Thoughts on Minnal Murali, and a chat with Tovino Thomas

Last week I did a short phone interview with the actor Tovino Thomas, for India Today. The Q&A is below. Before that, some thoughts on Tovino, whose work I have been enjoying in recent times – especially last year’s Kala (which he also co-produced) and Kaanekkaane, and the new superhero film Minnal Murali (which was the peg for the India Today interview).

Though Tovino is, to put it mildly, a good-looking man with considerable screen presence, that in itself doesn’t account for the part he is playing in the ongoing Malayalam cinema renaissance. What’s more notable is that much of his best work gets its tension from the contrast between his hunky charm on the one hand, and a vulnerability – or in some cases, unlikability – in his characters.

Some fine films have used this dichotomy to terrific effect: in both Kala and Kaanekkaane, for instance, Tovino’s personality and physical appearance help subvert a narrative, or keep us guessing. In the heavily stylized Kala, the establishing sequences, including an intense lovemaking scene, suggest that his alpha-male character Shaji is the protagonist (even though he looks a little too feral to be a straight “hero”). But as the narrative continues Shaji loses much of his self-assurance and we see him in a very different light. Meanwhile, in Kaanekkaane, as a man whose wife died in an accident, Tovino looks lost and distracted, then shows heartfelt emotion near the end – but much of the film’s suspense hinges on the possibility that the character is a philanderer who lied to his ex-father-in-law; so what else might he be capable of?

Different sides of the actor’s persona are also on view in Minnal Murali, the acclaimed new superhero film with Tovino as a small-town tailor, Jaison, who discovers new possibilities in himself after a freak lightning strike. The film moves inevitably towards a climax where Tovino gets to strike a heroic pose in his custom-fitted costume, but long before that we see Jaison as a man-child who sulks and mumbles “I deserve a better life!” to himself. In the initial scenes it is the eventual “super-villain” Shibu (wonderfully played by Guru Somasundaram) who seems more soulful and sympathetic, appearing to use his superpowers for a noble cause – saving a little girl – while Jaison is still goofing around. But soon their arcs change. Both men are in some way “unsuitable” – and harassed by people around them, including the police – but as one grows in stature the other regresses.

It's an atypical setting (for the genre), there is slapstick comedy, and the story builds in mundane, unglamorous contexts: Jaison tests his powers by juggling kitchen utensils and stopping a dirty-looking ceiling fan with one hand; clumsily, he discovers that flying is not one of his new gifts. And Tovino – listed the most desirable man from Kerala in a 2018 survey – sends up his own image as a style icon: in one scene, Jaison poses for a camera in an “Abibas” shirt (which he thinks is the real thing) and goes “Stylish, right?” He’s still a long way from being a saviour, and it’s one of the reasons why Minnal Murali is such an unusual and charming superhero movie.

Another thing I liked about the film was that though no time period is specified, it seemed to be set in a pre-liberalisation India that was much more cut off from the rest of the world. (Of course, the small-town Kerala setting already places the film at a remove from the big-city superhero movie; but period-wise it helps that this is a world without the internet or cell-phones.) Speaking as an 80s kid, it was comforting to feel that when Jaison’s little nephew gushes to him about American superheroes, the Superman and Batman being talked about might be the Christopher Reeve and Michael Keaton versions, and that Spiderman is a 5.30 pm cartoon show rather than a feature film. It felt like this dissociated the film from today’s Marvel and DC franchises, which have cluttered the superhero landscape so much that even fans sometimes find it hard to follow the chronologies and interrelationships; or from the ponderous “it’s dark and brooding, so it’s more meaningful than your regular comic-book stories” world of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films.

Here is the Q&A:

As an actor, how satisfying was it to do Minnal Murali? There is a perception that superhero movies aren’t good for “serious” actors, but I felt you got to do a bit of everything in this film.

Yes – I enjoyed playing the many shades of Jaison, from a self-centred, juvenile guy to a superhero who becomes selfless. It’s a gradual transformation, we wanted to keep it subtle, and I had to think like this character: if someone like Jaison gets a superpower, he won’t go out and start saving people the next day, he will just be excited to start with. Evolving into something good over a period of time, looking beyond his own selfish concerns – that’s what provided the character arc and made it worthwhile as an actor.

Did Basil Joseph (the director) and you set out to make it as rooted as possible, to be different from the regular type of superhero movie?

That came naturally to us – Basil and I are both small-town boys who dreamt of cinema as youngsters, then met at some point. I did Godha (2017) with him, we became good friends, our families are close now. It’s a very good working relationship too: he gave me the space to improvise, and I can see it on his face when I give a good performance, which is very encouraging. Also, we both have kids inside us – we don’t want to grow up!

With our budgets, we couldn’t do a Marvel or DC-type film anyway, and you can’t have superheroes flying around skyscrapers in a Kerala setting. We wanted it to be grounded, relatable, we wanted people to believe almost everything in it. So even the reason for the character’s transformation is a natural force, lightning. And we have used practical effects instead of VFX to make it look more realistic. The emphasis was on emotions and character development, which is something that Malayalam cinema has a reputation for.

With a Chitrahaar reference early in the film, the posters shown (Anil Kapoor and the very young Aamir Khan), no mobile phones or internet, I got the impression it was set in the late 1980s. Is that right? If so, it adds to the old-world charm of the story and the sense that it doesn’t belong to a technology-saturated universe.

Close enough – we thought of it as being set in 1994 or 95, which was the time of our childhoods, with so many things that we remembered from then. And yes, it would have been a very different type of film if it had computers and mobile phones in it. Technology would have had to play some role in the plot. But we also don’t want to restrict ourselves in future Minnal Murali films. We have passed the first exam, which was the character’s origin story – after this we can do more, take more liberties, change the setting if needed.

Even though this is a grounded superhero film, we are hoping that its success will get regular viewers more interested in Malayalam movies – which is something that a popular-genre film like Minnal Murali can do if it is well made. We in Kerala watch French or Korean movies, so why can’t people watch Malayalam movies? Especially in the OTT era when there is good distribution and promotion for our films. Cinema is a visual language, after all.

Looking at Malayalam cinema from the outside, it seems like there is a lot of genuine collaboration, a spirit of kinship. I have seen you thanked in the credits of films that you weren’t directly involved in the making of (The Great Indian Kitchen, for example). Is the industry more close-knit than the Hindi cinema world?

I think so, yes. There is lots of multi-tasking in our industry – for example, Minnal Murali’s cinematographer Sameer Thahir is also a director and screenwriter. There is healthy competition, based on the idea that the industry as a whole should grow. I have done a cameo recently in Kurup, played a supporting part in a woman-centric film like Uyare, a small part in a Mohan Lal film (Lucifer) – there was no ego involved, and that’s true for most of us. I also like to help out or be involved with films even when I’m not acting in them.

You have been taking uncharted paths as an actor, and now as a producer. Do you choose scripts that will let you experiment or do something different from audience expectations?

I always wanted to be a very good actor and to push my limits – I consider money and fame to be by-products of that process. I’m not saying I’m a great actor, there is scope for improvement, I have taken wrong decisions – but once I understand this then I do my best to correct it. Also, I have to be entertained by what I’m doing – I get bored of myself if I keep doing the same sorts of films or characters. This is also why I try to change my look as much as I can from one role to another, and keep my characters as different as possible. By the way, do watch the trailer of Naaradan, the film I have just done with Aashiq Abu – I have a different appearance there as well, and I’m very enthusiastic about the film.

Even within the Minnal Murali canvas, you look boyish as the young Jaison, but authoritative and like a true hero, a larger-than-life figure, as his father in the flashback scenes.

Yes, that again was something we worked on carefully – that contrast and the sense of character development, the sense that this boy has to grow up to truly understand his father and fill those shoes.

As for producing films: when I come across an amazing script – like Kala, which I had conviction about – I want to push it. But I don’t want to be a full-time producer, I want to concentrate on acting. 2021 was a very good year for me, with three completely different movies and characters (Kala, Kaanekkane, Minnal Murali), and I expect as much from this year.

[Related post: some thoughts on Malayalam cinema as an outsider - a piece I did for Outlook magazine last year]

Munich: The Edge of War – an elegant, often-engrossing historical thriller (with an unintentionally funny Hitler)

(I mostly liked this new film, set around the 1938 Munich Agreement, though there were a few odd things in it. Did this review for First Post)
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In the opening scene of a film that has just released on Netflix, a young nationalist speaks of a new era that is beginning in his long-suffering country, and of the larger-than-life leader – with a personality cult having grown around him – who is making it possible. “They are a bunch of thugs and racists,” replies his friend, referring to the leader and his party, but the first young man is having none of it. “We are now the proudest nation on earth,” he says.

