Breast or boobs: Malayalam cinema’s ‘coming of age’ dilemma

Some would blame it on the advent of Christianity and its list of do’s and don’ts; Hindus just go by their karma – if you screw around, you get screwed around; you might suffer that acute pain of repentance in this life or definitely take rebirth as a dung-beetle to end up crushed under a thick worker’s boot.

After all, you are talking of a state where Brahminical compulsions had it that the majority of our women had to expose their upper torso. And when some of the women shocked the system by covering the torso, the Government was cheeky enough to put a tax on it. At the risk of sounding risqué, whether they went about taxing based on asset size or volume, I have no clue.

Looks like, our erstwhile reformists needn’t have bothered. Our new generation moviemakers are willing to shed it for free. Or perhaps not. They might just want to talk about the upper torso and posteriors as (no pun intended in the phonetics) is.

And that has whipped up a storm. Perhaps it started with that wicked movie called 22 F Kottayam, which – to me personally – was the worst piece of perversion that was unleashed in Malayalam cinema in the name of popular entertainment. And for the record, I didn’t hate 22 F Kottayam for its profanity; it was simply too regressive for my taste. And I stand by my right to call it trash; the Facbook quotation squads who resorted to calling names of the film’s critics, be damned.

Are we really brave enough to be a true Yippie?

A girl lipsmacking over a guy’s posterior, the heroine admitting to pre-marital sex, the mandatory F-words of new generation cinema – 22 F had it all. And boy, wasn’t our new generation, our own Yippies (a word that referred to the members of the countercultural revolutionary Youth International Movement of the 1960s) drooling in absolute glee. Here, they told us, is a filmmaker who talks like us.

Who is to be judgmental about a generation that we hardly know? I wouldn’t.

I have at home a Justin Beiber fan, who graduated from Jonas Brothers, and is now reveling in Degrassi.  Does my own teenager cuss? I am not too sure; I am yet to hear it – but then again, who is to know what goes in the conversation among teenagers?

I take no moral stand against profanity. I am not holier-than-thou in any sector, and as a matter of fact, I dread my karma. 

But I am against prohibition. I hate the fact that Kerala doesn’t allow smoking in public and the state has shadow police to sneak on violators, while next door, the serpentine queue gets longer in front of the Kerala State Beverages Corporation. Now, according to a report, Kerala wants to move to liquor prohibition too. What, we want to be a Saudi Arabia?

But when Kerala gets into the newest debate on how far our script-writers can push the boundaries, there is room for dialogue – amongst us, the not so holy ones, and the puritans.

Sachi, the scriptwriter of ‘Run Baby Run’

The spark is the word ‘amminja’ used by Mohanlal in his newest hit movie, Run Baby Run. A section of theaudience has found it absolutely derogatory and uncalled for. And then came Trivandrum Lodge, which apparently (I haven’t seen it yet) throws at you every crude usage you have in Malayalam colloquial lexicon.

Sachi, the writer of Run Baby Run, passionately defends his choice of words. According to him, no television reporter would ask him about the usage, simply because they dread to mouth the word ‘amminja.’

“For me, that line was needed to buttress the enmity between the protagonists,” says Sachi. “These are two people with a past, who are ready to kill each other, and they are forced to share a bike ride. Maybe I could have stopped with ‘don’t let your body touch me.’ But then, what happens in a bike-ride through our potholed roads? And the touch of a breast is a sexual trigger for most men. I used it to underline the fact that the hero wants nothing at all to do with the girl in his life anymore.”

Vijay Raz in ‘Delhi Belly’

Well, you may dissect the words, and stick to your conviction that ‘amminja’ is sacrosanct, and that we don’t bring these words to our cinema lexicon.

Today, the battle lines are drawn. Crusaders of Trivandrum Lodge and its writer Anoop Menon (who has been trying to push the boundary by first talking of flatulence in his otherwise elegantly named Beautiful), call the film the Delhi Belly of Malayalam cinema.

I loved Delhi Belly, and I still laugh at that line, ‘Behenchud, luuuundry.’ Heck, it was funny. Aamir Khan also got away with his DK Bose prank. It was adult comedy, and perhaps Bollywood audiences had already reached that stage where there was room for appreciating such corny stuff without raising an eyebrow.

When MT made Mammotty call Seema at least two ‘names’ in his award-winning Adiyozhukkukal, where we as an audience shocked? After all, Karunan, his character, wouldn’t have had the luxury of refinement.

Vaikam Mohammed Basheer had a whole work called ‘Oru Bhagawadgitayum Kure Molakalum.’ Were we shocked?

Padmarajan weaved a whole movie set in a brothel, and set it to communal stife, no less, in Arappetta Kettiya Gramathil. Did we clamour about erosion in values?

The difference, when it comes to a Trivandrum Lodge is not whether the situation and script called for it.

It is in what they call creative spark.

Third-rate Bollywood comedies like Kya Super Kool Hai Hum, have young heroes refer to breasts as ‘do anmol rattan.’

From what I read and hear, Trivandrum Lodge hardly rises above this pedestrianism. And yet the film comes packaged for mass consumption, including families.

When a KS Gopalakrishnam film released, we didn’t have family crowds queuing up. When Arappettawas declared as the first manly movie, we knew it was going to be an easy movie.

Perhaps, it isn’t Anoop Menon’s fault. What we simply need is a new certification – Adult Comedy. There, like the Eddie Murphy movies, we can call a breast by any name you fancy, and have heroes on extreme flatulence.

The audience who come to watch it will know when to laugh. That will also strip us of the need to make icons of ordinary writers, who need to dip their pens in vulgarity as a substitute for creativity.

ENDS

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