The film is about the deseperations of a middle-class man. And while comedy is definitely welcome in a serious premise, the screenplay keeps turning to jokes as a crutch, and this affects the story being told. The rest of this review contains spoilers.
In Kudumbasthan, Manikandan plays a middle-class man named Naveen. He is married to Vennila, played by Saanve Megghana. She is studying for her IAS exams, so until that hurdle is cleared, he is the sole breadwinner in the family unit, which also contains his mother and father. Naveen is in and out of jobs, owing to his sense of self-respect. He stands up for a friend who has been wronged, and refuses to apologise for slapping a big-shot client because he knows that he did the right thing. But in a system where money is power, can the powerless afford to have self-respect? Can the moneyless afford to stand up to the men with money? An early scene shows Naveen and Vennila getting married in a register office. A man blesses them with these words: “Inime unga vazhkaiyila vasantha kaathu veesa pogudhu.” He says that their life is going to be like the spring breeze. CUT TO: air filled with dust and pollution, thanks to fast vehicles racing into the premises with the couple’s angry parents.
The scene is played as comedy. It’s a visual joke. But it’s also a metaphor for Naveen’s life. Nothing goes right. The self-respect he has makes him spend beyond his means when it comes to a family function. But when his mother gets up to make an omelette, he knows that there are exactly three eggs in the kitchen. In other words, he’s in such a bad financial situation that he’s keeping a close eye on the provisions at home. And we come to a different kind of definition of self-respect. Is Naveen’s issue more a matter of ego or perhaps foolishness? Can he not learn to live within his means? But then, that’s the middle-class curse. The upper classes have money. The lower classes have no money. But caught in the middle, the middle classes have money but never enough money.
Director Rajeshwar Kalisamy has a good eye for filmmaking. Kudumbasthan is fast-paced, but this is not due to lazy, fragmented cutting. The writing, the staging, the dynamic photography by Sujith Subramaniam and editing by Kannan Balu, all combine to make the movie move like a bullet. The visual of a man being slapped cuts to the slapping sound when another man makes a promise with his palm and this cuts to another visual of yet another man being slapped. The three scenes happen in a matter of seconds. So the film has energy, a solid plot, solid performances… What it doesn’t have is tonal consistency. The premise is more suited to drama, but the director wants to entertain us throughout with one-liners and situational humour. The quieter jokes like a woman wearing a sari without removing the store label or a man pretending to be a doctor for a second time – these land perfectly. But the louder humour becomes tiresome after a while.
Guru Somasundaram plays Naveen’s brother-in-law. He is treated like a cartoon throughout, having Tom-and-Jerry games with Naveen – and his change of heart at the end is not convincing. Naveen’s mother is another caricature. Kudumbasthan is certainly an easy watch, but it tries to milk jokes out of one premise: Naveen’s increasingly desperate attempts to make money. (A rooster fight? Really?) And after a while, a sense of repetition sets in, along with the sense that the screenplay will try and force a laugh out of any situation, even the birth of a baby. On the one hand, we have a pregnant woman whose labour pains finally make her burst out against her mother-in-law’s ill-treatment of her. On the other hand, in parallel, we get a man eating bananas by the dozen so that he can “deliver” the bottle cap he accidentally swallowed. It’s almost like the director doesn’t trust his audience with a drama. He keeps saying: “Look this is a comedy, look this a comedy!”
I am not saying that a dramatic premise cannot accommodate comedy. But the balance has to be right. Yes, we need to laugh from time to time. But we also need to feel the plight of an SC woman stuck in a household where relatives mock her about her caste. We need to feel her ambition in wanting to clear the IAS exams. We need to feel Naveen’s desperation as more than just a source for funny situations. We need to feel his utter degradation when he’s trapped in a toilet that has not been cleaned in months. We need to genuinely feel his emotions when he speaks to his unborn child while his wife is asleep. It’s as though he is using her pregnant belly as a daily diary. We need to feel his frustration that makes him talk to himself, which is why he asks his friend not to mock another man who they see talking to himself.
The scenes that work best are the ones that stick close to the premise and bring out what’s inside this story, inside this middle-class man and his family. The quiet scene between a woman and a divorce lawyer, the superb explosion from Naveen when he screams at his family for valuing him only as long as he makes money, a wife’s equally superb explosion about Naveen’s lopsided idea of self-respect – these are the building blocks of this movie. Had the characters behaved more consistently, had they not become caricatures when required to manufacture a funny moment, had the humour been more balanced and woven in more organically, Kudumbasthan might have been a nice modern-day update of movies like Middle Class Madhavan or Varavu Ettana Selavu Pathana. In its present avatar, it’s a not-bad watch, nothing less, but also nothing more.
