Narivetta takes its cue from real-life incidents and fictionalises the ordeal through the experiences of a young cop caught in the crossfire between the police and tribals up in arms, notes Arjun Menon.
Socio-political dramas are a rarity in Malayalam cinema these days, where political commentary is mostly delivered with the packaging of tone deaf, blunt mainstream outings, or the understated severity of independent productions that hardly cause any sizable ripples on our consciousness.
Narivetta weaponises the blunt, loud brand of memorialising a dark chapter in our joint history, in a storytelling mode where subtext is the text itself.
Based on some true events which occurred in Muthanga in the early 2000s, it is fiercely committed to being a raw indictment of the creaks in our sense of communal remembrance and lack of collective apathy.
Varghese (Tovino Thomas) is disinterested in a life in the police force but is forced to comply with his family’s demands in accepting the job of a police constable.
The reluctant hero in the unfamiliar terrain gets introduced to a colleague, Basheer Ahmed, who takes him under his wing and acclimatises him to the ways of the police lifestyle.
The screenplay slacks between his love life and domestic troubles with joblessness in the first half. The film kicks to its main plot when the police force that Varghese is a part of his tasked with setting up camp to fend off a brewing mass rebellion in Wayanad.
The film takes its cue from real-life incidents that happened almost twenty years ago and fictionalises the ordeal through the experiences of a young cop caught in the crossfire between the police forces and the tribal population up in arms against their unfair living conditions.
The effectiveness of the film’s ideas hinges on the central performance, and Tovino Thomas is up to the task of rising above the written word with the role of a man woken up to a reckoning with some bitter, morally dubious truths about the system of which he is part of.
Narivetta fictionalised the shooting by the cops at a tribal uprising in Muthanga years ago, which inadvertently became one of the darkest chapters in Kerala’s socio-political history.
The film aims to shed light on the unjust eradication of a fringe demographic, who to this day remain the disfranchised in terms of their basic living conditions, shrouded in a history of general human rights violations enforced on them.
The many unheard voices, the silent rebellions, and ear-shattering slogans against State-sponsored violence are all packed into this cinematic fever dream that has no qualms in its blunt force and overtly spelt out PSA like presentation.
Narivetta and its makers have been careful in putting out word that the film is a composite of many real-life incidents and similar atrocities against the marginalised. This seems a fair bargain considering the kind of responses films tackling sensitive historical events illicit in today’s largely divided ecosystem.
The story of the dehumanisation of the minorities and their fight for their rightful land is a tale as old as time, but one that unfortunately remains timeless for all the wrong reasons.
The director Anuraj Manohar and co-writer Abhin Joseph gives us a glimpse into the ‘better’ life style of the hero who seems bafflingly unaware of his privileges, only to upend his easy life later in the second half when he is forced to confront the struggles of the voiceless, who are left to extremist means to fight for what is rightfully theirs.
Narivetta, as a movie, is held together by Tovino’s convincing central performance that undergoes a radical arc from the naive, politically passive origins to being the conscience of an entire movement.
The actor convincingly tracks the evolution from political apathy to a deafening social realisation, and does so without going overboard, a facet that the film around him indulges in unabashedly.
Cheran plays the senior IPS officer who represents the system in a minutia; just and honorable on the outside, and quietly calculating on the inside. Suraj Venjaramoodu is a powerhouse of emotion who ends up being an important side player. Arya Salim gets a few well-written line readings and is among the few people from the tribal community who register as living, breathing characters, rather than archetypes.
Jakes Bejoy continues his use of culturally appropriate instrumentation and organic sounding score that remains true to the wild ways of the film’s latter half. The cultural milieu and emotional scape of the film is earmarked by his unrelentingly rooted score that synchronizes with the docufiction approach of the filmmaking.
The warm yellow hues and bright contrasts in the frames by Vijay also lend a culturally specific visual palette to the film. The documentary-like aesthetic is maintained even in the louder, charged sequences, and the inherent tension between the sleek images and the morally dubious revelations keeps the drama afloat.
The film sheds light on the many instances of wrongdoing and unfair government and administrative oversights that force people against the wall and are forced to push back. There is no inherent merit in only being politically relevant if the storytelling suffers, but Anuraj Manohar in his sophomore directorial outing, somehow finds a way to be topical and genuine in his film’s politics without letting go of the story at hand.
Narivetta does not break any new ground in terms of its character tropes or cinematic ambitions. The film is an overwrought exercise engaged in making a political statement and boldly exposing an unforgivable wound from a grim chapter of Kerala history, and serves as a timely reminder of many lost lives and lost voices.
Narivetta Review Rediff Rating:
