Ayal Jeevichirippundu

One of the main characters in the movie Ayal Jeevichirippundu is a booker prize winning Malayali. The films plot actually revolves around his quest for inspiration. With an instantly likeable Manikandan Achari delivering a neat performance as the central character, this movie from screen writer turned director Vyasan K P is an underwhelming film that lacks crispness.

John Mathew Mathan won the booker prize with his first ever book. The book was kind of easy for him as it was partially autobiographical description of his native place. He is struggling to get content for his next book and at the peak of that frustration he happens to meet this stranger named Murukan at Goa. Murukan was struggling in Goa as a tourist as he didn’t know the language. John decides to spend some time with him at Goa and the film shows us the influence of Murukan on John.

The template of the film is very simple. A writer struggling with the “writer’s block” meets a common man with unique character. The man’s attitude and life story inspires him to write a new book. This much of story was predictable from the trailer itself. I was looking for those moments that can create such inspirations for a writer. The problem with Ayal Jeevichirippundu is that it doesn’t have such awe inspiring moments to make us feel that Murukan is such an influential character. The writing of the film is in such a way that we can’t really feel a deep rooted bonding between these two. And with cheesiness evident in almost all scenes, the old school sort of feel only draws the film backwards.

Vyasan KP (Vyasan Edavanakkad) has earlier written films like The Metro and Avatharam. This is his directorial debut and he hasn’t really achieved the feel he wanted to create through this film. The screenplay needed more space for creating sequences that looked natural and here the emphasis was on making it look comical. All those sequences featuring actors like Hareesh Peradi, Thesni Khan and a few others looked annoying rather than funny. The parallel police investigation part had an exaggerated feel to it. Hari Nair’s cinematography was fine. Ouseppachan wasn’t at his best in the music department.

On screen, Vijay Babu’s character isn’t that challenging and by behaving like a normal calm person he handles that character neatly. Murukan’s character is played by Manikandan Achari. Murukan is an innocent and naïve character and with his natural openness, Manikandan succeeds in being that character. Kishor Sathya was okay. The actress who performed the role of John’s wife Anjali was terribly bad.

To sum up, Ayal Jeevichirippundu won’t inspire you or give you any great positive vibe with its content. Manikandan’s performance, the scattered humour and usual sentiments helps the movie in being somewhat engaging.

Rating: 2/5