Bhoomiyile Manohara Swakaryam

Bhoomiyile Manohara Swakaryam is one gigantic cringe-fest. From melodramatic dialogues to caricature-like characters that are somewhat similar to those mediocre government ads we saw on TV, this movie directed by Shyju Anthikkad has everything that can give you a headache. The plan is to show the viewer that religion has penetrated so much into our headspace that we have become alien to unconditional love. But the presentation here is so lame with a script that is trying to balance things in a clumsy way.

Ahammed and Anna are friends from childhood and their parents are also good friends. Both of them who loved each other belonged to extremely religious families. One day, all of a sudden Ahammed decides to leave his native place without revealing many details and he asked Anna to forget him and move on. What happens post this incident is the main content of  Bhoomiyile Manohara Swakaryam.

When the story shifted to Kanyakumari in the second half, I was wondering whether they were trying to create a Malayalam version of Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat. But that hope didn’t last for long. The movie sort of shifts to an ego clash between the hero and heroine and they are both trying to defend their religion at every breath. Just when we all may think that the movie is trying to avoid the Hindutva terror, A Santhakumar adds a track to balance the secularism. The presentation of this generation’s love is extremely outdated. The poetic romance they are trying to depict here looked like a school drama where two people who had no idea about acting was delivering sugar-coated lines without much of an expression.  

Deepak Parambol is that actor who has impressed us in character roles in the past. The ease he showed in those characters is there in this character too. But whenever the presentation goes to those cheesy areas, he is also struggling to handle it neatly. Prayaga Martin finally gets a character that wants her to do a little bit of acting rather than just looking pretty on every frame. Indrans is reduced to a caricature Muslim orthodox man and so was the case with Sudheesh too. Abhishek Raveendran doesn’t have much to do here and I must say that even though the character offered to him was way too unreal, Shine Tom Chacko as the police officer had appreciable ease in his performance.

Shyju Anthikkad who previously made movies like Scene Onnu Nammude Veedu and Honey Bee 2.5 is still in that outdated zone when it comes to the treatment of scenes. We will know how every scene will eventually unfold and that’s because we have seen that style a gazillion times. The ending of the movie was a weird one. It felt like the director and writer were afraid to take a credible stand and thus decided to play it safe by stranding the protagonists in the middle of a river. And that symbolic way of showing the heroin’s pregnancy was a facepalm moment. The cinematography was okay and the music by Sachin Balu was really nice.

Bhoomiyile Manohara Swakaryam is a tedious preach that wants to say something that has relevance but sadly has no craft attached to it. A script that wants to take everything to the very extreme in a very superficial way became even more insufferable when it got made in a ludicrous way.

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