Language: Malayalam
At an unidentified, isolated location on a pitch-black night, a stationary police jeep comes into view. As a man goes about the task of capturing the passengers, another sits with his back to the camera and the lights of the vehicle shining so bright on him, that his body appears to possess an aura.
That silhouette is recognisable as belonging to Prithviraj Sukumaran, the marquee name in this film’s credits. Right then and there, director Manu Warrier establishes his resolve to skip the loudness long associated with men-centric, ultra-commercial Malayalam cinema. He does not give Prithviraj a formulaic grand entry with high-volume introductory music and camerawork that giganticises him. Instead, like the star’s face, we don’t get to see the full length of his physique either at that point. And around him, the sounds of a still night punctuate the muffled struggles of the captives.
This appealing low-key tone remains consistent through a large part of Warrier’s Kuruthi – written by Anish Pallyal – in which Prithviraj and Roshan Mathew play devout Muslim men clashing over the dictates of their faith.
Roshan plays Ibrahim, a rubber tapper coping with a terrible personal loss. He lives with his gruff old father, Moosa (Mamukkoya), and younger brother, Resul (Naslen), who is getting restless about what he sees as the targeting of Muslims in their land.
Ibrahim’s friends include his Hindu neighbour Sumathi (Srindaa) and her brother.
Long-standing bonds and beliefs are put to test when a policeman (Murali Gopy) barges into Ibrahim’s house one night with a prisoner, followed by another intruder.
In the real world, where calls to assault Muslims are now publicly given with impunity in north India, Kerala may seem like an oasis of peace to a distant observer. However, there is enough underlying unrest in this small southern Indian state to be a cause for worry among its liberals and justify their unrelenting scrutiny of Malayalam cinema. While vigilance in a troubling socio-political scenario is good, this cynicism has sometimes led to unfair accusations of Islamophobia against films that deserved better, most recently Sajin Baabu’s Biriyaani and Mahesh Narayanan’s Malik. It is a massive challenge for any filmmaker then to create an intelligently crafted film on Hindu-Muslim strife that does justice to both communities without the effort showing. In Kuruthi, the effort shows. And ultimately, at least at a subliminal level, the Muslim community comes off the worse for it.
The film’s overlying message is beautifully articulated by Moosa: “Man always needs something to hate. To maintain that hatred between us, there will always be a ‘them’ and ‘us’. A spark of hate is all you need to ignite a raging fire. Once the fire rages, we keep hating to make sure it never dies. In the end, we fool ourselves into believing that we’ve won while we burn to death in that very same fire.”
Many of the early interactions between this ensemble of characters are believable as they highlight the helplessness of ordinary citizens caught between extremists of all hues, the manner in which personal grudges often fuel communal actions, the way radicals latch on to impressionable minds, the ridiculousness of animosity between two communities in circumstances where those who are in an overwhelming majority claim victimhood by selectively dredging up supposed historical wrongs of invaders from centuries gone by, or even the double standards of fundamentalists in a minority community who will not admit to any fanaticism emerging from their midst. Fair enough. Liberalism does not mean denying the existence of minority communalism.
Ever so often though, Kuruthi displays what I hope is only a subconscious bias. Such as by letting a problematic statement by a Hindu character go unchallenged, but not permitting a reverse situation with any Muslim character. Note how a man called Vishnu (Sagar Surya) speaks of his people’s suffering due to reservations. The absence of a voice to counter him panders to the majoritarian discourse in reality, which falsely holds that affirmative action for oppressed castes and religious minorities robs upper castes and the religious majority of resources and opportunities.
It is also unacceptable if a film scans minority communalism through a lens that plays up stereotypes that prevail off screen. For one, the misconception that most Hindus are vegetarians combined with the image of Muslims as cleaver-wielding, ravenous meat-eaters has been used to demonise the latter community in India for decades, more so now, as a result of which the starting block of Kuruthi itself is questionable: Ibrahim enters with a scene in which he insists on slaughtering a goat that had been promised to God although his daughter has grown fond of it. He is portrayed as a kind soul throughout and the purported purpose of that passage is to convey his resoluteness when he gives his word to God, no matter what the personal cost to him (a related situation comes up later), but that is not the only take-way from the scene.
Kuruthi means ritualistic animal sacrifice and has been translated in the subtitles as “The Holy Slaughter”. The title is definitively connected to the Muslims in the plot through the opening scene with Ibrahim and the subsequent wild-eyed portrayal of a character called Laiq by Prithviraj. A murder committed initially by a significant Hindu character takes place off screen, whereas the acts of brutality depicted on screen in bloody detail are all committed by Laiq. Besides, Laiq and his cohort Umar (Navas Vallikkunnu) are the only characters written without empathy. Everyone else, even an acknowledged criminal like Vishnu, is humanised to some degree.
If none of this is deliberate, it is incredibly mindless considering that Kuruthi is being released in an India where Muslims are under siege. It is also disappointing since Manu Warrier’s debut venture, Coffee Bloom (Hindi, 2015), was a sweet film about letting go of bitterness, while Anish Pallyal co-wrote Prasanth Vijay’s charming, sensitive Athishayangalude Venal (Summer of Miracles / Malayalam).
All this is such a contrast to the omnipresent Ibrahim’s likeability and Moosa’s wisdom that it takes a while to sink in. After the scene with Ibrahim’s daughter, when he searches for his rubber-tapping implements at home, it feels as if the writer and director are challenging the viewer to confront our own innate prejudices and reminding us that in Islamophobic India, work tools placed innocently around a man’s house might well be interpreted as proof of terrorist activities if the house belongs to a Muslim. If that was the goal of that scene, then what happens later is inexplicable.
As with too many Malayalam films, including those of the beloved New New Wave, Kuruthi too is male-dominated. Apart from Sumathi, women are absent from the foreground and almost entirely from the background too.
The cast comprises several acting stalwarts. It is a pleasure to see Mamukkoya get so much well-deserved screen space as he buries himself in his grim character. Roshan Mathew and Srindaa are naturalistic as usual. Prithviraj’s over-stressed dialogue delivery in the first scene in which we see his face and his pointed effort to look menacing for a while thereafter are the only overstated elements in Kuruthi’s otherwise understated narrative (this understatedness is one of the nicest things about it). Later in a conversation between Laiq and Resul in the outdoors, we see Prithviraj for the artiste he is capable of being, though by then it is too late for his character.
There is some suspense in Kuruthi’s plotline, but a couple of twists led by individuals revealing hitherto hidden colours are unconvincing. Some of the characterisation is flimsy too. Till the end, for instance, I could not quite make out what makes Ibrahim tick: conviction or sheep-like adherence to his religion.
Whether the writing of the Muslim characters is intentional or unthinking may be debatable, but there can be no debate on the mindlessness of representing the establishment solely through an honest Hindu policeman who is willing to give up his life for his duty. Can it be that in Warrier and Pallyal’s eyes, the system is upright and the citizenry to blame for all discord? Or is this unintentional too? C’mon gentlemen, you can’t be serious.
Rating: 2.5 (out of 5 stars)
Kuruthi is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/kuruthi-movie-review-prithviraj-sukumaran-starrer-undermines-its-own-lofty-messaging-on-hindu-muslim-ties-9878151.html
