Pinneyum

Well he is a legendary director and this was my first experience of watching an Adoor Gopalakrishnan movie from a theater. Pinneyum directed by Adoor Gopalakrishna with Dileep and Kavya Madhavan in the lead role is a very poorly executed movie. The movie perhaps has the most awkward dialogue delivery in the recent past and except for Vijayaraghavan every single actor in the movie fails to present the drama convincingly.

Purushothaman is a jobless man who is married and has a 6 year old daughter. He is a dependent of his wife’s salary and the humiliation because of that was quite high in his life. Much to the relief of Purushothaman, he gets a job in the Middle East. The movie’s conflict is based on a crooked decision taken by Purushothaman and his family to get a huge fortune. How it goes and what happens at the end is what Pinneyum depicting.

I don’t really understand why a strict director like Adoor Gopalakrishnan cant detect the lack of life in the scenes. The sort of dialogues the movie has is highly theatrical. No matter how hard you try to intellectualize it, the scenes and situations look depthless. At a time when even mainstream commercial cinema is adapting sensible realism, Adoor limits his movie’s realism in to backdrops of characters. Up to a limit we may feel it is the style of the director or the issue of the dialogue delivery of actors, but in the second half, both making and writing exceeds that limit and you find the movie very less appealing.

Among the performers, it is only Vijayaraghavan who succeeds in being completely genuine. Both Dileep and Kavya Madhavan fumble with dialogue delivery and expressions. The language of the letters and the way they talk in that emotional climax is somewhat laughable when you look in to the vocabulary. Indrans and Nedumdi Venu also struggle a little bit in rendering dialogues. Akshara was fine but the girl who played her older version made the audience laugh with her amateurish performance which reminded me of LP school stage dramas. Srinda also fails in being true to the character offered to her. A lot of actors are there who appears in just one or two scenes.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s movies always had this quality of going in to the depths of characters and their conflicts. The reason why we adore his creations is mainly because of that (at least for me). In Pinneyum there is no organic development to the plot. When Purushothaman decides to take a blunder risk and his wife and other seniors in the family readily agrees to go for that (I can’t reveal much as it is the turning point), you as a viewer find it very nonsensical. And the main reason for that is the lack of conviction in presenting such thoughts. It’s a story written on the basis of the simple thought that greed will ultimately give you nothing, but the approach was quite outdated. M J Radhakrishnan’s Cinematography was good.

I wasn’t expecting a typical Dileep movie as I knew who the director of the movie was. But the outdated theatrical presentation with unreal conflicts and very disappointing performances was somewhat irritating.

Rating : 2/5