It’s the sort of conversation that might well happen in the India of today – between two people who pejoratively call each other “sickular” and “bhakt” – but the scene is from Munich: The Edge of War, and the reference is to 1930s Germany. Paul von Hartmann (played by Jannis Niewöhner) is the German student in Oxford, while Hugh Legat (George MacKay) is his English friend, and their ideological differences will eventually rupture their relationship (after an argument that includes Paul’s hair-raisingly familiar claim that “voting for Hitler is not voting against Jews – it’s voting for the future”).

Years later, their paths will cross again – at the site of the 1938 Munich Agreement between Hitler and the British PM Neville Chamberlain, where the fate of Czechoslovakia is to be decided. That’s the premise of this political thriller, adapted from Robert Harris’s 2017 novel Munich (with “The Edge of War” awkwardly added to the film’s title, presumably to avoid confusion with Steven Spielberg’s Munich).

History tells us that the Munich agreement (also known as the Munich Betrayal) was a case of European leaders falling over themselves to appease a fascist who would never be content with simply annexing one small country; as Hitler’s ambitions and claims grew over the next year, the Second World War became inevitable, and the Munich pact is now generally viewed as a giant folly. But in Harris’s dramatized alternate history – starring the fictional Hugh and Paul – more complex games of realpolitik were afoot and Chamberlain is cannier and wiser than he is usually credited as being.

Those who find that too much of a leap of faith will do better to focus on the fictionalised espionage story, convoluted as it sometimes is. Former friends Hugh and Paul are on the same side now, since Paul has come to recognise the damage being wrought in his country and is part of a secret anti-Nazi resistance. But it takes Hugh – now a secretary in the British Foreign Ministry – some time to fully process what the stakes are. Like many others, he clings to the hope of lasting peace. Paul, who is more urgent (“To hope means waiting for someone else to do it”), more passionate (“The great characteristic of the English is distance. Not only from one another but from feeling”) and understands Hitler better, knows that war is coming. The question is when, and how prepared can the Allies be for it.

****

This is an uneven, sometimes perplexing narrative. At its best, it’s a touching story about friendship, about the ways in which the personal and the political can collide, and about the gulf between youth and experience. (On the one hand, there are young men cocky enough to believe that the world’s fate lies in their hands; on the other, an old man, committed to protocols, says “This is most improper” when asked to participate in an urgent secret meeting.) The lead performances are very good, and as Chamberlain the veteran Jeremy Irons effortlessly shifts registers between a doddering relic from a PG Wodehouse book and a dignified statesman determined to see peace. There are some nice supporting turns too – including one by the cleverly cast August Diehl, as sinister and watchful a Nazi as he was in the guessing-game scene in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. The film elegantly suggests the dilemma at the heart of its story: when a situation is so bad that the only options are to embrace disaster right now or to risk much greater disaster in the future, can one find the hope or resolve to do the right thing? Is there even a “right thing”?

In its more underwhelming moments, though, there is much ponderous dialogue (“Friends, history is watching us.” Really?) along with some strange choices. Almost every time the Führer (played by Ulrich Matthes, who looks about as Hitler-like as Raghubir Yadav did in Dear Friend Hitler, or as Asrani did as the jailer in Sholay) appeared on screen, I wanted to giggle – which was probably not the intended effect. As portrayed here, Hitler shows the same disdain for Oxford education as Narendra Modi once did for Harvard; there is also a bit of business involving Paul’s wristwatch that was probably meant to make the dictator seem menacing but felt like slapstick comedy to me. You don’t want the Hitler in this film to remind you of Inglourious Basterds, though the story does steer close to providing a similar wish-fulfilment ending.

Also, even as one acknowledges the horrors of Nazi Germany and the need for that regime to be defeated, for an Indian viewer with knowledge of colonial history and British atrocities (even around the time of the events depicted here), there is naturally some ambivalence built into watching a film like this where the good guys and the bad guys are so clearly defined. It’s hard not to raise an eyebrow during a scene where Hitler’s imperialist expansion is described as being the opposite of everything the British PM stands for.

