finds a ladies’ purse. She asks Dominic to return it to the owner, whose details are not in the purse. Then, the plot thickens. The person whose purse is missing turns out to be missing, too. And the landlady now wants Dominic to find this person. This is when you realise the solid layering in the film’s foundation. The landlady’s son has gone missing. She knows what it’s like to wait for someone who may or may not return. She extends this concern to the family of the missing purse-owner. There’s another big dramatic plot point involving Dominic’s ex-wife.
But none of this is handled heavily. With the exception of the final stretch, where the drama kicks into overdrive, these plot points are handled lightly, breezily – like Darbuka Siva’s score. The way a password to a pen drive is cracked is an example. It is borderline-silly, and yet, completely plausible and completely in sync with the tone of the film. The scene where Dominic invites himself to a birthday party and then realises whose birthday it is, is a scream. We get a dancer named Nandita, superbly played by Sushmitha Bhat. She’s the epitome of the GVM heroine: a gorgeous, graceful Bharatanatyam dancer who’s always impeccably dressed in fabulous saris and oxidised jewellery. But looking back, this may be the biggest “joke” of all. This may be Gautham deconstructing his own idea of the ideal woman. The abrupt interval block is equally amusing. It introduces us to a character who is connected to Nandita, and gives us crucial information about a loan – but this is cleverly covered up by the sight of Mammootty in action-hero mode. Because we anticipate the showdown, the verbal clues take a backseat – and come back to us only later.
The action blocks, especially the one inside Dominic’s house, are staged beautifully (and shot beautifully by Vishnu Dev). But this is the one aspect of the movie I didn’t buy. Dominic did not need these heroic displays. I liked him as the street-smart detective who is like the loser next door, and who has a constant cheerleader in the wide-eyed Watson played by Gokul Suresh. But this is not a great deal-breaker, because the film is filled with actorly Mammootty moments. In the brilliantly framed scene where Dominic watches Nandita dance, his face turns wistful, as though he is recalling something. We are never told what it is, but we always sense that this man has a dark inner life beneath his bright, humour-filled facade. Like those sari-curtains, like that badminton racquet and chessboard, we wonder about Dominic’s interest in dance.
Gautham seems to be having some more fun with little callbacks to his films: a reference to a detective’s “instinct”, or the insert of the line Suriya tells Simran in Vaaranam Aayiram. But his biggest achievement in Dominic and the Ladies’ Purse is to give us a story with an arc that travels from intentionally silly to totally serious, and yet seems one of a piece. The twist at the end is something we have seen in earlier films, and not all the clue-hunting works. But for fans of old-fashioned pulp thrillers that rely on character and mood rather than the intricacies of the mystery, this is a solid work, and a solidly crafted work. From the slow close-in on Veena Nair’s face as she narrates her story (she’s wonderful in this scene) to the constant snaky camera moves that suggest a kind of fluidity, as though everything is interconnected, the film is a treat. This is not a thriller. This is a throwback. It recalls a time when not every mystery had to be nail-biting. I didn’t know what to expect from this actor-director combination, and I came out smiling.
