Recently, I have been exploiting cinema to quench the deep ‘Malluness’ that churns inside me like a tall coconut tree swirling madly from the stupor of being under Monsoon winds. It’s a beautiful yearning, one that I am guaranteed not to experience had I been living in Kerala, suffocating in that society and its norms. But 4000 miles away from the land itself, it is easier to access a love for my roots — the language that all my jokes sound best in, the tastes that best satisfy my palates, the imagery that best soothe my eyes and of course, the stories that touch me the deepest. And so, when a friend told me that he is planning to end his subscription to a certain OTT platform, and I have about a week to consume the Malayalam content on it, I jumped on board and watched ‘Saudi Vellakka’. Like the water that gets expelled from a wet towel when you wring it, the weeping that ensued this film released all the stress that had stagnated my mind for a while, and left it squeaky clean.
‘Vellakka’ is a baby coconut. In Malabar we call it ‘Velichil’ and it was my favourite childhood toy. I tried to find the exact English word for this object, but my disinterest in Botany got the better of my research instincts and I am going to use three sentences instead of one word to describe it. A Velichil is a wannabe-coconut. It’s really tiny and is like a ball, and hence is a beloved toy. I think in essence it is a premature coconut that fell off the tree before achieving its true purpose of being a full-fledged coconut with all its seduction. But really, baby coconuts powerfully rule over the hearts of Malayali children who grow up in rural Kerala. Saudi Vellakka is a ruckus created by one such baby coconut in the densely populated semi-urban town of ‘Saudi’ in Kochi, Kerala. But besides that, it is a beautiful story of the chaos of humankind and in a span of 2.5 hours manages to swing the viewers back and forth between various emotions, like the aforementioned coconut tree swaying under a milder monsoon wind.
The movie shows with impeccable precision the ordinariness of the real life of real people. A police-officer who pops a pill and continues with his daily work despite the slight feverishness he feels, the routine feuds between family members and neighbours who live their own varieties of frustrations, the jealousies, the manipulations, the humour of everyday life — everything that makes us human. Amidst all of that, the goodness that live quietly inside of us, wakes up occasionally, yawns and stretches, makes its appearance and leaves just as quietly, with an implicit promise to return later.
I have recently found myself on the verge of curiosity about humankind. What makes people who they are, what’s driving them, how do certain things make them feel. Its a newfound fascination and I haven’t processed it yet, but the movie fully indulged my interest. The characters have been sketched out with completion and nobody sticks out of the ordinary. They are all remarkably different from each other despite their common backdrops and their lives are connected by that unique baby-coconut incident. And the protagonists — a ten year old boy and an old woman who age by thirteen years during the span of the film — couldn’t be any more different from each other in who they are. The range of human experiences in this film is vast and extremely interesting. I saw something like that previously in ‘Nna thaan case kodu’.
Starting on a packed day in 2005, the movie runs through thirteen years — the wretched timespan of judicial proceedings. These are thirteen long years in the life of an elderly woman, and so without question, it is painful to watch. The stretch where this Umma stoically faces the reality of life, alone in a legal battle, are interspersed with the short events at the court. Her family is ruined in the meantime, and she faces that emotionlessly — makes you wonder about the experiences that might have moulded such a strength in her. One of the characters say that no one has ever seen a smile on her face, she always seems numb. He did not get to see it, but we got to see a tiny smile on her face when she found herself a community by selling small home-cooked snacks to be able to pay for her lawyer. He also did not see the smiles perhaps of relief that she had when she got the chance to serve Pazhampori to random children playing near her new home.
And so in the final leg, when the case finally comes to a close, it was intense to watch how a woman who has always only lost all through her life, finally ‘wins’ an opportunity to exercise her virtue. I couldn’t shirk off the feeling that when ultimately their innate humanity pronounced the right verdict loudly and clearly, everything that preceded were futile repercussions of a system that ideally has been set up for protecting each of us but in practice is only occasionally so.
I wept. I realised that I was weeping only because I am a human-being. And I remembered https://alleysomind.wordpress.com/2022/07/26/linie-6-nordhafen/
I am not an expert critic, but I would like to appreciate the maker of this film for his obvious brilliance in filmmaking — in the design of the characters, the choice and use of performers, the screenplay that delivers with impact and the imagery. And finally, for the kindness he showed to the audience by adding that last scene. He could have chosen to end things differently, two minutes earlier, but he did not.
Image : DALL.E
Alleys 