In fairness the film does touch on this at one point. “You’re one to talk about exploiting others, Englishman!” Paul says. “I know I’m a hypocrite, but I know fanaticism when I see it,” responds Hugh. Their conversations – where we see two young men weighing ideological positions, recognising the contradictions in themselves and in their world – are ultimately at the heart of this odd but engrossing film. 

(My earlier First Post pieces are here)

Mix and match: Aranyak, The Leopard Man, The Power of the Dog

In my Economic Times column, thoughts on beasts and men (or victims and predators) in an enjoyable new crime series Aranyak, a 1940s B-horror film and Jane Campion’s new Western
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The opening image of the new series Aranyak involves a movement from a dark space to a well-lit one: the camera follows a man in a leopard costume through a “cave” onto the stage of an auditorium where fond parents are watching a school production. It’s fun and games at first, but then the music becomes minatory, there are unsettling close-ups of the “leopard” holding a “rabbit”, and we realise that this is a performance within a performance. A human, mimicking a predatory animal, turns out to be a predator himself.

The transition from wilderness (or an impression of wilderness) to civilisation, and the blurring of Man and Beast, are central to this story, which is actually set a few years after that school-play scene. The main Aranyak narrative centres on a murder in a fictional hill town, and the widespread local superstition that a mythical creature – half man, half animal – is on the rampage. Early in the show, police inspector Kasturi (Raveena Tandon) finds a snarling leopard (a real black leopard, albeit one that’s obviously computer-generated) in her house’s compound, menacing her daughter. But we are also invited to reflect that this creature is one of many victims of human encroachment into the natural world. (An important character, a smarmy parliamentarian, is trying to convert forest land into a tourism project. “If it continues like this,” someone says sardonically, “all the wild animals will enter our homes.”)

Structurally, Aranyak is comparable to the acclaimed series Mare of East Town, which is also a crime investigation with a solid lead role for a middle-aged actress (Kate Winslet), and set in a place where everyone knows everyone else – resulting in a tangled weave of suspects, personal histories and interrelated motives. But one of the joys (and hazards) of being a full-blown movie nut is how often you see connections between generally unrelated works: how a similarity of name, or a character arc, or just a particular scene, can lead you down various rabbit-holes. Or leopard-caves. Just one whimsical example: watching a scene involving a cute rabbit – fussed over but eventually disembowelled for medical purposes – in Jane Campion’s new film The Power of the Dog, I thought of the kidnapped “Rabbit” in Aranyak. The Campion scene was also a reminder of the different contexts in which someone can be victim or prey: the bunny-killer is a shy, bullied young man who we are meant to be rooting for but who turns out to be steelier than expected. (Along similar lines, Aranyak ends with the suggestion – heralding a second season – that the “victim” from its opening scene may have become a threat.)

Much as I liked the threads that jostle for our attention over Aranyak’s eight episodes, I also fixated on a specific aspect of it: the repeated references to the much-feared “nar-tendva” – or “leopard man”, as the subtitles had it. This had me thinking about a 1943 film by that name, produced by Val Lewton, who was a master of low-budget psychological horror in that decade.

The differences between The Leopard Man and Aranyak are more pronounced than the similarities, given the changes in filmmaking styles and tones over eight decades (from the world of the 1940s B-movie to the polished and expansive OTT universe of today). The Lewton “flick” – as it would have been described by most people in its time – is in black-and-white, looks creaky to modern eyes, and at 66 minutes it is one-fifth the length of Aranyak. But like the new series, it involves a human criminal who may be using fear of the unknown – or fear of wild beasts – as a cover for his own dark pursuits.

Once a broad connection between two such works is made, other little things fall in place. Both film and show make references to wild creatures wanting to stay away from concrete and cement dwellings unless they have no other option. If the real leopard in Aranyak looks like a CGI creation (hence not “scary” to the eyes of discerning viewers), the black leopard shown in The Leopard Man is underwhelming too: it looks puny and out of its depth in a scene where a nightclub performer brings it (on a leash!) to a crowded party. In both cases, though probably unintended, the effect is that the relative harmlessness of the “wild creature” is emphasized. The bigger menace, as is often the case, comes from humans – especially when they combine the feral side of their natures with the big-brained ability to contrive and manipulate. Run, rabbit, run.

