Let’s look at Fazil’s last five Malayalam movies as a director-

Moss and Cat(2009)-The plot?- We are yet to figure it out.
B.O. Status- disaster

Vismayathumbathu(2004)-A good thought gone terribly wrong.A saucer flying in the air,an over the top Harishree Asokan desperately trying to make us laugh and an insane Kalpana trying to woo a confused Mukesh.What started off as a mystery involving the missing medical student Reetha (the movie was initially titled as ‘Aval Evideyanu’) turned out to be a disappointing flick.
B.O Status-Flop

Kai Ethum Doorathu(2002)-A wannabe ‘Aniyathipravu’. Fahad Fazil (then known as ‘Shanu’) gyrating his hips as though he is some chinese made doll running on a defective battery ,a blue eyed Nikitha struggling to get the lip sync right and a disinterested Mammootty making a guest appearance to help out his old friend and ‘Mammattykuttyamma’ director,Pachikka. Kai ethumdoorathu was a (boring)love story which should have been made in the eighties.
B.O Status- Flop

Life is beautiful(2000)-Fazil’s half hearted take on the Robin William’s starrer ‘Dead Poet’s Society’.A bad movie which had some really good songs like ‘Valittezhuthiya’,’Ini enthu nalkanam’,’Keli nilavoru’.
B.O. Status- Flop

Harikrishnans(1998)- A slapstick comedy disguised as a murder mystery. ThoughFazil could bring together the 2 Ms of Malayalam cinema, after seeing the movie we wished Hari and Krishnan had never said yes to such a lame and mundane script. Produced by Mohanlal’s own production house PranavomInternational,Harikrishnans was a super hit.

Fazil also made a couple of Tamil-Telugu films in between(which were mostly the remakes of his own yesteryear malayalam hits) . None of them were hits. When you are a film maker, flops are bound to happen but what bothers us is the consistency with which he has been making horrible films,of late.

What has happened to the legendary film maker who has given us gems like ‘Manichitrathazhu’,’Manivathoorile Ayiram Shivarathrikal’?

Fazil’s fall from grace has been insidious. His last five movies itself testifies this. They ranged from bad to worse. The progressive deterioration in the quality of his films and their inevitable commercial failures have been due to varied reasons.

Bad writing-One of the factors that can be attributed to hisrecent failures is the reluctance to part with his pen!  Almost all his movies post Aniyathipravu have one thing in common- a lame and often an insane (read ‘Moss and Cat’) script! While his contemporaries like Joshiy, kept themselves updated with the changing trends by collaborating with a Renji Panicker or even an Uday Krishna- Sibi k Thomas, Fazil continued writing mushy romances and half baked dramas which might have worked in the nineties .

The Manichitrathazhu Effect- Fazil has not really been able to come out of the brilliant success of his cult classic ‘Manichitrathazhu’. Just like Bhadran(Spadikam-Udayon) , Fazil is desperately trying to repeat the success of his most famous film. Movies with weird/ paranormal themes work only if you bring some kind of believability into them. But his recent trysts with the paranormal (Vismayathumbathu,the yakshi episode in ‘Living Together’) defied all kinds of logic and left the audience high and dry with their sheer absurdity. The ‘Vismayathumbathu’ climactic sequence for instance, where the spirit/soul tries hard to get back into the body of the comatose (Nayantara) turned out to be unintentionally funny.

An overdose of tele-serials,  most of his successful films have dealt with an imbalance in the family and they revolved around the efforts of the protagonist to overcome the situation and the ultimate restoration of the normal equilibrium of the house, thereby emphasizing the Freudian theory of family and relationships. This worked perfectly in the doordarshan era (which used to go into a week long mourning every time some  politician left bhoomidevi’) when private television channels remained a distant dream. An average malayalee who sees atleast half a dozen similar stories everday(thanks to the Baiju Devarajs and the K.K.Rajeevs)in his television set, finds no charm in spending fifty rupees to watch the same thing again on big screen.

Bad Marketing- His last few movies have been plagued with bad marketing. Fazil is no longer has a Navodaya or a Swargachithra with him which in turn is getting badly reflected in the marketing of his recent movies. By the time the songs of ‘Moss and Cat’ got aired in the television channels,the movie had left the main centers!

Dated presentation and old fashioned story telling-Today’s youth who are fed on a staple diet of latin American/telugu/hindi/Gautham Menon films are no longer able to connect with the old fashioned story telling of fazil. His songs still have a heroine dancing all the way to glory in the company of half a dozen precocious children or the hero and the heroine singing over their cell phones!

• Review: Manichitrathazhu
• Can Manichithrathazhu be remade?
• More Manichitrathazhu Analysis
• Oru Murai Vanthu Parthayo

One of the points that has come up often is regarding the voice behind Ganga and Nagavalli. Was Shobhana’s National Award justified?  Doesn’t that credit go to the dubbing artiste Bhagyalakshmi as well?

