Saturday Night movie review: Why is Nivin Pauly in this scattered, scatter-brained ode to imagined male suffering?

Language: Malayalam Cast: Nivin Pauly, Aju Varghese, Saiju Kurup, Siju Wilson, Grace Antony, Shari, Malavika Sreenath, Saniya Iyappan, Niva James, Prathap Pothen Director: Rosshan Andrrews Director Rosshan Andrrews’ Saturday Night is a primal call to humankind never to lose the innocence of youth. Noble intention indeed, except that humankind is really just mankind in this film’s vision, the destroyers of their peace and self-confidence are mainly women, and innocence is confused with juvenility, irresponsibility and unrelenting vitality that no one can possibly sustain unless they are on a substance-induced high. There are a handful of funny patches – just patches – in Saturday Night, but for the most part, aspirations far outweigh impact in this new film with an unmistakable patriarchal mindset. Nivin Pauly , Aju Varghese , Saiju Kurup and Siju Wilson here play friends Stanley, Sunil (a.k.a. Poochcha Sunil), Justin and Ajith who have drifted apart. When Justin was once publicly humiliated, Stanley had offered him unequivocal solidarity. Later, when Sunil was assaulted, Stanley defended him while Justin and Ajith did nothing. Stanley vowed revenge for the attack. It is clear by then that he is more committed to the friendship than the rest of the quartet.

Years pass. Except for Stanley, the rest are struggling, either emotionally or financially or in both areas. When at last they reunite for a purpose, the others find Stanley’s hyperactivity and child-like, childish behaviour incomprehensible. Justin and Ajith conclude that he is “mad”. What though is the definition of madness? This is the question Saturday Night examines. In a remote sense, Saturday Night reminded me of Danish auteur Lars von Trier’s contentious The Idiots (1998), in which a group of adults shed their inhibitions to find the ‘idiot’ within each of them, trying to achieve this goal by acting in public as though they were in the throes of spasticity. This was their rebellion against a restrictive society. Their conduct was conscious, Stanley’s though is accidental and is subsequently consciously aped by Justin and Ajith. As a concept, The Idiots was intriguing, but it was an insufferable viewing experience – chaotic, pretentious and over-the-top. Just to be clear, this is not to say that Saturday Night is a copy, but that it inhabits the same thematic universe. In terms of treatment too, Saturday Night is not as OTT, nor at any point repulsive to behold, but it is incoherent, all over the place and tiresome. When the leads’ lives intersect again, Ajith, Justin and Stanley are in relationships with women who they ultimately rebel against. The three women are the film’s symbols of cramping social set-ups. Their portrayal is an extension of the jokes that fly about in the real world about how marriage ends a man’s freedom – jokes that are usually cracked by men whose wives have left their homes to move into the husband’s or his family’s house, given up their surnames, borne children who are given the Dad’s name, quit their career or subordinated it to the man’s job in families that consider house-keeping and child-rearing her primary if not sole duty, never his. (Minor spoilers in the next three paragraphs) Ajith is married to the mild-mannered Susan (Grace Antony) who is always solicitous towards him. She is the daughter of a moneyed man, and the couple live in her father’s home. Ajith constantly complains of being suffocated without elaborating further, and Naveen Bhaskar’s script treats his feeling of imprisonment as natural and understandable. Why? Because he was forced into the marriage due to his own fault? Or because a man living in his wife’s parental home is that inconceivable? All the women in Saturday Night are one-note characters, none more so than Justin’s bossy girlfriend (Niva James). She terrorises him and is a caricature of arrogance, going so far as to command him to embrace her at their office. Meanwhile, Stanley rebels against his wealthy fiancée (Malavika Sreenath) whose crime is that she objected to Sunil demeaning her father. (Spoiler alert ends) Stanley’s mother (Shari) is the only woman in Saturday Night who is some form of a person, and not a mere outline. The same cannot be said of an inexplicable creature with inexplicable purpose played by Saniya Iyappan. Someone tell the team of Saturday Night that giving a female character dreadlocks, a motorbike and a nomadic life is not characterisation, nor can it camouflage the film’s overall illiberalism. Before MRAs and the #NotAllMen lobby descend on this page, let me spell out the obvious in black and white: it is not this review’s contention that flawed women should not be portrayed on screen; the point is that the writing of women in this film is superficial, and the script’s lopsided perception of wrongdoings on their part reveals the creators’ blatant prejudice.

Saturday Night reads like an apology note from Rosshan to everyone who’s been offended by his feminist or aiming-to-be-feminist works. When the maker of How Old Are You (2014) marginalised women in the otherwise thoughtful Kayamkulam Kochunni four years later, it was troubling enough. His Prathi Poovankozhi (2019) showed a lack of awareness of the all-pervasiveness of sexual harassment in women’s lives, but at least it meant well. There are no excuses for Saturday Night. This is a film for men, by men, about men, that cannot escape its animosity towards women or its sense of imagined male victimhood. That is not the projected theme, of course. The theme is our inner child. Towards this end, the director tries to maintain a frenetic pace and fills frame after frame with psychedelic colours, snapshots of Mysuru (one of the film’s few saving graces) and characters perennially in motion. Energy, however, cannot compensate for emptiness in storytelling, and the four lead actors’ commitment to the film cannot compensate for its hollowness and upside-down gender politics. Saturday Night is like that celebrity you see in interviews offering to recount a funny episode and struggling to control their laughter while narrating a decidedly unfunny story. The disconnect between intent and effect is mortifying. Rating: 0.5 (out of 5 stars)  Saturday Night is in theatres

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, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .