First Take | Is Jayasurya India’s finest contemporary actor?

What’s with these Malayali moviemakers? What do they eat for their lunch that makes their best works so superior to the best from the rest of the country? Bollywood of course being the mecca of mediocrity. Here, in Hindi cinema, we celebrate films that are barely palatable. We lower our standards in accordance with what is available in Bollywood. We make superstars out of upstarts who don’t even know the ‘a’ of acting.

I seriously suggest that some of the Bollywood A-listers, many of whom have been reining for decades and still can’t deliver their dialogues with the right pauses, watch Jayasurya in Meri Awas Suno. He is an actor in the truest sense of the world. I have gorged on his brilliance earlier in films like Sunny, Vellam, Captain and Shakespeare M.A Malayalam.

Jayasurya in Meri Awas Suno is in a league of his own. He plays a radio jockey who loses his voice to cancer. In theory that sounds like a very orchestrated scenario for a screenplay. One can imagine the brainstormers at the scripting session suggestion, ‘Let’s do a film about a guy whose voice is everything and he loses it. Awesome, no?’

What writer-director Prajesh Sen in collaboration with Jayasurya has done to the potentially exploitative story is miraculously motivational. I came away from this masterpiece eternally grateful for the gift of life and good health. I also came away with a sense of dread: it can all be snatched away in a jiffy.

Jayasurya takes us through RJ Shankar’s journey with such an unparalleled sense of tragic adventurism, he makes every second of the playing time valuable and precious. There are sequences during Shankar’s process of healing where the therapist ( Manju Warrier ) advises Shankar’s wife to ignore his voiceless predicament and helplessness, to let him work his way through his rage and frustration.

Jayasurya walks us through Shankar’s fall and rise with such deep empathy I was reminded of William Hurt in The Doctor where he too survived throat cancer. The life-changing process is beautifully adumbrated in both the films. Much as I liked William hurt in The Doctor I prefer Jayasurya in Meri Awas Suno. Why? Just so. The man is incredibly into his part. Watch him in the sequence where in a fit of (unspoken) anger he tries to strangle his wife. Sshividha as the wife is so-so-so all there, she just makes Jayasurya’s performance all the more transfixing.

But rest assured, Meri Awas Suno is not only a showcase for Jayasurya’s performance. Its message on humanism compassion and family ties is never pushed into the plot with a battering ram. The narration is a work of gentle persuasion. This drama of ruination and redemption sweeps us into tragic drama with a tender touch.

There are several moments in this motivational masterpiece where I found myself weeping copiously. Early in the film when all is well with Shankar, that call he gets from a little radio listener whose mother has no time for her has been edited with such splendid sharpness, that episode alone could have made for a fabulous movie.

Meri Sawas Suno is not satisfied with being just a good film. It wants to be much more. It says so much about the quality of life, I want to give the director and his leading man a standing ovation. The only false note is struck by Manju Warrier. As the voice therapist, she is way too flighty bouncy and bubbly in a film that constantly sobers down on its own level of adrenaline.

In comparison with Jayasurya, the other Malayalam maverick Mammootty comes across very poorly in his latest film CBI 5 . This is his fifth film in the forensic franchise and his heart is clearly not in it. Of course, you will never hear any critic imputing a bad performance on the all-time greats. When was the last time you read that Amitabh Bachchan , Mohanlal , Shabana Azmi , Vijayshanthi, or Mammootty had given a bad performance? Even the greatest actors are at the end of the Friday, human. CBI 5 proves it.

Okay, to solve the big mystery first. Why is CBI 5: The Brian the title of this film? Because it is the fifth film in the CBI series where the great Mammootty whom we recently saw in the stunning Puzhu, is reduced to playing Malayali Hercule Poirot.

If you are familiar with the franchise, you would know that Mammotty plays Sethurama Iyer a CBI officer this time investigating the murder of Kerala’s home minister in the air as he travels from Delhi to Kerala,

Initially, it is taken to be a normal heart attack. If you visit the Centre from the Kerala government, you are bound to get stressed. But no, there is more to this than meets the why.

I wish it wasn’t made. There was no need to stretch out the drama into a yawn-inducing yarn which is more a muddle than a murder mystery.

To be honest, and there is no polite way of putting this, CBI 5 The Brain, is a mess. Characters keep bobbing up from the murky water to give us a glimpse into their scheming hearts and evil intentions, none more evil than police officer Sathyadas (Saikumar) who has many axes to grind. But before grinding them he keeps grinding his teeth so hard you fear for his molars.

You also fear for the future of whodunits in Malayalam cinema. Just the other day we had the other cinema legend Mohanlal solving an indifferent murder mystery in 12th Man.

Choosing between Mammootty in CBI 5 and Mohanlal in 12th Man is like being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, although there is nothing especially devilish or sea-deep in either of the murder misfires.

The problem in CBI5, as in 12th Man, is in the screenplay by S. N. Swamy. The whodunit is swarming with smarmy politicians and cops, all hungry for power or wealth or both. The villainous Sathyadas is so cheesy he is more comical than intimidating. His wife is played by the talented Asha Sharath who is a lawyer subjected to endless taunting by her husband.

Why does she take it? Why do we take it? Why do we have to be inflicted with this vapid brainless whodunit which serves no purpose except to tell us that a pacemaker can be hacked like any computer?