As the debate continues, please watch this clip. This shows Bhagyalakshmi giving voice to the most crucial scene in the movie. You see her start as Ganga and then transform into Nagavalli. It is absolutely stunning. It is very rarely that we get to see such a scene(Please fast forward to 10th minute).

Dileep looks at the latest box office reports and sees that 2 Harihar Nagar is a winner.   He would most probably come out with sequels for his successful movies. Ever helpful, we have a few suggestions.

1. CID Moosa goes to London
2. Lioness(Lion + Chanthupottu)
3. Kochi Rani
4. July 4th 2010 BCE (a period film which will be a double role film,Dileep will play hunter as well as gatherer)
5. Sane Gopalan
6. Commissioner Garud (with Suresh Gopi as a bird)

Only good thing about Moz n Cat is that it  would accelerate the  demise of Fazil’s career as a director. Can’t believe this is the same person who directed Manichitrathazhu.

Towards the end of the film, Sunny Joseph (Mohanlal) asks Nakulan (Suresh Gopi) to tell his wife Ganga (Shobhana) not to go shopping. She might question him, but Sunny asks Nakulan to be firm. The camera follows Nakulan as he walks into the room where Ganga is getting ready. He asks where she was going and she replies, “I told you, for shopping”. Nakulan tells her strongly not to go that day.

First Ganga asks why not and Nakulan keeps on saying that she should not go.Suddenly Ganga’s voice turns angry, her face turns menacing with the eyes rolled up and her whole body language changes. She points her finger at Nakulan and shouts in Tamil, and with the other hand lifts a wooden bed. Nakulan is terrified, but he shouts her name at the top of his voice. Ganga pauses and returns back to normal. Then she realizes that the mental patient of Madambally is herself and not Sridevi (Vinaya Prasad).

This is one of the powerful scenes in this movie which starts when Nakulan and Ganga come from Calcutta to Kerala for a project. Ignoring the warnings by their uncle Thampi (Nedumudi Venu), they decide to stay in an ancestral home which is considered to be haunted. The story is that a Tamil dancer Nagavalli was bought by the local king and she fell in love with another dancer. The king did not like this and had her killed. Her ghost was loitering around looking for revenge. and so they perform some pooja and lock the ghost in a room.

Ganga does not believe this and opens the room and various incidents start taking place. Sometimes vessels and stones are flung around, sometimes saris catch fire and the suspicion falls on Sridevi. Nakulan asks his uncle to show her to a psychiatrist, but he does not. Irritated, Nakulan calls his friend Sunny Jospeh to come and help him. How Sunny Joseph cures Ganga is the climax of the movie.

The story of this movie is very unique and has not been told before. First we thought it is a supernatural story, but as we understood the dual personality of Shobhana we got very interested in this character and how she would be able to get out of her predicament. The characters in the movie, Sunny Joseph, Nakulan, Ganga, Ammavan are all memorable and have been portrayed with realism.

Even though this is a ghost movie, there are no special effects. Director Fazil uses simple tricks like shadows on the wall and sounds to heighten the tension. In one scene, the whole family goes to watch a Kathakali performance. Sunny sits in the front and occasionally turns back to see if Ganga is alright. The sound of the drums heighten in the background. Then, once when Sunny turns back, there is silence and Ganga is not there. The intensity of the scene is heightened by the lack of any background sound, which we thought was a very innovative but subtle technique.

In this movie, the script by Madhu Mattom is the hero and Shobhana is the heroine. Shobhana had two roles, one as the mild mannered Ganga and the other as the revenge seeking Nagavalli. It during the Nagavalli phase that you see her transformation, in her voice and in her mannerism. Shobhana won a truly deserved National Award for this role.

Mohanlal makes his entry just before the interval, which is unconventional. From that point onwards, it is his show and the character he portrays is that of a fun loving psychiatrist. He is unconventional in his treatment style also. Mohanlal does not have much histrionics in this movie and plays a very subdued role.

For a movie which is a psycho-thriller, it has excellent comedy provided by Innocent, Lalitha and Mohanlal himself. There is a scene where Mohanlal goes to take bath and takes the clothes of Lalitha who was bathing in the next stall. Their conversation across the wall had us in splits.

There is only one scene which irritated us. There is a scene where an angry Sunny, takes Sridevi to a room and locks her up in front of the whole family. While everyone is stunned, Sunny Joseph breaks into a song, which was very odd. Mohanlal thinks that only Fazil could have pulled it off.

The story, screenplay and dialogue is by Madhu Mattom and we liked all three of them. There are no unnecessary scenes in this movie and each scene in the screenplay sustains our interest in the story. We also are impressed by the craft of director Fazil for making this movie very interesting. The movie also had a second unit by directors Sathyan Antikkad and Priyadarshan. M.G.Radhakrishnan has provided some memorable music for this movie. All the songs are nice to hear, but our favourite is Palavattom Pookalam

This movie is one of our favourites and is a must watch.

See Also:  Can Manichithrathazhu be remade?