(Wrote this review for Mint Lounge. A couple of my earlier essays about the contemporary Malayalam cinema are here and here)
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Dileesh Pothan and Lijo Jose Pellissery, Rima Kallingal and Aashiq Abu, Syam Pushkaran, Don Palathara… I had barely heard of these names seven or eight years ago, and never imagined they would become part of my cultural landscape. Then, around Covid time, the floodgates opened. Since then, my closest engagement with contemporary films has been not with Hindi or English or “world” cinema (as was once clearly the case) but with the new Malayalam wave – thoughtful, whimsical, often unpredictable and detour-laden films that erase the distinction between “mainstream” and “serious”.
To gradually feel my way around this world, making little connections between the oeuvres and career arcs of this or that actor, screenwriter, cinematographer or director, was to replicate an adolescent excitement, when similar discoveries had taken place around international films. This included the thrill of becoming used to subtitles while consciously or subconsciously processing little things about the cadences of the language spoken onscreen; and feeling like one had been allowed entry into a culture that might otherwise have stayed remote.
For viewers like me, besotted by current Malayalam cinema but untutored in the rich history of this film industry (perhaps only maintaining a link with that history through one-off screenings of important works like Yavanika or Chemmeen – seen in poor prints decades ago – or an occasional G Aravindan or Adoor Gopalakrishnan film), SR Praveen’s Ticket to Kerala is a welcome comfort read. The book begins with an overview of the ongoing wave and how it reached non-Keralite viewers in an era of OTT, superior curation, and lockdown-dictated viewing shifts. I spent the first few dozen pages nodding at this or that reference, glad about my familiarity with many of the works discussed – but also feeling enlightened when the author provided an insight into a film I thought I knew well. Discussing the superb Kumbalangi Nights, for 
example, Praveen notes that the smarmy alpha-male figure played by Fahadh Faasil (and exposed as unhinged by the story’s end) could easily have been the much-hailed hero of a 1990s mainstream film; while the four brothers living and squabbling in a rundown village house, whose stories we are most invested in, might have been stereotyped goons in that earlier work.
In this first section, Praveen also goes back to the early 2000s when mainstream Malayalam cinema, then in the doldrums, began to find tentative new directions through films like Ritu, Traffic and Nayakan. Only after this does the book, in its second half, travel to the very distant past, with a haunting vignette from the dawn of Kerala’s cinema: a little boy is playfully burning the negative of a film made by his father JC Daniel, unaware that he is destroying a historical artefact, the first ever Malayalam feature. More than eighty years later, the author speaks to the old man who remembers his childish vandalism, and even recalls one of the images from that doomed film – Vigathakumaran (1930) – when he had looked at the negative.
This mood-establishing start to the book’s “post-interval” section is followed by plenty of historical information: about the studio rivalries of the 1950s, the initial new wave of the 1970s (which was clearly non-mainstream), the Middle Cinema, and the ever-evolving links between Kerala’s society, politics and cinema. Analysis and reportage go together – interspersed with the narrative chapters are a few interviews, presented in question-and-answer format, with prominent figures such as Adoor, Lijo, Rajeev Ravi and Bahul Ramesh (who has doubled up as screenwriter and cinematographer – an unusual combination – for such powerful films as Eko and Kishkindha Kaandam).
Some passages about specific films – with brief plot synopses, back-stories and overall relevance as part of a movement or a career – might not be easy going for a reader who hasn’t watched those films yet; this is an occupational hazard while reading any cinema book of this sort. But there is enough else of general interest. I thought two such chapters were particularly notable. The first is about the formation of the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) after the 2017 sexual assault on an actress who dared – unlike others in the past – to speak up and name her assailants. Praveen tellingly emphasises the contrast between the braggadocio shown by male stars onscreen (including the “punch dialogues” spoken in films for their adoring fans) and their real-world timidity or evasiveness when it came to the sexual-harassment issue; and, conversely, the contrast between quiet or docile women characters and the bold speaking up of women from the industry during this crucial moment.
There have, inevitably, been some simplistic responses along the way: consider the statement made by the actor Prithviraj (quoted here by Praveen) in which he pledged to never participate in films that “glorified or justified the actions of” misogynistic men. Well-intentioned though this may be, it is also symptomatic of a reductively Wokish take on very complex issues, such as the dark places that creative works must go to – and the blurring of the line between honesty and glorification – when they depict the vantage points or inner spaces of problematic characters. At the same time, one has to be glad that the WCC movement got underway and created some change, given the unquestionably male-dominated structures of the industry – in Kerala and elsewhere – and the chapter gave me a better understanding of why so many recent Malayalam films have deliberately (sometimes self-consciously) eschewed gender stereotyping and stressed agency and independence.
The other “pivotal moment” chapter deals with the formation of film clubs and societies, going back to the 1960s, and the advent of the celebrated IFFK festival, known over the years for its egalitarian nature and its refusal to place the regular movie enthusiast in a lower pew than the privileged delegate. As film editor and IFFK artistic director Bina Paul indicates, such festivals are essential for the building of cinematic literacy and to consolidate Malayalam cinema in ways that would make it more appealing to outsiders.
If I had to carp about anything in the book, it’s that it gets too fragmented at times – with facile subheads within a chapter being used to separate one talking point from another – and that it ends on a startlingly abrupt note: the final chapter is a collection of segregated thoughts on some major leading ladies, past and present; and with this Ticket to Kerala simply winds up, as if printer’s ink had gone out of stock or the author had another deadline to meet.
The good considerably outweighs the awkward, though. Most of all, I appreciated the little moments where the author allowed himself to get personal, placing himself in the narrative. Writing about P Padmarajan’s 1990 film Innale, for instance, Praveen mentions his own partiality for narratives built around memory or the fading of it, “as in the recent Kishkindha Kaandam”. As it happened I had watched Kishkindha Kaandam two days before reading this passage, and had enjoyed it for very similar reasons. It was a nice coincidence, and a reminder of how different film-watching journeys – involving people with varied backgrounds and personalities – can intersect serendipitously. That knowledge is also central to one’s enjoyment of a book like this.
(A few of my earlier essays and columns about Malayalam films are here)
