Communist Pacha Adhava Appa Review | A Scattered and Ineffective Political Satire

Listening to sophisticated Malayalam dialogues in the Malappuram slang has a unique feel to its credit, and in my opinion, it really suits satires. The new Malayalam film Communist Pacha Adhava Appa, written by Ashif Kakkodi and directed by Shamim Moideen, is using this advantage of the dialect to pull off a political satire against the backdrop of local cricket, aka Kandam cricket. But the placement of political statements in this post-corona story is not at all smooth, and whenever the movie tries to act like an emotional one where the hero is surpassing some sort of struggle, we are not even able to understand what it was that he was struggling with.

So the story is happening right after the Covid lockdown and our hero Wahid, who was in Bangalore working for a company happens to be in his town when the major announcement came. The mundaneness of the days made Wahid’s friends set up a ground near his house to play cricket every evening. What we see in Communist Pacha Adhava Appa is the emotional changes that happened in the life of Wahid because of the cricket matches.

Somewhere around the middle of the second half of this movie, we can see that Wahid is terribly upset about the things happening on the ground, and his wife gives him this motivational speech to not get emotionally involved in any of the events that are happening on the ground. But the problem here is that the film barely shows us anything that could bother someone to this degree. While other characters on the ground are pretty real, Wahid, with his no-violence policy, looks like a caricature. The script has events on an abstract level, but the writing is struggling to connect one event to another in a smooth fashion. The treatment being a mixture of emotional drama and political satire also makes the final output underwhelming.

It seems like an idea they planned during the Covid lockdown but got shot at a very later stage. From a very creative point of view, the idea of placing several political themes like gender equality, feministic ideas, caste politics, marginalization of minorities, the neutral stand, etc., against the backdrop of “Kandam” cricket seems like a tempting challenge. There is ample scope for you to show the widely debated topics using smart metaphors. Even though the humor we see in the first half of the film to show the dynamic of the hero with other characters is funny, as an audience, we are kind of asking the makers, what exactly are you trying to say? The caste politics in the cricket field, the gender equality inside the house, the religious tension, the hero’s efforts to please everyone, etc., have an isolated significance. However, the disjoint nature of the script does not give the story a concrete shape.

The director of Sudani From Nigeria, Zakariya, is the hero of the movie. While certain comedic aspects of the performance aided by his less agile body language worked in favor of the film, the eccentric bits, be it the funny ones or the angry ones, felt flat. Nazlin Jameela, as the wife character, did a really good job in pulling off that character with ease and grace. She delivered her lines very naturally. Shamsudheen Mankarathodi, who we see in smaller roles in major films, gets a major role in this small film, and he was pretty good. Sarasa Balusserry, Balan Parakkal, Renji Kankol, Aswin Vijayan, RJ Anuroop, etc., are the other names in the cast, along with a brief cameo by Althaf Salim.

Communist Pacha Adhava Appa is a movie that has a very scattered structure with a lot of ideas that need a place in contemporary political satire. When you see video clippings of this movie on YouTube in the future, it will definitely generate a sense of curiosity as the humor in the scenes is somewhat appealing. But because of the disjoint nature of almost all the sequences in the film, you just won’t get to feel that emotional high point, despite Sreehari K Nair trying his best to elevate the film musically.