The biggest plus point of Jithin Arts' ‘Mummy & Me' is that everyone can relate to any one of the characters. There's a déjà vu about many of the incidents that you see in the film; you go back to the time when it happened to you, when it happened to a friend.
Mother-daughter ties
The relationship between a mother and a teenaged daughter is fraught with misunderstandings and a long blame game between them, a very common phenomenon anywhere in the world. Director Jeethu Joseph, who has also written the story and script was last seen in tinseldom as the creator of ‘Detective', a Suresh Gopi starrer. “I wanted to do a different subject, something that is common today, and this was it. The chatting angle that is crucial to the story was intertwined with the theme,” he says.
There are very few characters in ‘Mummy and Me,' though are a few college scenes and a couple of songs. Two upper middle class families and their children form the core characters. Archana Kavi. The ‘Neelathamara' girl plays a character that is in sharp contrast to her earlier one. Her body language and figure fit the character of Jewel to a T. Urvashi plays the angry mother for most part of the movie, not giving in an inch, though her heart beats in the opposite direction, as most mothers'. The computer and chatting almost assume character-status along with the delineation. “The most interesting aspect is that I had to wait for three years with the finished script only because no actor was willing to play the mother of a teenaged girl! Most of our South Indian actors were willing to be a mother of a child, but only up to five or six years old. Finally we zeroed in on Urvashi. We did not approach her earlier because we wanted a change from similar movies in which she had played mother,” says Jeethu, who is now ready with a script that is a thriller.
“I want to do different genres,” says the director who is also a farmer, based in Piravom. He wanted to do a course in film making but could not. Instead, he learnt it on the job, with Jayaraj and studied the scripts of veterans like MT.
There are five songs in ‘Mummy and Me', quite a few, considering that many movies are cutting costs with fewer song sequences. Vayalar Saratchandra Varma has penned them and a music student, Sejo John, has tuned them. “The theme song, ‘Maalakha polay makalay…' was written after I spelt out the visuals I had in my mind. I got very positive feedback for those visuals,” Jeethu says.
Kunchacko Boban has many dancing sequences, which he does very well, but for that old effect, he has to shed a couple of kilos. Watching Sudheesh and Kunchako Boban as college students was a little hard to digest. Archana Kavi's is a plum role which she does well. The others in ‘Mummy and Me' are Mukesh, who plays the tolerant father, Shari and Lalu Alex and a child artiste Jeevan. It has camera by Vipin Mohan. The story and content of ‘Mummy and Me' far outweigh its technical values.
