For the past three weeks, this reviewer has been subjected to raves and more raves about just one Malayalam movie wherever he went. Multiplex owners in Chennai have been forced to pull out Tamil films and replace them with repeat shows of – it should be obvious by now – yes, the Manjummel Boys and yet, the screens remain packed to capacity. Thus, expectations were literally hitting the sky when we managed to finally watch the movie this past weekend.
The opening credits of the film sets a sombre vibe by playing the magical score from Kamal Haasan’s Guna (1991) along a graphic narration of a cryptic story — for those unfamiliar with nineties film. The first half hour of the film is about a bunch of small-town boys drinking, hurling abuses at each other playfully while planning a trip to Kodaikanal, one of TN’s popular destinations. This is the weakest section of the film with nothing really taking place in terms of plot development. Efforts taken to establish the lead characters of Kuttan (Shoubin Shahir), Subash (Sreenath Bhasi) appear contrived and hardly intriguing such as the conversation about God that Subash indulges in with one of his friends. If the movie wasn’t so hyped about or if you were watching it on OTT, it is very likely that 90 per cent of the viewers wouldn’t cross the 30-minute mark and move on to the next one. But Manjummel Boys is still rocking the screens in TN and you have no choice but sit through.
The next thirty minutes are slightly more engaging but would be too familiar – as writer Jeyamohan had pointed out in his scathing write-up about the Manjummel Boys – to those who travel frequently to tourist destinations in South India. Loud, inebriated groups of youngsters vandalize the peace of a serene tourist destination doing crazy things in search of a memorable tourist experience. Most young men must have gone through such vomit-filled trips as a rite of passage into adulthood and that’s probably a connect with the audience.
Towards the end of their trip to Kodaikanal, the boys decide to visit the Guna Caves, a banned destination, for reasons I had mentioned before and jump past iron railings into a prohibited area. Once beyond the touristy crowd, they run wild among the rocks screaming popular dialogues from 1991-film. The movie takes a sudden turn when one of boys, Subash, slips into a deep hole which is camouflaged by dried leaves. The rest of the movie deals with whether Subash’s friends manage to rescue him from a depth of over 120-feet where he gets stuck on a slippery rock.
Manjummel Boys has all the elements of a great survival movie: haunting locale, a hopeless situation, a daredevil protagonist, characters rising against all odds etc. But is the movie unlike anything that has come before?
Manjummel Boys has all the elements of a great survival movie: haunting locale, a hopeless situation, a daredevil protagonist, characters rising against all odds etc. But is the movie unlike anything that has come before? This reviewer would disagree – so many survival dramas have come out in as gripping a manner as this one or even better. The film also struggles with trying to balance an interesting plot match with a real-life incident, which are often great experiences in life but doesn’t provide as much drama as a conceived story. For instance, in the movie all the Manjummel Boys are shown as caring for their friend in trouble and willing to give up their lives for the one in trouble. Perhaps, that’s what happened at the Guna Caves too but it doesn’t make as great a story if there were at least one or two among them who had a counter point and a conflicting objective.
Shoubin, Sreenath and the others have aced their roles; cinematography reaches near perfection with certain scenes such as the one where Subash is shown lifeless lying on a rock after falling over 120 feet and when Kuttan and Subash almost get dropped again really providing the jolts. But the scenes that received most applause were those in which 1991-Guna’s background score and dialogues were presented. Having watched the original Guna in theatres way back in 1991 when it was released along with Rajinikanth-starrer Thalapathi on Deepavali day, this reviewer was surprised by the overwhelming applause for Guna in Manjummel Boys, which was arguably absent three decades ago.
Obviously, Santha Bharathi’s directorial venture has aged very well. In the 1991 movie, Kamal Hassan plays title character Guna, a mentally-ill young man who is obsessed with a fictional woman Abirami and believes will come and rescue him from his ‘filthy’ life in a Hyderabad brothel. Guna’s obsession with Abirami begins during his time in a mental asylum where he is told the story of Goddess Abirami by an older inmate who also tells him that she would come to marry him on a full moon day as she did for one her devotees Abirami Pattar, according to legend.
While there are no direct references made in the movie, the story narrated by the inmate is similar to that of Abirami Pattar who, according to mythology, forces the goddess to appear before him through hard penance and bring about a full moon on a new moon’s night. However, in this movie, Guna considers himself as God and Abirami’s partner in the film.
Thanks to his obsession with Abirami and delusional behaviour, Guna abducts an attractive young woman Rohini who appears to him as his ‘Abirami’ at a temple and takes her to a deep cave in Kodaikanal where he threatens to marry her on full moon’s night. To cut a long story short, the cops and villains arrive at the scene before that happens and Abirami suffers a gunshot. When Guna finds that she is dead, he carries her corpse and dives into an endless pit proclaiming that his love for Abirami something humans can understand and thus leaves this world. It’s one of the most beautiful and tragic scenes of the film.
The success of Manjummel Boys and the applause for dialogues from Guna in the recent blockbuster makes one wonder if Manjummel Boys is Guna’s Andhadhi. It is as if the spirit of Guna and Abirami have risen from the deep cave into which they plunged thirty-three years ago through the Manjummel Boys to haunt Tamil cinema audience.
Through the film, Kamal recites verses from the Abirami Andhadhi (a collection of verse sung in praise of Goddess Abirami by the 18th century poet Abirami Pattar). The verse is known as Anthathi (anth – athi), which means the end of one verse is the beginning of the next depicting continuous cycle of verse.
While watching Manjummel Boys, this reviewer could not but think about Manjummel Boys’s connection with the Abirami Andhadhi and Guna. The success of Manjummel Boys and the applause for dialogues from Guna in the recent blockbuster makes one wonder if Manjummel Boys is Guna’s Andhadhi. It is as if the spirit of Guna and Abirami have risen from the deep cave into which they plunged thirty-three years ago through the Manjummel Boys to haunt Tamil cinema audience. Perhaps, that explains the film’s phenomenal success in TN.