Review: Ee Adutha Kaalathu is interesting

Paresh C Palicha feels Ee Adutha Kaalathu shows the life of six different people living a city, in a very entertaining manner.

Written by Murali Gopy and directed by Arun Kumar Aravind, Ee Adutha Kaalathu follows the Rubik's Cube allegory in the storytelling technique, using multiple narrative streams (a recent fad in Malayalam films). It tells the tale of six different people (or three couples) in bits and pieces, which start to fall in place by the end of the first half.

Vishnu (Indrajith) is a rag-picker who recycles toys gathered from the dump yard and sells them on the beach. He has to keep hiding from his creditors and finds it hard to make ends meet with two daughters and an ailing mother. He is ruled by his wife Ramani (Mythili), who is more gainfully employed.

Then there is Ajay Kurian (Murali Gopy) who run a multi-specialty hospital and is going through a mid-life crisis. To hide this fact, though, he pretends he hates his wife Madhuri (Tanushree Ghosh) who had struggled to make a mark in Hindi films in her younger days and had even appeared in a couple of sleazy roles at the behest of her father. Ajay pretends to be a womaniser in front of his wife by making his female subordinates act as if they are having an affair with him.

The third pair is Rupa (Lena), a TV journalist with strong feminist views and Tom Cherian (Anoop Menon), the city police commissioner who has trained at Scotland Yard, but has become the butt of jokes among his colleagues because he cannot nab a psychopath who is targeting rich old people staying alone in the city. Tom has a soft corner for Rupa and gives her exclusive access to the crime scenes under his investigation.

There are other peripheral characters who become the nuts and bolts of the stories of the six main characters. Rustam (Nishan), a migrant worker doing odd jobs for a cover, actually provides reality porn for dubious websites by seducing gullible housewives. His next target is Madhuri.

There is a 'yellow' journalist played by Jagathy Sreekumar who provides turning points to at least two streams of the story and is himself the narrator in the background.

It is interesting to see how the scriptwriter handles the story without causing any major harm to any of his main characters. He shows us the city of Thiruvananthapuram with its history of 1500 years, garnished with wry humour in the manner Paul Haggis showed Los Angeles in his Oscar winning Crash (2004), though this depiction is not as grim.

For those who believe that films become a part of our visual history, showing how people lived in a certain period and how a place looked in that period, Ee Adutha Kaalathu fulfils that mandate. It shows how the people of Thiruvananthapuram lived in 2012 to future generations, that too in an entertaining manner.

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