NPNM- Lost and found

There are certain moments in life when you lose yourself to emotions like anger, lust, etc., become something else for a while, and return to your true self when you regain your composure. You would look back in wonderment at what had taken you over, and how silly and foolish you had been to an emotion and losing your right senses. 

Nanpagal nerathu Mayakkam (NPNM) evokes a similar feeling, in a movie running for just under two hours and brilliantly stitched together with a series of absorbing visuals that look like water colour paintings of rural landscape of south Tamilnadu, memorably captured earlier in a series of paintings by Koilpitchai Prabhakar during the pandemic. 

Native series 2021 by Koilpitchai Prabhakar, accessed from his FB pg

The brilliant visuals int he film are topped up with a cacophony of songs and dialogues sound track from old Tamil films. It was a joy to watch the rural country, its people, their land and life presented with the masterful strokes of a very gifted artist.

It has been quite some time since a movie had me eating out of its hand, enjoying every morsel it had to offer thoroughly, and leaving me yearning for more- such was the quality of art that NPNM was. 

poster accessed from wiki

Every frame of the movie unfolds as a treat to the eyes, a stunning composition of colour and a brilliant experimentation with lighting. i have often gaped with wonder at the light blue tinge of the white that houses in south Tamilnadu are plastered with. It tends to have a cool chromatic effect in the summer and evokes a warmth in the rains. But to see this white plaster make a great canvas for the cinematograhy of this film was quite revealing.

Songs and dialogues from old Tamil films make the sound track of the movie. At times they sound perfectly in sync with the mood of the movie, and at other times they provide a jarring effect accentuating the pathos in the movie. These tracks though not placed randomly, act like abstract colours in a painting that can grow upon you the more you immerse in it. 'Vidu varai uravu' that plays out towards the climax sums it up best. 

The film has dusted and used props from the Tamil aural and visual treasures, stuff that has mostly been relegated to the cellar and safely ignored. The artist in the director has put these together and serenaded them in a carnivalesque delight, hoisting a mesmerizing spell on us with stuff from this Tamil cultural backyard. 

This movie seemed made for a very personal viewing experience, just made for a couch viewing experience in the comfort of your home. i am not sure how much would it have been enjoyed in a theatre. Many might find it slow and pointless.

For the first few minutes of the film, nothing much seems to be happening in the movie except for what looks like an impending accident that could crash on us anytime. But then the movie starts making you sit up when Mamooty stops the bus and gets off in the middle of nowhere in a rural Tamil countryside and starts walking out into the open, and then walks into a house and behaves as though the house and its people were his own. Suddenly the plot and its attendant intricacies reveal themselves in all their splendid possibilities and invites the viewer to immerse into a charming world of many splendors.

The screen play gently tickles moral judgements and slowly pushes the viewer into taking the side of one corner or other of the scale, and then springs a sweet surprise with an unexpectedly easy and neat resolution to undo the moral knot that it had us tied into. 

Mamooty revels in all the scope of acting this beautiful script provides. The bar scene invoking 'Gauravam' dialogue was one sequnce that brings the different glorious features of this film together- the acting, the paly with the lighting, the soundtrack of a classic film, and the immense potential for drama. 

However, the sequence that follows, in which a drunk Mamooty questions the people of his village could have been put together better. The making doesn't quite live up to the potential drama in that sequence.

The helpless, yearning blank stares of the two wives, the desperate friends of the families who want to force a return to normalcy, the blind mother sitting all day before the television immersing herself in all that the television has to offer (there by aiding in the playing out of the train of songs and dialogues) and playing an indifferent yet affective subject to the proceedings of the drama - are some of the lasting images from the film that are likely to stay with you for a long time. 

A very difficult truth, that could break one down, lands on a people unannounced and they are shown to be taking to it with a great heart and character. Its the beauty of these people and the character they show, that speaks of the immense nature of the human spirit, that makes this film all the more beautiful and absorbing. There are a few who happen to be small and react to it differently, but the Truth finally takes leave of these wonderful people with the soft treads of a dream, leaving these people smiling, with a little ache in their heart, at the  'அலகிலா விளையாட்டுகள் ', the crazy ways of the world.