Five South Indian films in 2020, you couldn’t miss

Sometimes I feel all the beauty  and innovativeness of Indian cinema lives in Kerala. Or maybe a little further down, in Tamil Nadu. In 2020  Hindi cinema had a tough time staying on par with its southern counterpart. Here’s my pick  of the best from the South:

1. Moothon (Malayalam): In her sophomore film the  Malayalam masterpiece Moothon  which should be on everyone’s must-see list, director Geetu Mohandas(whose debut film Liars Dice is an undiscovered  gem) has actually yoked two  films together into a work of  stunning  impact. On the surface  Moothon is a  travel tale  of a  15-year child’s  search for his missing elder  brother.  Amir has gone  missing in the bustle of Mumbai. The male  child, played by a female actor Sanjana Dipu, travels to Mumbai alone and gets sucked into the city’s brutal  underbelly with  barely space for  anyone to breathe.

Nivin Pauly is  a revelation. With this one  performance—actually it’s two  performances so seamlessly fused  together that  they become  completely  unified—Pauly joins the elitist  circle of the  most accomplished  actors of our country.His Akbar is  force  of Nature. Thundering against  the humanity that he has buried under the rubble of roughness, his  performance epitomizes that musk of  machismo that men are supposed to flaunt to be  considered  “man enough”.Miraculously, and  with a fascinating  fluency, Geetu Mohandas  flips the coin,and takes us into a ravishing  romance captured  by the splashing seawaves  of Laskshadweep in a flashback between  Akbar and his  mute soul-mate Amir(Roshan Matthew).

This is a love story so freed of gender restrictions that I  wanted to stand up and applaud not just the supreme  sensitivity of  the  director  but also the  indomitable bravery  of  the two actors. In scenes that are reminiscent of  Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, the two actors  portray love with spellbinding immersive intensity. When  Nivin Paul  amd Roshan Matthew  look at  each other they see neither man nor woman. They see only love.

2. Kappela (Malayalam):  After  the  outstanding Mothoon  another whammy  from the  land of  gorgeous greenery. Kappela  captures  the Kerala countryside with a caressing glance  that  we get only  in their  homespun  films. The film is set in rural Kerala, though  luckily there are no  coconut trees and football players .This  nutty  anti-romcom takes  us  on an   unexpected   rollercoaster  ride…Rather , a  bumpy busride  where the film’s achingly  young inexperienced  rustic heroine  Jessy(Anna Ben) almost loses everything, only to have  her soul redeemed just in  time.This is a kickass morality tale  . I am afraid to give away  the plot. Suffice it to say that  for all my movie-viewing  experience  I could have  never guessed what  the  writer-direcror Musthafa (believe  it  or not, this is  the actor-turned-director’s directorial  debut)  was  leading into. Nope, I never saw the twist coming. Life’s  life that.(I can bet  it will be lapped up for  a Bollywood remake in  no time at all.)

For  about  20 minutes  of the second-half when the  film’s loutish   shamelessly  parasitical  hero  Roy(Sreenath Bhasi) is introduced, I thought I  was watching  another  film altogether.   But then the director, fully conscious of  where he  is going and with a grip on the moral graph of  the three main  protgaonists’ destiny,  manoeuvres  the story through the stormy  incidents with expertise. There is not one idle moment in Kappela. The director’s eye  for detail is one of the  film’s  many virtues. In one sequence when Jessy gets into the window seat  of a bus in the pouring rain I actually saw raindrops on her seat. The  pace  through always in a race, never lacks in grace.By the time the  films  screeches to a halt three lives  are changed irreversibly. And we  breathe a sigh  of relief . All is well in the world, at least this time.

3. C U Soon:  Thank God for happy endings. Well, almost. This thriller about an online dating plan gone horribly wrong, has a whole lot of balls, plus a steadily beating heart. And it ends on a bright note. We need that.The important detail that we must remember is that the whole 98-minute film has been shot on IPhones. So now we finally know why they are called smartphones. This is as smart a thriller as they come with some of Malayalam cinema’s finest young talent pitching in with a conviction born out of isolation.

Not surprisingly the well thought-out thriller simulates a taut tempo at a slow burn temperature. Since the world is under a lockdown none of the characters is in a hurry to go anywhere. The plot, done up entirely in a virtual format, takes its time to whip up a frenetic anxiety. By the time we reach the devastating climax, there is no escaping from the film’s vice-like grip on our senses. A piano-based deceptively calm and soothing background score by Gopi Sunder goes a long way in getting our undivided attention as love-stuck Jimmy (Roshan Mathew) befriends the troubled Anu (Darshana Rajendran) in Dubai on the digital platform.

Remarkably the entire romance and the horrific aftermath unfolds through images on computers and phones. This is an ingenious invention born out of necessity as the film is shot in quarantine. At the same time that sense of virtual disengagement gives a muscular immediacy to the narrative. The actors get into the mysterious, melancholic mood effortlessly. I could almost feel Roshan Mathew and Darshana Rajendran’s growing fondness. Mathew, so brilliant recently in Moothon, Kappela and Choked, is growing into one of the most interesting actors in the country. But here it is the redoubtably Fahadh Faasil who holds this robust thriller together.

4. Ka Pae Ranasingham (Tamil): By  the time  the  primeval  screams  of helpless agony  of woman  scorned,filled  the  screen at  the end, I was so  shaken by the film’s  stirring  depiction of bureaucratic empathy that I  wanted to flee the scene.Ka Pae Ranasingham offers no  quick exits  or easy  solutions. It traps you,  pins  you down to the protagonist  Ariyanachi’s  hopeless battle with bureaucratic red-tapism  to get her  dead husband Ranasingham’s  body  back from Dubai where he  has died under mysterious circumstances.

It’s not the mystery that  freezes us in  our seats. It’s the  sheer frustration rage  and   helplessness of  watching  a brave woman  brutally powerless in her bereavement and grief. Though the plot tends to  ramble  it never loses its  focus . The central  tragedy, so deep yet so flawed, will haunt you  for  a  long time. The image  of  Aishwarya Rajesh determinedly  striding across the sweaty streets of  Chennai  armed with her baby,  is  so powerful  it decimates  all  misgivings as you become one with  Ariyanachi’s struggle.

While Aishwarya  steels  the show (and I do mean, steels)  hats off to  Sethupathi for agreeing to play her dead pati. There is a snide reference to Sridevi’s death in Dubai and  her body being flown back to India within days,  whereas Ariyanachi’s husband’s remains  are  returned to her after ten months. The sheer volume of  indignity inherent in  the situation  should make us think hard.

5. Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo (Telugu): A  perky  appetizing potboiler. When it comes to South Indian screen icons, their larger-than-life image far supersedes the  calibre,  heft and  tenability of  the their parent-product. Allu Arjun is  no  exception. In  his latest  swag-suffused  sojourn  he puts  up a one-man show while  all the other actors(including  the once-great Tabu)  are reduced to  peripheral attractions.As far as star vehicles go Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo is a masterclass of  cine-seduction, with Allu Arvind presiding over the oldfashioned but  engaging plot  without overwhelming the proceedings.

There are episodes in the  hero’s exhibitionism(almost  like one  super-enticing item song after  another) when Arjun unleashes  a kind of tantalizing crowdpleasing tamasha that  takes  his  inherently  persuasive screen presence  to dazzling heights of virtuosity.