After having achieved everything there is to achieve as a mainstream Malayalam superstar Mammootty at 70-plus, is all set to explore an experimental arena of cinema. In his latest film outing Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam ,he assumes two characters. James is a tetchy Catholic visiting a Tamil religious town with his wife and son. On the way back he alights from a bus into a small Tamil village and starts behaving like a local named Sunderam with a blind mother who ‘watches’ Tamil sitcoms and allows Sunderam to rest in her lap.
The visuals are a stream of eccentric montages.
This is a strange situation. And indeed, this a strange film. Strange and intriguing, filmed in tableau form that could be a problem on the OTT screen. There are hardly any close-ups of any actor not even the mighty Mammootty who is seldom caught in closeups walking through the lanes of the desolate village that he has decided he belongs to.
But will the villagers reciprocate his overtures? The narrative takes great pain and some perceptible pride in exploring Mammootty’s dual personality.He is far less grumpy , much more sociable as Sunderam while James is a bit of a sourpuss.
In Sunderam we see everything that James lacks specially warmth. Not that James is an undesirable presence. Nothing is that simple here. At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering if the director Lijo Jose Pellissery and writer S.Hareesh are trying to make the plot unnecessarily complex.
Is the identity crisis real, or is it a dream? If the latter, then at what point do we stop worrying about Sunderam who it seems left his family one fine day never to return(like Sreeram Lagoo in Mrinal Sen’s Ek Din Achanak) and resume our rapport with his doppelganger James?
Who between the two is real ? Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam plays on the mirror-image metaphor, harping on the dual-identity crisis just long enough to let us have a peep into the heart of two men who are divided by their duality, but conjoined at the hip for the same reason.
The film has no room or patience for intimacy with any of the characters, not even the two parts played by Mammootty. Far from playing the superstar,Mammooty scarcely gets a closeup from cinematographer Theni Eswar who captures the mood of the village rather than the impulses of the individuals. The first closeup Maammotty gets is when he gazes into the mirror wondering who he really is.
The audience is left wondering the same till the end. We are left with the knowledge that Mammootty’ Sunderam avatar was a dream. But what if that explanation is being offered by an unreliable presence ? What if James is the made-up character and Sunderam the reality? Or, what if James and the busload of fellow-pilgrims were part of a street play in a Tamil village where James played Sunderam?
The what-if mode of narration in Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam is both its greatest strength and its biggest weakness. If you believe that somewhere there exists a person with your face leading another life,this film mesmerize you. But if you are a staunch believer in individualism , this Malayalam-Tamil film may just bewilder you.
