Kanakam Kaamini Kalaham movie review: Nivin Pauly's instinct for scripts goes missing with this ordinary comedy

Language: Malayalam On any given day, a comedy that brings together director Ratheesh Balakrishnan Poduval who debuted with Android Kunjappan Version 5.25 , actors Nivin Pauly, Vinay Forrt and Jaffar Idukki of everything-they’ve-done-so-far fame and Grace Antony from Kumbalangi Nights , would sound like a dream project. Poduval’s sophomore venture as director, Kanakam Kaamini Kalaham, is a team-up of some fantastic talents yet misses a great script and that X Factor that is essential to elicit laughs. It starts off well with opening credits that, apart from being amusing, also take a swipe at caste-based surnames, thus holding out the promise of an intelligent entertainer to follow. The promise remains unkept as the script runs out of steam early on and even fails to make an important political point it is clearly aiming at. Perhaps the title itself should have been a warning sign. Kanakam Kaamini Kalaham (KKK) is a reference to the widely held age-old dictum that all wars in this world have been fought over women or gold, which is most often interpreted to mean that women and wealth cause conflict — not men who actually fight those wars. No of course, men are helpless victims of their circumstances and/or the female half of the species. It does not bode well for the film at all that its chosen name rests on this yawn-worthy cliche, the sort about which women are told to “relax, chill…c’mon, have a sense of humour, baby!” KKK’s problems go way beyond the trite title though. The sad truth is that the script by Poduval himself lacks substance, the film is only intermittently funny, gets repetitive after a point and the direction lacks energy. KKK’s narrative kicks off in a reasonably engaging fashion. Nivin Pauly plays Pavithran KV, a struggling junior artiste in Malayalam cinema who also runs an acting academy. His wife Haripriya (Grace Antony) used to act in Malayalam soaps. To save his rocky marriage, Pavithran buys her a pair of gold earrings and — for reasons I won’t reveal here — takes her on a vacation to Munnar. There, they encounter an assortment of characters including the hotel manager Joby (Vinay Forrt) who is dealing with his own share of relationship troubles, and a perpetually drunken stranger played by Jaffar Idukki. Pavithran’s questionable intentions and Haripriya’s temper lead to the friction that forms the pivot of the plot.

When actors with such excellent natural comic timing gather on screen, some laughter is inevitable. But beyond a point, they have nothing on which to rest their enthusiasm.

A character named Manaf Khan is introduced to shine a light on how easily suspicion falls on Muslims when crimes are committed in an Islamophobic society, but the running gag about him ends up being self-defeating when the script decides to balance things out by pointing out that sometimes the suspicions are indeed on point. What a disappointing way of critiquing extreme prejudice! The only joke that is sustained effectively from the moment it is introduced is the one involving Joy Mathew’s character, Jaffar Idukki and mayflowers in the monsoon. It is a hoot, and is all the evidence we need that Poduval should perhaps give slapstick humour another shot sometime in future. It is unfortunate that the collective skills of the cast end up being wasted, because every once in a while each one shows us what they are capable of. In that scene in which Pavithran addresses Haripriya as “honey” for the first time, the barely discernible flicker of emotion on her face tells you everything you need to know about this brilliant woman’s comic potential. The insubstantial script lets her down though. When vomit becomes a vehicle for comedy in a film — more than once — you know it is out of ideas. I signed out of KKK, however, in a scene that plays around with a possible rape. KKK is Nivin Pauly’s latest film as producer. In his earlier productions, he revealed an eye for scripts that ended up yielding quality middle-of-the-road cinema that was off the beaten track even by the standards of this experimental phase in Malayalam cinema : the police procedural Action Hero Biju, and _Njandukalude Nattil Oridavela_ (An Interval In The Land of Crabs), a light-hearted story of a family whose mother is diagnosed with cancer. That instinct has clearly betrayed him in this case. For a film with such interesting individuals attached to it, Kanakam Kaamini Kalaham is surprisingly ordinary. Kanakam Kaamini Kalaham is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar. Rating: 1.75 stars

(Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad)