When Barroz was announced as the first directorial venture of Mohanlal, what excited most people was the fact that Jijo Punnoose, the man who made the iconic My Dear Kuttichathan, was along with Mr. Mohanlal as a creative support. The COVID hit production took delays, and Jijo eventually left the project. In his blog, he shared that the movie is very different from what he had envisioned. Initially, Mohanlal had planned Barroz as a 3D play, which he dropped after sighting the humongous logistical hurdles. The Barroz we see now may have the format of a film, but the staging, writing, and performances are all very much like a play. With the writing even underestimating its target audience, children, Barroz becomes a 154-minute display of a group of ace creative people losing judgment.
Barroz was a loyal servant to the Portuguese king, Cristóvão da Gama, who ruled Goa almost 400 years ago. At one point, Gama had to leave Goa to get more military strength, and he asked Barroz to protect his treasure. What we see in Barroz is the events that unfold in the present day when a girl named Isa reaches the same place, which is now a heritage tourism spot.
From a very early stage itself, the movie was promoted as a film for kids. But making a film for kids is actually a challenging thing as their attention span is extremely thin. I feel even if you approach this movie as a children’s film, the chances of you being able to overlook the flaws in the writing of this movie are very low. TK Rajeev Kumar and Mohanlal had done a lot of staged skit-like things for Asianet, and Barroz just feels like an extension of such creations. From the basic idea of a ghost protecting his master’s treasure, the story rarely manages to evolve and add layers. And the melodramatic dialogues are unintentionally funny, especially whenever Mohanlal says “Thampurane.”
This is Mohanlal’s directorial debut, and as a filmmaker, he is struggling to extract the best emotions from a scene. The writing itself approaches the movie on a peripheral level, and thus, the making has its limitations. It seems like they have this dilemma on how to treat the film. The way the film jumps into songs feels very immature and hasty. After a point, it looks like a desperate effort to salvage the movie by throwing in animation songs, unfunny comedy sequences, and a lot of rope fights. Santhosh Sivan, who has handled the cinematography for the film, is staging every shot in order to create the depth required for 3D. One can see a pattern in the way the camera pans, and it feels like since the movie was shot in 3D, there was this lensing limitation as the frames mostly looked very tight. And there are far too many shots in the movie where 3D makes objects pop out, and it feels gimmicky after a point.
Santhosh Raman’s production design is good, but I think the lensing or the lighting is making it look like a set. Most of the locations we see in this movie have this congested feel, which really reduces the grandeur aspect of the film. The visual effects aren’t that great. The WooDoo doll’s animation was done neatly, but the sequence that has Barroz sitting on a pole in the sea had terrible lighting. Lydian Nadhaswaram’s songs are fine, considering how they have been envisioned in the movie. The background score definitely has that sense of grandeur attached to it, but the visuals weren’t complementing it.
Apart from Mohanlal and Guru Somasundaram, there are no known faces in the film. And frankly, it feels like everyone, including Mohanlal, is trying to figure out the pitch of the performance. The pauses Mohanlal gives while getting astonished, or even the way he slowly remembers everything, are all looking very artificial. Maya Rao West as Isa has that innocent face, but the performance part is not that amazing as the tone shifts are very abrupt. Guru Somasundaram is reduced to a mere joker. The non-Indian cast members have this task of being eccentric all the time, and the unfamiliar Indians in the cast were really bad with expressions and dialogue delivery. Thanks to the gracious cameo of Antony Perumbavoor, there was one moment when the whole theater erupted with laughter.
The Woodoo doll in the film was added in CGI in the post-production, and I think a lot of the dialogue of that character was written in order to reduce the damage. Because when Barroz starts to speak dramatically, beating around the bush, there were moments we can literally hear the doll telling him to cut the crap and get to the point. If that doll was actually present while Mohanlal and TK Rajeev Kumar were rewriting the movie, we might have got a less cringy and more fun film in the form of Barroz.
With the writing even underestimating its target audience, children, Barroz becomes a 154-minute display of a group of ace creative people losing judgment.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
