Once upon a time, there lived a bored warrior, “a man whose name echoes across all lands” and yet, a man who suffered from “a loss of purpose”. All he wanted was a worthy challenge, so he went from place to place in his bullock cart – with his mentor and the mentor’s son – to duel with other fierce warriors. But look at what happened the first time he sought out one such challenge! (That is, the first time we see him seeking a challenge.) The opponent was big and beefy and built like a mountain and existed on a protein-stacked diet of raw eggs, but our warrior (who appears to exist solely on arrack) blew him away like a fart. He could barely hide his boredom, his contempt – in fact, he could not even bring himself to get up from his sitting pose as he sent this opponent packing. And he must have thought to himself: “Is there no one to give me a true challenge and shake me out of my slumberous existence?” Strip away the man’s existential crisis, and the premise of a warrior seeking worthy challenges sounds like an Indian folk tale.
But note Prashant Pillai’s very anachronistic score: the twang of a bass guitar, a whistle that sounds like wind echoing through a Sergio Leone desert. And note the very funny aftermath to this early action scene, which sets up Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Malaikottai Vaaliban. The great warrior – called Vaaliban, and played by Mohanlal – yanks out a stone tablet inscribed with the exploits of the man he just vanquished and hurls it into the sky, in the manner of a discus throw or a javelin event. The tablet lands far, far away, amidst a lonely goatherd and his goat. The puzzled man goes to inspect the item that apparently just fell from the sky, and then, he looks up and raises his hands, as though saying, “Thank you, God!” It reminded of this ginormous 1980s South African hit, The Gods Must Be Crazy, where a desert tribe sees a Coca-Cola bottle dropped from an aeroplane and thinks it’s a gift from the gods. I don’t know if Lijo was thinking particularly about The Gods Must Be Crazy, which was a film I saw while I was growing up – but he was surely thinking about the fantastical films he saw while growing up.
The very title sounds like a mashup of Malaikallan and Vanjikottai Vaaliban. There is a Spartacus-like slave revolt. There is an homage to the ‘Haan jab tak hai jaan’ song sequence from Sholay, where Hema Malini is asked to dance on broken glass in front of the man she loves, who is chained to pillars. And into this, Lijo drops in a belly-dancing equivalent to Helen from the ‘Mehbooba’ song sequence. There are inspirations from Kurosawa, Leone, and the Hong Kong ‘Shaolin’ martial arts movies (I loved that pose of Vaaliban resting on an inclined pole, mid-fight). Only Lijo can fully enumerate these references and appropriations – but one point that quickly emerges is that Malaikottai Vaaliban is not a “regular” film about a warrior, like, say, Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha. This is not a naturalistic movie, with “well-written characters” and so forth. It is a hallucinatory epic. Its style is part of its substance. Take a look at how Danish Sait plays – or, how he is made to play – a villain named Chamathakan. This villain is compared to a snake, so we hear the hiss of a rattlesnake in the background and his main “weapon” in a crucial moment is poison. Even all this can be treated as “naturalistic”, but Lijo takes us to a realm where Chamathakan opens his mouth and rattles his tongue, as though mimicking an actual snake.
In other words, there is a gestural, performative aspect to the whole movie, where nothing is real. The way I read the “story” is like this. Vaaliban faces a number of challenges, each one more difficult than the other. And these challenges are presented in a “mass” movie style, with full-on slow-motion and non-narrative diversions and hero-worshipping and outrageous heroics. (It’s like watching an Atlee blockbuster based on a Panchatantra story.) Vaaliban gets through all these challenges, with increasing difficulty. He still emerges victorious, and then he gets what he really wants: he gets that one challenge he has been waiting for. And in the last half-hour or so, Lijo does something fantastic (and fantastical). So far, we have been watching a “mass” movie, based on physical challenges. And now, Vaaliban is faced with an emotional challenge that shakes the roots of his existence (and also sets up the sequel). You can think of everything from Rajinikanth discovering who his mother is in Thalapathy to Luke Skywalker discovering who his father is in the Star Wars movies. The action gives way to serious drama, and the film shifts from “mass” mode to “masala” mode. Vaaliban is fond of saying: “What the eye sees is the truth. What remains unseen is a lie!”
But towards the end, he realises that the truth about him is something he never saw. All that he had been seeing with his eyes – that was the lie. This last portion carries a serious emotional charge, but the film does not build to it in a normal way – and this is a given, of course, because Lijo does not do “normal”. I liked the deliberate pacing, which makes us feel we have been transported to a timeless time. This gives the film the space to hold Madhu Neelakandan’s shots (and Lijo’s choreography) for a long time. There is a stunning dissolve-effect where slaves running out of prison look like ghosts, and all this artifice is heightened by the deliberate use of colours – like red in a bloody battle in a Portuguese colony (I think!) and yellow in an episode with masks. Each segment feels like a self-contained chapter – the first fight with an opponent, the second bigger fight with a bigger opponent, the third and even bigger fight with an even bigger opponent, the fourth and biggest fight with the self. We know that each of these chapters follow one another, but “cinematically” speaking, and the way Lijo crafts them, they exist as their own little universes, with their own rules and rhythms and colours.
The frames within the frames, the ‘stage play’-like sets and costumes (a key female character is introduced as a silhouette), and especially the dialogues create an effect that is at once distancing and magnetic. Early on, a woman that Vaaliban is with speaks of their parting, but she shapes this speech like a fable. (And the ‘actors’ we see in this fable are Vaaliban and this woman.) Later, a trans-woman tells her employer a fable about a love triangle, and this time, the fable transforms into actual events on screen. We are never “immersed” in this world. We are always aware that we are “watching a movie”, one that throws anything and everything into the mix: from the seductive lavani dance form to a peacock crown to a deranged (and delightful) Roberto Rodriguez-style action set piece involving a contraption with multiple cannons. Among the conventional – as in, non-abstract – pleasures of movie-watching, we get a deftly delineated romance between Vaaliban’s master’s son and a woman who limps to get attention. As character sketches, there isn’t much – but Manoj Moses and Katha Nandi transport us into the world of these lovers, especially in a gorgeous, minimalistic duet.
Amidst the cows and goats and donkeys, the actors find their space. Manikandan Achari, as a slave, steals the few scenes he is in. I enjoyed Sonalee Kulkarni’s performance as a seductive dancer, who violates the rules of her kind when she allows herself to fall in love. And Hareesh Peradi, as the master, mouths his rhetorical lines with the hammy confidence of a pre-cinema stage actor. He really sells his final scenes where his character gets precedence over the hero. What he narrates is the final “fable” in the narrative, and it’s a marvellous one. The film, of course, is owned by the hero and his director. Mohanlal registers in every single way: as a still presence, as a near-superhuman warrior, and as a human being who sighs that his destiny will not allow him to fall in love. This is a winking performance, one that knows that it is a performance. It is not invisible and internalised, but thrown at us with quiet power. As for Lijo, he has made a warrior story that looks and feels nothing like a warrior story. For all the battles and romances and drama, what we get is a singular eccentric vision. Does it come together fully? I am not sure.
There are portions I am still trying to put together in my head, like with Churuli. There are other portions that I did not connect to as much as I would have liked to. But I couldn’t tear my eyes off screen, always wondering what new subversion lies in store. I liked Malaikottai Vaaliban a lot, but unlike Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam, I am not going to label this an “instant classic” or a “masterpiece” or any such thing. I am just going to call it a quintessential Lijo Jose Pellissery film, and for now, that is enough praise.
