Director Jithin Issac Thomas made a terrific impression with his first film, Attention Please starring Vishnu Govindan. The he went on to make “Pra. Thoo. Mu.”, which was part of the Jeo Baby-led anthology film Freedom Fight. His next full-length feature film had Vincy Aloysius playing the title role, Rekha. All his films had a treatment that had a lot of rage. Be it the visual color palette or the way it showcased resistance, we can see the filmmaker trying to invoke a sense of anger in the audience with his fast-paced narrative style. His new film Pattth, which is now streaming on Manorama Max and was showcased in the last IFFK, has Jithin making a drastic switch from the style he is known to follow. While the movie is eventually becoming a political critique of the hollow claims of the privileged, the mockumentary style is making it an absorbing watch.
While editing something he was assigned to finish, Unni, an aspiring editor, gets to know that his grandmother knew an African folk song he was editing. Considering the folk nature of the song, Unni became curious to know how his grandmother could know a song originated in a different continent. He decides to do a parallel documentary with the help of his girlfriend Anupama and what we see in Pattth are their efforts to find the roots of this song.
The style they have opted for the film is Mockumentary, which we have seen previously in Krishand’s Avasavyuham and, most recently, in Arun Chandu’s Gaganachari. Even though the subject matter here isn’t supposed to be funny, this treatment makes the storytelling engaging. The story is narrated from the point of view of Unni and Anupama, who consider themselves better than the folks whom they interviewed to know the origin of this song. But the very last scene, which has them asking the same question repeatedly, sort of gives you an impression that they are also no different from the others.
Since mocking society’s obsession with owning something as their thing is one of the aims of the movie, this treatment really favors the film. The way people from various religious or cultural backgrounds claim ownership of the song is hilarious, and we can clearly see how Jithin is trying to draw parallels with several things that are happening in society with these claims and interpretations. The frames here are mostly static, with the interview shots getting occasional gimmicky zooms. For almost 95% of the movie, what we see is mere documentation of people talking about the origin of this particular song. But without really saying much and by bringing back his signature style of jarring cuts, Jithin conveys the statement he wanted to say at the very last moment.
Ashik Safiya Aboobakker as Unni and Gauthami Gopan as Anupama are the lead pair of the movie. They mostly have these combination scenes inside their room, which is perhaps the only cinematically staged frame in the film. Both of them make the conversation feel real on screen. Other than these two, the rest of the performers are the people who are talking to them about the origin of the song. Out of those, the most memorable for me were Divakaran Vishnumangalam as PV Mohanan and Satheesh P Babu as the auto driver.
Clocking at 86 minutes, Pattth is not really beating around the bush to get into its theme. With a major chunk of it being this sarcastic dig at several elements in society, the film never really goes into that dry zone. Jithin pushes the movie away from looking like a politically charged film, and that helps the film convey its agenda in a sharp and swift way at the end.
