In the very first scenes of Aami, a bird hits the ceiling fan and ricochets off the window glass, forming a bright scarlet blob. But somehow the blood looks artificial, and so does Kamal’s much-hyped biopic of Kamala Das – staged and pretentious to the last frame.
In his jarring potpourri of fact and fiction, Kamala’s tempestuous mindscape loses its edge, making the film a soulless docu-fiction. The director simply fails to breathe intensity into the shell of gorgeous saris and cascading curls.
But the worst part of the film is something else — it tries to salvage the notoriety of the woman who wrote Ente Kadha . So Kamal introduces us to this author and her platonic affairs, this all-new Aami who revels in erotica only when she holds the pen. In reality she is a half-saint, an ‘insane goddess’ as one of her admirers puts it. Kamal conveniently cloaks some individuals and incidents as fantasy, reducing her to a neurotic liar in the process. He presents before you the chaste, dedicated wife, but leaves her complicated relationship with husband Madhava Das, 20 years her senior, half-baked.
Apart from her addictive oeuvre, Madhavikutty is unconditionally admired for the enigma she is. But here Kamal tries to decode her in terms of his rusty moral syntax. There is a cardinal and clear-cut difference between obscenity and sensuality, but the director confuses one for the other. The scene in which Madhava Das brings a sex worker to groom his teenage bride and the consequent striptease is nothing but cheesy. And yes, the woman with her paan-stained mouth adds to the volley of cliches including the Dalit maid and the gay lover. There are amateurish and stagy sequences that remind you of school dramas such as the one involving her millionaire Italian penfriend.
The second half of the film is somewhat lost in its conflict of interests. Here Aami is allowed to touch a man other than her husband and an imaginary lover (Tovino Thomas playing Lord Krishna, her agony uncle and shoulder to cry on).
Finally you find some glimpses of passion in her affair with this much-younger Muslim scholar. But here also Kamal is keen on exonerating her — widowhood, solitude and the lure of a religion that ‘respects women who have lost their husbands.’ Yes, he tries to validate the quest of a woman who gave two hoots to moral codes, celebrated body and wore the wounds of love like a jewel. And between syrupy Urdu ghazals and some exasperating sermons on Islam, Kamal pitches the most dramatic event of her life – conversion.
Manju Warrier is never effortless as Aami as she struggles to bring in fire and poignancy to her act. But then it’s the censored, child-friendly version where she is only supposed to heap on make-up and break into throaty, overly-rehearsed laughter.
The film may still hold some charm to people who are meeting Kamala for the first time, but for a generation who grew up reading her, it’s no more than a hollow deal.
