The Mammootty-starrer is a passable procedural, let down by half-baked ideas that don't necessarily come together, observes Arjun Menon.
Gautham Vasudev Menon is a filmmaker prone to 'ideas'.
When you look at his body of work, you can see the director working his way through seemingly simple longlines in the search for an invigorating cinematic experience.
Dominic And The Ladies Purse, his debut outing in Malayalam cinema, is a testament to his fascination with genre material.
Like in many of his past films, a spark of an idea, a character beat, or a single event can be fodder enough for a film deserving of the 'GVM' treatment.
Dominic is one of his better outings in recent times that looks, feels and builds up like a 'Gautham Vasudevan Menon' affair.
Dominic starts with a kernel of a great 'meta' idea.
What if Mammootty plays a Sherlock Holmes-inspired smart-alecky private detective in Kochi, with a younger Watson accompanying him on random cases?
You can already expect Mammootty to be playing a down-and-out bum, whose sharp eye is matched by his clumsy lifestyle and untidy apartment.
Dominic makes a living blackmailing unfaithful husbands with 'private' images that might damage their marriages.
He has no qualms about his way of life.
He embraces being the mentor figure to the wide-eyed understudy Vignesh (Gokul Suresh), who is constantly in awe of Dominic's powers of deduction.
There are no qualms about making the hero a less-than-noble slacker from the very onset.
He has a condescending ex-wife who is living a happy life with her new industrialist husband, he never pays his rent and feeds off of his landlord Madhuri (Viji Venkatesh), who is awaiting the return of her estranged son.
This detail is important as the procedural aspect of the movie falls into place through this very story beat.
But his impersonal and sloppy blackmail routine is upended when his house owner hands him a random lady's purse that she discovers in a hospital.
The duty to find the owner of the purse is handed over to Dominic with a great offer -- foregoing his outstanding rent if he traces the owner of the purse.
The film is laidback and fidgety in the first half, with Gautham Menon's handheld adjacent loose aesthetics complementing the tone. You never get the basic shot, reverse shot staging, but more of the freewheeling dynamism of Gautham's recent output, where the camera seems to be on a constant prowl for the moments that transpire between characters.
This approach has a visceral impact and keeps you on your feet as you never know how the cross-cutting and constantly moving camera is going to settle on an unfamiliar detail or event.
Dominic and The Ladies Purse makes use of some quirky referential jokes about some of the tropes of age-old crime procedurals of ilk.
There is a scene involving the characters deciphering the password of a protected memory card that gets at the absurd quality of onscreen representations of crime investigations.
There is a cozy quality to the way Mammootty plays the outspoken 'Benoit Blanc', who at one point tells a character about his investigation being a 'low budget' effort.
There are interesting pieces of information revealed throughout the film, sprinkled with unconventional montage sequences that ironically undercut the impact of the end revelation.
Gautham Menon and screenwriters Neeraj Rajan and Sooraj Rajan build up a run-of-the-mill whodunnit setup that is built up to a rushed, abrupt ending.
A couple of missed cases converge and the mystery piles up forcing the reluctant detective to look into probable leads and connections. A sister grieving for her long-missing brother and a mother awaiting her son become players in the pulpy plot.
Nanditha (Sushmitha Bhatt) enters the investigation and knocks Dominic off his feet with her charm.
Vineeth gets thrown into the mix of side players and major revelations.
Mammootty is effortlessly charming playing the smart detective.
The unfamiliarity of the director with the language is clear in the way some of the supporting characters render their lines and you can sense the disconnect in the way certain interactions go about.
The unique ;case' at the centre of the film is stretched and you sense the over-plotting and jarring edits, coupled with a half-baked, abrupt 'twist'.
Dominic And The Ladies Purse ends up being a fascinating story idea that gets partially lost in translation on screen, saved by the presence of Mammootty.
We will have to wait for the next Mammootty-GVM collaboration for the magic we were promised.
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