Even the arrival of Mammootty in all his investigative glory can’t dispel the growing ennui that envelopes us from almost the first frame to the last. This is the kind of self-important mystery story that wants us to believe that it has something valuable to say. Sadly even Mammootty seems the least interested in who killed the minister, then a journalist and a cop…were there more victims? Sorry, I lost count. I was too busy licking my own wounds.

While watching a crime show as bedazzled by its own ingenuity as this could be problematic enough, making it worse is the self-references to earlier films and characters in the series.

Evidently, the makers of this who-gives-a-damn-whodunit think they have created a suspense franchise to equal Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries.

Little do they know.

Another disappointing film from another actor who has reputation of an impeccable delivery is Rk/Rkay. As a movie buff who has always enjoyed the cinema of Rajat Kapoor— Ankhon Dekhi and Mithya being personal favourites—his latest work left me with mixed feelings. It’s not that I disliked it. It’s just that I didn’t like it enough. At least, not as much as I’d have liked to. As a director Rajat Kapoor remains as audacious and seductive as ever. In Rk/Rkay he tears the idea of a doppelganger right out of a movie screen and brings it into his own home.

Let me explain. RK, the director, has just completed a film where he stars as a poet-lover Mehboob. The film, a passionate love story of Mehboob and Gulabo (Mallika Sherawat) has not turned out as well as expected (much like Rk/Rkay itself). The producer, a superb turn by Manu Rishi Chadha, is a disgruntled nervous businessman, who wants the tragic ending to be changed into a happy one.

Here we see Rajat Kapoor vent his sarcasm on the mythical philistinism of Bollywood movie producers. It is an unfair description. Just because you as a filmmaker have no access to big money (this film was made with public funding) you cannot look at the movie-producer ilk as ugh.

But then RK, the director in the film, is as churlish as Rajat Kapoor in real life. RK gets even more churlish when Mehboob(Rajat in a double role), the character he plays in his own film, disappears (yes literally disappears) from the film and lands up at his home as an uninvited house guest. It is this part of the plot, where RK the director’s home space is taken over by Mehboob (who in theory is just a character in RK’s film and who doesn’t exist) that perks up the proceedings. Without external props, Rajat Kapoor is able to portray RK and Mehboob as two completely antithetical characters . We can see why RK’s wife and children begin to warm to Mehboob, or perhaps the idea of Mehboob, as he brings back the poetry so abysmally gone from RK’s wife’s marriage.

This idea of a character jumping out of the screen was explored far more powerfully by Woody Allen in The Purple Rose Of Cairo. Here it just remains an interesting idea, potentially innovative but largely unexplored. While Kapoor is a smashing success in the two roles, Mallika Sherawat as Mehboob’s femme fatale in the film-within-film is a disaster. She looks neither enticing nor seductive. Kubbra Sat is ill-cast as RK’s unhappy wife. Rajat Kapoor’s regular cinematographer Rafey Mehmood composes the frames to simultaneously denote a sense of growing frustration and escalating escapism. The camerawork reminds us of how ambitious this film really is.

Another new illustration of the not-everything-that-glitters-is-gold adage: Israeli director Navad Lapid’s fourth film about cultural oppression in Israel is so oppressive it leaves you feeling squeezed from both ends. It is an exhausting largely exasperating non-drama. And by non-drama, I don’t mean nothing happens. In fact, many things keep happening. But they don’t add up to anything. It all seems hazy and, if I say so, lazy. And yes, more than a bit crazy.

A self-centered vain and arrogant filmmaker who we know throughout this dreary film as Y (Avshalom Pollak) arrives in a small sleepy sandy city in Isreal where we presume, nothing much happens. So the arrival of a known arthouse filmmaker (equivalent to India’s Anurag Kashyap) in this town is news.

A bright cultural attaché Yahalom (Nur Fibak) is assigned to Y. She seems a big fan of Y and his work. So dazzled by his artistry that she can’t tell the difference between the man and his work.

Initially, there seems to be a mutual attraction between the artiste and the fan; you know, the idol and the idolizer locked in a mutual love for the same person. I expected a lot of discussion and steamy sex. Instead, the two are seen roaming the scorching deserts sharing sweat instead of sex.

Y seems vain and full of himself. He narrates war-time stories to Yahalom. She listens in rapt attention. We don’t. These flashbacks/fantasies are neither reliable nor interesting. They are injected with a deep sense of hurt, a hurt that is so corrosive and embedded in the socio-cultural history of the province that everything begins to seem like a documentary shot with a handheld camera.

There is a lack of consistency in the storytelling which in some critics’ circles is considered a sign of mature filmmaking. In Ahed’s Knee, the filmmaker’s wisdom and truth is wedged between the devil and the deep blue sea: he wants us to believe in his cry against oppression and yet he chooses to stifle the voice of protest by imposing an oppressive mood over the theme of oppression.

The relationship between Y and Yahalom never grows: they both have too much on their mind to think of what is staring in their face. Repeatedly the narrative keeps strolling into mind games where we see what Y want us and Yahalom to see. He tells her about a war game wherein he was locked into an elaborate war camp that was actually a fake, a sham war front. An image of war, rather than a real one.

The film feels the same weight of a vaguely oppressive filmmaking technique whereby we are being bullied to believe what the director wants us to. In that sense, he is no different from Y who invents the reality as per his convenience. Towards the end, he threatens to expose Yahalom’s statement on the subversive politics of Israel so that he can feel like a liberating hero.

And here lies the crux of the problem. The hero filmmaker sets his moral compass according to his own will regardless of how his behaviour affects others. Ahed’s Knee is as oppressive as the culture it pertains to deride.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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