Our zombie selves in Covid time: an apocalyptic essay

Outlook magazine had a year-end special built around the cheerful theme “Apocalypse”. I wrote a piece about zombies in film/literature/Covid times. (This includes Max Brooks’s marvelous book World War Z, as well as one of my favourite Val Lewton films I Walked with a Zombie, which I discussed during an online class a year ago. Here is the piece…
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It’s one of many mutation-vaccine memes that has been doing the rounds lately. “Waiting in line for your 56th booster shot to stop the 89th variant that comes with the 23rd wave” reads the text. The image accompanying it is a close-up of one of those malodorous lurchers from a zombie movie – eyes open but glassy and unseeing, slash marks on throat, half-grin plastered on his (its?) face, as if pleased by the news that the local pharmacy has a fresh stock of paracetamol.

At this point, who among us can’t relate to this shuffling wretch?

There is a long-standing connection between zombies and pandemics in horror lore, but there isn’t always a definite answer to the question: which came first? Does the mysterious emergence of zombies lead to pestilence sweeping across the land, or does the plague come first, turning us all into zombies? It depends on which book you’re watching, which film you’re reading… or which real-life scenario you happen to be inhabiting. It also depends on how you define “zombie”, or “apocalypse”.

Consider Max Brooks’s marvellous dystopia book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006), which – in amusingly straight-faced, journalistic prose – describes a global zombie infestation and how it affects (or is prolonged by) different countries and cultures. When Covid-19 got underway, my mind turned to that book, but I didn’t realise how closely it resonated with contemporary events until I pulled out my old copy recently and saw the back-cover blurb “It’s Apocalypse Now, pandemic style”. Followed by: “It began with rumours from China about another pandemic. Then the cases started to multiply […] Humanity was forced to face events that tested our sanity and our sense of reality.”

World War Z has “real” zombies, of course – the supernatural undead who cause all the trouble – but it also makes clear that there are ways and ways of being a zombie. In one stirring chapter, which reads like a nod to Edgar Allan Poe’s classic story “The Masque of the Red Death”, a super-rich New Yorker turns his mansion into a sanctuary for himself and other celebrities (along with their battalions of personal assistants and stylists) – until they learn that however carefully they indulge in ivory-tower hedonism, they can’t stay forever untouched by a raging plague. When the assault comes, it comes not from zombies but from living people on the outside, enraged by this obscene display of privilege. “It was bedlam, exactly what you thought the end of the world was supposed to look like.”

But perhaps the zombie-in-apocalypse theme is most clearly realised in the section about a young Japanese man named Kondo who spends all his time on the internet, where he feels most in control. Long before the zombie invasion begins, Kondo is an automaton: glued to his computer, mechanically interacting with people whom he doesn’t really know, staggering to his door to collect the meal trays his mother left for him outside. Little wonder that when he awakens to an unthinkable crisis – no computer or internet – he goes nearly insane. Like the zombies, he needs something to feed on: in his case, the glow of the screen and the validation of other cyber-residents. But that is gone now, and he is so socially inept that stepping out of his building is barely an option.

Prescient as Brooks’s book was, it was written before smart-phones, social media, and easy-to-access video-meeting rooms – and these are things that don’t figure in the narrative (at least not to the degree that they have now infected our world). I think of Kondo the almost-zombie whenever I come across a tragic-comic news items about a young person, so lost in a phone screen while walking, that they tumble into an uncovered manhole or something such (still gazing into the phone, their minds not having yet processed all the signals).

It is easy to recognise the zombies in ourselves in the cyber-age, where one can stay cut off from the outside world for long durations. (This even before a nasty little virus came along and forced us all into our houses, giving many of us the excuse we wanted to never meet anyone.) It is also easier than ever to grumble that technology has facilitated alienation and living-dead behaviour. But in fairness, versions of this have been happening for hundreds of years. Think of all the stories about insensate, vaguely human-like creatures – going back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and beyond – that were responses to new technological developments; born of the fear that in moving away from the comforting moral certainties of religion towards something more diffused and unpredictable, people would lose their humanity.

