Malayalee From India is trapped within its self-serving corniness and refuses to break free in the process, observes Arjun Menon.
Halfway through the runtime of Dijo Jose Anthony's Malayalee From India, you imagine yourself watching a cautionary tale of a right-wing hero, who is forced to reckon with his carelessly constructed ideological bent.
However, the film, like the writer-director duo's previous films like Queen (2018) and Jana Gana Mana (2022), starts off being one thing and morphs into something more unexpected and stifles under its own good-intentioned messaging.
Malayalee From India undercuts the weighty seriousness of its subject matter with a lighter tone and you follow a jobless, clumsy troublemaker Aalparambil Gopi (Nivin Pauly) who still feeds off his ageing mother and working sister.
You get a sense of what the film is trying to say by following the pitifully unaware existence of a hero, who attaches himself to the ruling party, seeing how things have been turned out in his immediate surroundings and he prides himself on being a 'Hindu for no apparent reason' but that he has never been faced with the possibility of the idea of pluralism in his lazy existence.
I was truly excited at the prospect of a comedy tackling some heady issues, framed from the viewpoint of a right-wing figure, driven by a lack of understanding of the political state of affairs venomously seeping into his surroundings which the film does with varying degrees of effectiveness.
Aalparambil Gopi and his similarly jobless confidant Malgosh (Dhyan Sreenivasan) are faced with a problem in their village when they get embroiled in a sensitive, communal issue that changes the course of their existence.
Gopy is derivative of the many loafer stereotypes played by Nivin Pauly in the past and the star seems perfectly at home playing the goofy hero caught between serious problems.
Nivin gets to delve into the comedic beats of Gopi's mundane existence and you get a glimpse of his performances from films like Oru Vadakkan Selfie (2015), where he balances a foolhardy earnestness while playing a character caught in issues that are slightly above his head and beyond his temperament.
Dhyan Sreenivasan is functional as the hero's sidekick, who drives the inciting incident of the screenplay and then is relegated to the sides.
Anaswara Rajan plays the underdeveloped female lead, who is fated to be Gopi's unattainable romantic ideal, and is rushed off to the sides once the film kicks into story mode.
In the second half, we get the second best-written character in the form of Jalal Bin Omar Al Rashid aka Sahib (Deepak Jethi), who elevates the stakes of the drama and his relationship with Gopy and slowly picks up the film's momentum, even though it comes a bit too late to turns things around from the film's meandering lecture like design.
Manju Pillai too gets to revel in a shaggy conceived 'mother' role.
Dijo Jose Anthony is committed to each sentiment expressed in Malayalee From India and you can see Sharis Mohammed, the screenwriter, furiously ticking off the checklist of all liberal talk points when dealing with religious fundamentalism and communal politics.
Malayalee From India cannot be more timely as a film by nature of its subject alone.
You get a peddler of right-wing ideology, forced to work in the Middle East alongside a Pakistani captor, as loglines go, you can rarely miss that sort of a coming-of-age arc for the hero in your story.
However, excessive preaching and the sincere yet hitting-you-over-the-head construction of the scenes hold back the film from its potential.
Sudeep Elamon glides through the film capturing the meandering tone with a consistent visual style and Jakes Bejoy underlines the thematic and conceptual ideas of the film with an overbearing but rousing score.
Malayalee From India cannot be faulted for earnestness.
In this day and age, where propaganda and social media misinformation are an unavoidable fixture of all our lives, here we have a film that satirises the hate-spreading ideals of fascistic units that have slowly crept their way into our feeds and daily lives.
In the polarised world of hate politics and simplified communal bigotry, I am rooting for these occasional films that have their foot rightly fixed in the corner of truth and moral high ground.
But the idea, more than the execution, stands tall in this version of well-intentioned but bloated civics lessons. Like the CGI-lend rat shown to symbolise Gopi's character beats in the film, Malayalee From India is trapped within its self-serving corniness and refuses to break free in the process.
Malayalee From India streams on SonyLIV.
