Nivin Pauly and Mamitha Baiju play Justin and Ashley. They fall in love despite a significant age difference. Both actors are marvellous in this movie that’s not just about their emotions but also a community where the feelings of others are important, too. You’ll laugh. You’ll tear up. You’ll be thoroughly charmed. That’s the basic storyline and the quick review. A longer analysis follows, and it may contain spoilers.
Bethlehem Kudumba Unit begins with an in-flight announcement. We see the character played by Mamitha Baiju. As of this moment, we don’t know that her name is Ashley. We don’t know where she boarded this flight. We don’t know why she looks “melancholic”, as someone will call her later. After the flight lands, we see her in a car with her parents. They are a little annoyed about a social obligation. They have to “show face” at a wedding. At least the mother seems a bit startled when Ashley says she will join them. What we are seeing here are outlines that will be filled in with colour later. We will learn where Ashley is from, why she is melancholic, why this wedding seems something of a big deal – but all in good time. For now, there are bigger priorities, like a bite-size running gag about Mysorepak, or a caterer who is passing off chicken that’s been burnt as “smoky chicken”.
An utterly charming Nivin Pauly plays this caterer, Justin. The first time we get a sense that he and Ashley are going to hit it off is through a match cut that occurs even before he and Ashley have met. She brings down the pick on her guitar strings, and this action is edited in sync with Justin bringing down a matchstick to light his cigarette. The filmmaking seems to be doing the matchmaking. Both of them have nicknames defined by things they did earlier: he is “Mp3 King” and she is “Room 17”. Both of them are defined by tragedies. He lives with the memories of a dead girlfriend. She lives with the memories of the town and the house she grew up in, before financial troubles forced her family to relocate to Justin’s tightly knit Christian neighbourhood. And when they finally meet, they see another similarity. They are both fans of an obscure rock band.
Bethlehem Kudumba Unit is written by the director Girish AD with Kiran Josey. They collaborated earlier on Premalu, which was a feel-good film. This is more like a feel-warm film. Many moments make you smile or laugh out loud, from the way a woman is casually teased about her “96 Trisha churidar” to Ashley and Justin’s “date” in a supermarket to pretty much everything done by Glixon, the riotous character played by Roshan Shanavas. But the heart of the film lies in the way it humanises this small, flaws-and-all neighbourhood. Take Ashley’s mother. In an early scene, her husband finds a document that he cannot read. Ashley looks at it and says it’s his wedding certificate. Her mother dismisses it curtly, and you think it’s just one of those things a long-married spouse would do – as opposed to, say, giving the paper a “sweet memories” look. But slowly, we see that this woman has struggled with her husband’s alcoholism, and this wedding certificate is practically useless in her eyes.
She has no time for the past. She is only invested in a future in which Ashley will go abroad and take care of the family. And this is primarily why she objects to Ashley’s love for Justin. Part of it may be the age gap of twelve-thirteen years. But the bigger worry is that Ashley may settle into an amiable life of doing nothing much in a town where no one’s ambitious and no one seems to do anything much. The woman could have easily become a villain, but she is just someone who has struggled all her life and cannot bear to give up her one last great hope for happiness. Even her brother (Vinay Fortt) objects to the match because he cannot see his niece marrying a man who is more or less his own age. This is why you don’t hate them. You understand them. If Girish had his way, world peace may be achieved over the course of his filmography.
Even the romance is hardly what you’d call a romance. It has its share of warm-fuzzy moments – the “I love you”-s and “I miss you”-s. But what Ashley sees in Justin is not some kind of Prince Charming but a very comfortable armchair. He makes her feel safe. He makes her feel seen. He fixes her laptop, and he makes her feel that perhaps he can fix her life, too. Because of her tragedies, she has had to begin adulting early, and this may be another reason she prefers the older Jutsin to the more age-appropriate boys around. Nivin and Mamitha are both fantastic, both in their scenes together and apart. They perform without a trace of artifice or cuteness, and they sell this love track like a dream. Just before the interval, we get a scene where Ashley is getting ready for a stage show and Justin is with his friends. They are physically apart, but what unites them is their happiness. We see her smile and we see his smile and we smile right back at the screen. Bindu Panicker has a beautiful role as the most unlikely of matchmakers. The woman is a nun. She sees the suffering and the longing inside Ashley and Justin. She blesses the union, and we get the feeling that even God would not mind this age gap as long as these two souls can find their happiness with each other.
Bethlehem Kudumba Unit is filled with joyful music by Vishnu Vijay, and the film is as much about the central characters as the people around them, the numerous friends and cousins who quickly begin to feel like our own family. Sangeeth Prathap is wonderful as a short-film maker who gets his own subversive love track. Justin’s driving skills come of use in this situation, and these skills are established much earlier in the movie. Ashley plays a flamenco track on her guitar, and this underscores a scene of chaos she is unaware of – but her love for the guitar has been established even before Ashley moved into this town, when her school friends gifted the instrument to her. Even the fireworks that interrupt the screening of a short film are preceded by an earlier scene with fireworks. And because everything cannot be so structured, we get wonderfully loose and crazy moments as well – like the way a man falls into a well and seems to forget the self-righteous rage that he was filled with just a moment ago.
Girish has made a very entertaining movie where the external manifestations of conflict are shown in a light manner – but if you look past this treatment, you’ll see that this lightness is deceptive. Girish seems to be asking why something dramatic cannot have silly jokes, or why something with madcap laughs can’t also be something you feel deeply for. In other words, he erases the easy lines between comedy and drama. The Sangeeth Prathap character is all fun, until the moment he sees Justin crying and turns into someone we haven’t seen so far. We all contain multitudes. Mainstream cinema, for the sake of convenience, streamlines our complexities. Girish lets them be. When Ashley sees Justin drinking and sighs that her fate is with drunkards, she isn’t raging against fate. At least at this moment, what she says is just an observation about her life. That’s what Girish does. He puts people in position and then he observes. He is a behavioural scientist with a movie camera.