Zombies are a direct bequest of that legacy. One of the most famous zombie films, George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, begins with a cemetery scene where a young man (a non-zombie at this stage) is sardonic about traditional things such as putting a wreath on his father’s grave, and doesn’t even go to church. These “blasphemies” of a cold modern age prepare us for the arrival of the living dead. But a question hangs over the film: was that man already dead inside?

****

Historically too, even in the age of early, low-budget horror movies, some of the most notable cinematic “zombies” weren’t supernatural: they were regular people who had been petrified into inaction – through circumstances, or because they had looked for too long into an abyss. The hopelessness might be engendered by personal tragedy, general distress about their immediate surroundings, or cosmic destruction at an unthinkable scale.

Consider the wonderfully atmospheric I Walked with a Zombie (1943), produced by a master of subdued horror, Val Lewton. This film’s sensationalist B-movie title doesn’t begin to convey its quiet, haunting beauty and how it deals not with external terrors but with a soul-destroying conflict within a family where a young woman has turned catatonic after an illicit affair. Or take another tragic young woman from the genre – Christine, the disfigured protagonist of the 1960 Eyes Without a Face, who wanders desolate through the rooms of a large mansion while her scientist father tries to restore her features. Or another legendary horror-film character who must also have spent long lonely hours walking through an old house, Norman Bates in Psycho, rendered zombie-like by his crippling dependence on his long-dead mother.

If the heroine of Eyes Without a Face wears a mask – like someone living through a pandemic – there are other similarly isolated characters in dystopian films. In the climactic scene of the chilling The Face of Another (1964), a doctor has a nightmare vision of countless masked people – soulless ciphers – walking through the streets of a city. For the protagonists of these films, “apocalypse” is a very personal thing, as it would be for most of us in their situation: how does it matter to them if the rest of the world goes on as normal? In another Val Lewton-produced work, Isle of the Dead, a group of people are stranded on an island as a plague rages around them. They scrub their hands, wear masks when possible, and are very aware of the external dangers; but their inner demons are what consume them.

Personal tragedy often runs alongside social commentary in these stories: for instance, I Walked with a Zombie is set on an island with a history of colonialism and racial oppression; the white characters in the film may have infected the place through generations of exploitation. But then, anyone who knows the history of horror cinema knows that the genre, however otherworldly or fantastical it might seem, has always had powerful subtexts. “Unusual Times Demand Unusual Pictures” said an advertisement for the Depression-Era film White Zombie; as David Skal put it in his fine book The Monster Show, part of the reason why this film was scary was that “millions already knew that they were no longer completely in control of their lives; the economic strings were being pulled by faceless, frightening forces”. Decades later, when the American economy was in a much healthier place, along came Romero’s 1979 Dawn of the Dead – a witty commentary on the giant-shopping-mall era, where rampant consumerism could turn people into zombies.

And then there is the end of the world, non-pandemic-style – and outside the horror genre. I’m thinking about two very different types of films made in different cultures in 1955, both of which involve terror of nuclear annihilation: Akira Kurosawa’s plaintive drama I Live in Fear and Robert Aldrich’s B-noir Kiss Me Deadly. Both have scenes involving bright flashes of light that might signal Armageddon, and people who are paralysed by fear. The protagonist of I Live in Fear, an old man traumatised by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cowers when his house is lit up by lightning during a storm, imagining it to be another atom bomb attack. In Kiss me Deadly, when a woman opens a mysterious, glowing suitcase, we realise that this is a horrific Pandora’s Box containing a form of all-consuming nuclear power; and the house goes up in flames. Both the old man and the woman are rendered immobile and sub-human… like you-know-what.

From the fears of rapid industrialisation to the world wars, from the possibility of mutually assured nuclear destruction to climate change… and now to Covid-19 and its many avatars: every age has had its own zombie-generators. Each situation poses its own special challenges, but maybe some things don’t change all that much over the centuries. Writing about White Zombie in 1932, a reviewer quipped that zombies were especially useful in the busted economy, “since they don’t mind working overtime”. Something similar might be said for some of us in Covid’s WFH world, where the line between work time and leisure time has been blurred, where there is no “switching off”, and we stare into the depths of our many screens, fingers involuntarily tapping away to indicate slight signs of life. Perhaps the next major zombie film should be about the undead launching their most macabre attack yet… by infiltrating our online video meetings.