Queen

The women empowerment – revenge theme has been getting made over and over in the last few years and last year itself Bollywood sort of faced a burn out of this theme. The Malayalam film Queen is also an addition to the list and unfortunately it isn’t that gripping. Those of you who have not seen or heard about the film Pink produced by Shoojit Sircar might argue with me on the social criticism part of the story in the last twenty minutes featuring Salim Kumar. But even after giving a consideration, I don’t really feel anything fresh about this campus movie.

So the college in the film has started Mechanical branch and our heroes are the ones in the first batch. Soon after the classes started, a girl joined the batch. Initially the boys were reluctant to accept her and soon they became thick friends. The movie talks about something that happens to this girl and how these friends reacted to that and how it all ends.

The film has a length of two hours and forty minutes. It begins as a campus story, then after that it takes a Kal Ho Na Ho/ Chitrashalabham detour and then it becomes that women’s right activism film. The elaborateness and similarities with other films almost made me feel that the makers of the film had only the idea of presenting Mechanical department on screen and they just picked up used out topics to elongate the film. The packed theater howled for the sentimental dialogues and fury of the boys and the girl in the film. Like I mentioned in the beginning, the scenes featuring Salim Kumar had relevance. But the film took a whole lot of time and a lot of predictable sequences to reach there.

Dijo Jose Antony seems to have less clarity on what all to include in the film. At one point our heroine is in a devastating phase in her life and in the next scene we are seeing her in that poster attire where she is full on energy and dancing. It almost felt like they made up that entire sequence to use the potential of that famous photograph. Post interval the film becomes clumsy with sentimental and political elements coming in to it. The cinematography was fine, but there were some evident DI glitches. The songs were fine even though some of them weren’t placed smoothly.

Barring a few supporting actors, a majority of this film’s cast is new faces and they all have some evident weaknesses. The screenplay kind of gave space to all of them to show the audience their weakness. Emotional outbreaks and anger expressed by these actors weren’t really working. Saniya Iyyappan as the heroine is a little too innocent and the “goodness” level of the character was also unconvincing. Even though he appears only in the last few minutes, Salim Kumar manages to create an impression.  Nandu was good while Sreejith Ravi looked artificial.

Queen for mechanical is less than or equivalent to what Mexican Aparatha was for left supporting students. On a content level it has nothing interesting to offer. Because of the discrete humor and last minute feminism, this 160 minutes long film manages to stay somewhat alive.

Rating: 2/5

By Aswin Bharadwaj

Founder and editor of Lensmen Reviews.

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