Prithviraj Sukumaran’s brilliantly measured performance in Blessy’s deeply personal tale of a working-class man’s escape from slavery is one of the most powerful acts in Malayalam cinema
There is a poetic aspect in author Benyamin’s novel reaching the hands of director Blessy. In the journey of Najeeb Muhammad, a Malayali immigrant in West Asia, who gets abducted by one of the region’s many slave owners, there is an element of miserablism that resonates with the cinematic inquiry Blessy has been conducting over the last two decades. His films, in essence, are excavations of grief from the depths of unfortunate ordinary men who go from one tragic situation to another. In Thanmathra (2005) and Kalimannu (2013), the human body becomes his primary work material. Pain and suffering are visceral in these films, animated without any subtlety to pierce into the viewer’s consciousness. In Aadujeevitham, Blessy finds a goldmine.
Consider this elaborately picturised scene of death that happens in the latter half, where the film zooms in on a human being disappearing chaotically into the depths of the desert. It holds the body of the actor playing the role up close, screaming at the viewer to behold his suffering, milking the viewer’s shock, sympathy and repulsion. This pattern repeats in several segments, prolonging the portrayal of suffering until it becomes agonisingly unremarkable.
An incredible life story
Benyamin’s work is part of Kerala’s sprawling migration literature that shares, documents and studies the life of Malayali immigrants who moved to the West Asian region in the early 1970s following the oil boom. Overriding any socio-political observations, Aadujeevitham is, first and foremost, a deeply personal tale of a working-class man who survived abduction and slavery in the infinite desert landscape. Relying entirely on the real Najeeb’s memories, the work shreds into flesh and bones the idea of the Gulf region as a ‘paradise’, revealing the dark side of economic migration where working-class bodies wither for the sake of families back home.
Blessy’s film does not acknowledge the subjectivity and agency of Najeeb. It often shrinks into an earnest but simplistic visual presentation of an incredible life story, focusing solely on the protagonist’s misfortune. It does not bother to drill into the layers of the title, The Goat Life, which signifies the elasticity of human endurance. Over the countless days and nights he spends in the desert camp, Najeeb catches himself slowly evolving into a goat in the pen, wrestling with and accepting his slavehood. The existential questions Benyamin evokes in the novel are almost lost in the film’s narrative that, counterintuitively, assumes an episodic structure, leaping from one sequence to another, lacking fluency.
What the actors achieve is truly remarkable for they do it despite the sloppy staging of scenes in many parts.
One of the obvious aftermaths of this kind of filmmaking is that it denies its protagonist any profundity. Three years later, Najeeb’s wounds and sadness retain the same freshness as they had when he arrived. What lies beyond the sadness and yearning for home? How did he shrink himself to wriggle through the tunnel of suffering life off-handedly threw him into?
A shot at escape, on foot
The film wobbles the most in its first half. It opens with a glimpse of Najeeb (Prithviraj Sukumaran) as a rugged and pencil-thin shepherd, quickly transitioning to a long-winded scene in the West Asian airport where he and Hakim (KR Gokul) nervously wait for the arrival of their sponsor, feeling like a fish out of water. It is easy to see what the film is trying to do – stressing the endearing naivety of the characters, it sets up the viewers for a predictable heartbreak. Najeeb and Hakim are whisked away by a slave master, into a world situated far away from modernity, where animals are more valuable than the labourers. The narrative is strictly functional, feeding the viewer information, rarely transcending it.
There is a bunch of nice touches and poetic flourishes here and there, like the scene where Najeeb, moved to tears on his first day as a shepherd, finds a miraculous assistant in a lamb. There is a delicious editing transition at the beginning, where a narrow rill of water in the sand becomes a bridge connecting two places and timelines. If water is a treasure held by the rich in the desert, it is abundant and omnipresent in Najeeb’s memories. In the flashback sequences, it appears as the monsoon shower and the backwater lake flanking Najeeb’s modest home.
Water is from where he ekes out his daily bread, as a sand miner, and it is the witness to his romantic escapades with Sainu (Amala Paul), his new bride. While these sequences perfectly adhere to Malayalam cinema’s oldest nostalgic imagination, showcasing a lush green village and a warm village community, they also impress upon the viewers the life and persona Najeeb has lost and must reclaim. These memory flashes power the latter half of the film where Najeeb sets out on foot to escape from the desert, with Hakim and Ibrahim Khadiri (Jimmy Jean-Louis), their new friend and guide, who, eventually, becomes the film’s most fascinating character.
Oneiric reality of alien desert landscape
Prithviraj Sukumaran’s physical transformation for the film has given Malayalam cinema a story for the ages. However, the surprise lies in Gokul, who deeply internalises the innocence and hope Hakim holds close until the end. His brilliantly measured performance is one of the most powerful acts in recent memory. What the actors achieve is truly remarkable for they do it despite the sloppy staging of scenes in many parts.
KS Sunil’s camera inconsistently flits between an ad-film smoothness and amateurish patchiness, while Rahman’s background score vehemently conceals the sound of the desert from the audience. Interestingly, the idea of God, which occupies a pivotal position in the book, does not figure in the film so much. It is superimposed on the narrative — rather loudly — in the form of a song written by Rafeeq Ahmed.
The film, which struggles with transcending the ordinary in the first half, attains a great sense of purpose in the latter half. The desert becomes the devil and the divine, sending the characters nightmares alongside signs. There is a breathtaking moment when the film enters a sandstorm head-on, impressing upon the viewer how wickedly beautiful death could seem. When it all ends, it feels like the silence after a storm. Life after death. If for nothing else, Aadujeevitham will be remembered for bringing this alien desert landscape and its oneiric reality into Malayalam cinema, expanding its geography.
