Note: this is not a review but more of an outpouring of thoughts that strike you when your mind is captivated by beautiful frames written, enacted and captured; maybe spoilers ahead.
Some movies are bold enough to force you to walk with the characters, often in sombrely long sequence of shots where nothing happens (nothing from the point of view of a regular movie-watcher). Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam is a spectacular example (and I am positive Malayalam cinema has a plethora of such examples, esp in recent times). But to do this, I would imagine, requires a boldness of a different kind.
I mean, imagine having an entire minute or two just of a sequence of shots showing Mammootty – a James who’s just woken up as a Sundaram (but we dont know that yet) – walking into the village: first through lush-green paddy fields, then into the serpentine lanes of the village, turning around into a corner street, walking past an old man in his afternoon siesta under the shade of his thinnai, and finally to his house. and because this is no accidental placement, you’ll find the same happen in the climax when Mammotty walks back to the bus all the way from “his” house – a beautifully-long sequence of shots, the whole sequence spanning almost three minutes, with Veedu varai uravu as the tonal backdrop.
Perceptions from such scenes are subjective and I can imagine some folks not liking it. Personally though, I feel these are very crafty scenes that force you – the viewer – to not just consume what’s happening on the screen but, by the nature of the ordinariness of the sequence of shots, make you go into yourself and start thinking about the non-ordinariness of what just transpired in the movie. This is in some sense similar to the long-shots post-scene that makers like Spielberg employ where a scene is done but the camera stays on a close-up shot of a character (presumably in deep thought) subverting the viewer to actually do the same – think deeply about what’s just happened or what’s about to happen.
–
Isn’t it such a wholesome pleasure to watch such a fabulous collaboration of Tamil and Malayalam characters, in such a luxurious mix of Tamil and Malayalam dialogues? I am probably biased here: I got goosebumps just watching Ramesh Thilak share screenspace with Soubin in Kumbalangi Nights because, to me, that felt like a greater cinema acknowledging the talents of a Tamil actor often overlooked by Tamil cinema itself (hopefully, not so true anymore), so watching a whole village (no pun intended) of Tamil characters employed in a beautiful Malayalam film (I’m calling it that only because the main shakers and movers of the film are fellow Mallus) is a paradise.
–
That the entire movie has as its backdrop not just a rural setting but the constant drone of old Tamil movie scenes and songs can be chalked up as a creative mixing technique, something oft-employed in a lot of movies but only for some scenes. But this film takes it several notches up: not only is the presence of these songs and scenes near-constant and near-throughout the film, but they are often outrageously spot-on and in-sync with the movie scene! I dont know better so I can only imagine that the director has an enviable encyclopedic knowledge of 50s-70s era of Tamil cinema.