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Initial controversies
Padavettu, the long-in-production project from. Nivin Pauly has been in all sorts of trouble with a delayed production schedule and me too allegations against the debutant director that surfaced online, a year before. However, that aside the film is an organically designed ode to the triumph of humans will be told as a political resistance tale at heart.
What is the film all about?
The film is a self-contained coming-of-age tale built around the life of an apolitical, passive hero who is the central piece of humiliation and insults from the people of the village due to his largely unemployed history, spending his time lying around, surviving the last remaining revenue from his household cows and hens, raised by his widowed aunt, hopeful of his eventual awakening to the poverty that is slowly eating them up.
The film is a reactionary exercise in rousing storytelling, dealing with the politics of land and its belonging, well disguised within the staples of a sports film. Padavettu is a leisurely-paced examination of a person’s life that was muted beyond redemption from a tragedy from the past. There are attempts to examine the extent of the human spirit and endurance in the face of impending catastrophe and a downward spiral.
The star Performances and a beautiful love story.
Ravi ( Nivin Pauly ) has an ex-lover who he had lost out in the past due to his inability to take a decisive stand in a moment of crisis, a regular facet of his subdued personality. We get vignettes of beautifully constructed sequences of Shyama ( Aditi Balan ) and Ravi drawing back their lost love, in long stretches played out through silences and slight eye nods. That all-encompassing track aside, the film is at heart a losers journey to political awakening and the revival, that no one cared for after a point, even himself.
What makes it a cracker of an inspirational film…
Deepak Menon’s controlled flamboyance and grounded use of light paint a beautiful picture of the godforsaken village. Padavettu pays tribute to the spirit of political and social resurgence through the grammar of commercial underdog template with an exceptional central performance from Nivin Pauly, who is often chased around by Liju Krishna’s vision of a claustrophobic passiveness captured in long tracking shots where Pauly is centred in the frame and we are forced to confront the humiliation and callousness with which people try to put down Ravi and his wasted existence.
Padavettu is surface-level in its examination of political equations and interplay but the human aspect of Ravi’s passivity makes it a well-mannered examination of systematic apathy and personal degeneration told with the underpinnings of a well-plotted hero’s awakening story.
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