Oru Jaathi Jathakam, the latest movie starring Vineeth Sreenivasan, is as breezy as an Oru Vadakkan Selfie. The movie offers you enough moments to laugh out loud thanks to the Thalassery dialect and the constant angry mood of the central character. In order to give the film this conventional structure and ultimately give it a progressive outlook, writer Rakesh Mantodi adds conflicts that an orthodox man would find hard to accept. While the momentary humor does work, the way this film treats the LGBTQI+ community is almost borderline problematic. But with a lot of dialogue humor, Oru Jaathi Jathakam manages to be a film that rarely has a dull moment.
Jayesh, a native of Thalassery who works in Chennai, is our central character. He is 38 years old, and he is really trying hard to get married through all the options available, like matrimonial websites, and local brokers etc., Jayesh is a very old-school guy, who is very particular about physical attributes, caste, horoscope, etc., of his future wife and he doesn’t want her to do a job after marriage. The journey of this 38-year-old guy to get a girl and what he faces and learns in that journey is what we see in Oru Jaathi Jathakam.
Some of you may feel whether one should think too much about the content of the film as it is designed as this rollercoaster laugh riot. The thing is, M Mohanan and Rakesh Mantodi are actually trying to cater this to an audience who might be of the mindset of Jayesh. There are a lot of advocates of conventional marriage who think finding someone and getting married is a major achievement. To an extent, the excessive Kundan humor in this movie is justifiable because the whole segment is, in a way, roasting the people who have this shallow way of judging someone for having a sexuality. The film tries to include various ideas of marriages, like the ones with a huge age gap, same-sex relationships, the relationship of a divorced individual, etc., at a later stage.
As the trailer suggests, the emphasis is pretty much on the humor that comes along with the idea of an unmarried man in his late 30s. Looking at the way Rakesh Mantodi has described the bride-hunting of his uncle, M Mohanan, who is the director of this movie, there is no surprise that every beat of this movie is full of humor. While the first half, which sort of gives us an idea about the character of Jayesh, is definitely entertaining, you can see the writing finding it a bit difficult to take the story forward. The gay aspect gets introduced in that area, then we have a series of events where a chauvinist has to face or go through situations that he finds disgusting. And through all these, they are somewhat trying to educate a reluctant segment of the society to move forward. But like I said, the over-dependence on the gay jokes, and the way the story slips from one girl to another somewhere reduces the laughter riot mode of the film.
Vineeth Sreenivasan, as Jayesh, is in that totally different zone, and somewhere, the funny aggression reminded me of the character he played in Oru Vadakkan Selfie. He is playing a character with absolutely no redeeming qualities, and aided by the slang in which he is comfortable, the performance looks great on screen. Alamabans fame Amal Thaha is playing the role of the friend of Jayesh in the film, and he was good. Mridul Nair, as the male chauvinist friend of Jayesh, cracks the character by using slang pretty effectively. PP Kunhikrishnan, as Jayesh’s father, was hilarious. Most of the female leads you may have seen in the posters of this movie, including Nikhila Vimal, are there mostly for one or two scenes. The most memorable ones, largely because of the impact they have on Jayesh, were the ones played by Kayadu Lohar and Indu Thampy.
The subject of a man being bullied around for not getting married is not something that can be considered a fresh theme in Kerala. But like how Vineeth Sreenivasan managed to make OVS an entertaining film about a failed BTech guy who tackled the “job” queries, Rakesh Mantodi and M Mohanan have managed to pack this movie with back-to-back situational humor, and because of that you sort of ignore the preachy, middling progressive aspects of the script, which clearly gets lost in the abundance of dialogue humor.
With a lot of dialogue humor, Oru Jaathi Jathakam manages to be a film that rarely has a dull moment.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended