This week seems to be the week of movies about movies for Malayalam cinema. We had Aashaan, and there was also the re-release of Udayananu Tharam. And now to that list comes the new movie from G Prajith, Ashakal Aayiram, a film that talks about the passionate love some people have for movies. While the middle-class family arguments that we see in the movie can claim to have relatability, the content here, after a point, relies heavily on staged humor that is at times very meta. With the drama falling flat and rhetoric increasing as the story progresses, Ashakal Aayiram is an extremely predictable movie where the father and son are competing, and the father has won the race even before it begins.
Ajeesh Hariharan, a 28-year-old aspiring actor, is trying to get a chance in cinema, and his father, Hariharan, is a medical representative who hates Ajeesh’s aimless life. This tussle between these two takes a new dimension when Hariharan gets a chance to do a small role in a movie out of the blue. How this creates a rift between these two, and what all happens in that family after that, is what we see in Ashakal Aayiram.
If you look at the movies of G Prajith, one can see that he very much adopts the style of the writer in the presentation of his movies. In Vadakkan Selfie, since the tone was largely humorous and the writer was Vineeth Sreenivasan, the movie had a very fluid nature. Sathyam Paranja Vishwasikko had a more dramatic tone. When it comes to Ashakal Aayiram, the movie is written by Aravind Rajendran along with director Jude Anathany Joseph, who is also the creative director of this movie. The writing of the movie is so stiff that you can see most of the jokes coming, and the style of humor reminded me of Jude Anthany’s movies like Oru Muthassi Gadha and Sara’s. One of the main issues is that the drama part of the movie is extremely predictable. In the first half, since the issues between the father and son are on the humorous side, the predictability of scenes isn’t much of a problem. But in the second half, when the drama takes control of the narrative, the predictability was so obvious that when the guy in front of me was loudly predicting the next scene, even though I hated his lack of civic sense, I couldn’t completely blame him.
The plot here is extremely simple, and it is something that depends on the conviction of the performers. I don’t know whether the writers were unsure about getting the best performances from the actors, because they seem to be overtly relying on humor to save the movie. From self-referential and self-depricating humor to creating fan service moments by referring to old dialogues, old songs, and even meme moments, the movie is trying really hard to hide its creative emptiness. I would say they sort of succeeded in doing that in the first half, and even I laughed out loud for a lot of moments. The problem for me was the second half. They are trying to create dramatic conflicts between the two, but it lacks nuances, and the whole Sumith Raghavan episode in the climax bits of the movie felt more like a Jude Anthany Joseph anti-nepo rant, which he couldn’t post on Facebook.
Jayaram is very much playing his age, and much like how Aashaan gave Indrans an opportunity to create a showreel of his range, Ashakal Aayiram is celebrating the actor in Jayaram. The humor, the sentimental dialogue delivery, the anger in tone, and the emotional contentment are all shown in this movie. When it comes to Kalidas Jayaram, the actor in him hasn’t really evolved, and that makes it very difficult for the audience as he is constantly sharing screen with his talented father. The writers Aravind Rajendran and Jude Anthany Joseph have written scenes where they have used the iconic climax line from Veendum Chila Veettu Kaaryangal. Unfortunately, Kalidas just couldn’t deliver a performance that justified the use of that dialogue. In the first half, the amateurishness sort of goes well with the immature characteristics of the character. But when it comes to the second half, where we are supposed to believe that he has evolved, the flaws in the performance become more evident. Sharafudheen, as the nepo baby superstar, was hilarious, and his timing was impeccable in all the scenes. The movie projecting his character as someone who reluctantly admires the acting of Kalidas’s character was tough to digest. Asha Sarath was fine as the stereotypical mother who believes her only job is to handle the egos of the men in the house.
During the release of the movie Prince and Family, there was a video of the scriptwriter of that movie, Sharis Mohammed, giving a small speech where he says Malayali has learned about cinema from the womb itself, and they don’t need anyone else’s opinion. Ashakal Aayiram would definitely work for you beyond the humor if the above-mentioned speech from Sharis Mohammed gave you goosebumps. If that had made you cringe or facepalm, then go in for this movie with minimal expectations.
