Sunday Holiday

Sunday Holiday is Jis Joy’s second film after Bicycle Thieves and if you have seen that film, you might have noticed his love for sentiments and twists in narrative. The suspense quotient this time may not be on the same dose, but the tempo is much similar. Intended to be a feel good entertainer, it might not have achieved that level of perfection, but I would say Sunday Holiday won’t annoy you.

Amal’s love life met with an unexpected ending and he decides to go to Ernakulam for a job so that he can stay away from the entire buzz surrounding the love failure. The movie is about the things that happen in Amal’s life during that phase and how it eventually changes everything.

The movie is narrated as a script discussion between a well known director and a wannabe writer. And as you all may easily guess, the script discussion ends on an overwhelming note and much like the recent film Oru Cinemakkaran, we as an audience won’t feel the kind of emotions the director (Lal Jose) shows at the end of that narrative. And that is because of the lack of freshness in the cinema story here. That story is this simple thread with usual elements of sacrifice, sentiments, romance etc. And apart from the occasional humour, there isn’t anything peculiar here to make the content exciting. There is a minimum respect we give to sentimental segments in films and Sunday Holiday gets that for sure.

Asif Ali becomes more of a behaving actor with each film and here also he performs neatly, but there is no uniqueness to its credit. Aparna Balamurali had some hiccups in the beginning portions, but towards the end she was smooth. Sreenivasan’s character is another version of tailor Ambujakshan with a little more realness. As always, Siddique did his part effectively. Sudheer Karamana, Dharmajan, Alenciar, Bhaghath, KPAC Laliltha, Asha Sharrath, Lal Jose and a few more names are there who were all fine in their roles.

Jis Joy has written the screenplay and dialogues for this film. At this phase of Malayalam cinema, where realism in treatment is making a very effective communication with the audience I think he as a writer should try to loosen things. Almost all the dialogues in the movie have this dramatic structure and some of the attempts to create humour weren’t working. In the beginning, there is a sequence where old people sitting at a wedding are looking at the rain saying that it is the tears of the boy who got ditched by the girl who is getting married. Seriously? I was hoping Jis Joy would make the on screen director say that Unni’s script has numerous flaws, but can be rectified. But nothing like that happened. The amount of numerous subplots in this film somehow make us question the relevance of all those in a story like this. Cinematography was fine. Edits could have been tidier. All the slow tracks from Deepak Dev sounded nice. That club song was a negative by all means.

Sunday Holiday is not a patience tester for sure. With sporadic jokes and a little bit of excitement here and there, the film moves on with all its ups and downs. I would say Sunday Holiday is an average harmless comedy.

Rating: 2.5/5