Tiyaan

The agenda of the new movie Tiyaan written by Murali Gopy is something that looks relevant. The God men “business” that is still ruling the minds of many people, is the main focus here and through a story that tries to shed light on the concept of finding your God by yourself, this movie had the scope to be that mix of genres, but the lack of layers in storytelling and also the way it has been narrated reduces the impact and we don’t really feel the kind of enlightenment we should have felt at the end of the film.

Mahashay Bhaghavan is this God Man who wants to build his Ashram at a place in the north India where many people including a Malayalaee Brahmin Pattabhiraman is living. Pattabhiraman has a very dignified lineage. The arrival of the Ashram causes problems to these people as they were asked to leave the place. Tiyaan basically is about the fight of Pattabhiraman for his right to live in that soil and how a third person named Aslan Mohammed influences him in this fight.

Theme and the politics of the movie are definitely on the progressive side. But it is the writing and the presentation that becomes the villain here. From the “go back to Pakistan” movement to the ongoing beef based lynching activities,   the movie bravely makes references to all those things. But it can’t really shape all that in to an ultimate climax. Remember how everything used to have an exciting culmination in Murali Gopy’s other successful scripts like EAK and LRL? Here that magic isn’t happening. Unlike what Prithviraj said in an interview prior to the release, it isn’t that difficult to comprise this movie into a simple one liner. If he felt there were many other layers to the movie that can’t be put in words, I think they were lost in translation.

Jiyen Krishnakumar as a film maker can’t add freshness to the script. The predictability was never taken care off. The build up in the story of Aslan was way too much and looking at the point at which his story is exposed in the movie, we might have predicted it way before. Murali Gopy’s writing used to have impressive detailing about characters which mostly comes in to play a key role in later portion of his films. Tiyaan on the other hand is trying to focus on what it wants to say about the concept of God, but largely on a peripheral level. The wow factor MG has shown in other films in connecting characters is missing here and whatever he has done here looks cheesy. A key area in Tiyaan is the shift in Aslan’s character and I feel that they should have focused more on that part rather than the predictable struggle of Pattabhiraman. The political correctness they try to add through certain dialogues isn’t that effective. Satheesh Kurup has made the frames of this movie look really impressive. The scale they wanted to show is evident in all those frames and the color tone of the visuals suits the mood. The background score was okay from Gopi Sundar.

Prithviraj plays a vital character in the movie but when you look at the screen-time of that character he probably has the least among the three pivotal characters in this film. While the younger Aslan is a character that we can easily call a typical Prithviraj choice, the older one had to look and feel like someone with wisdom and the actor was pretty much okay. Indrajith plays the role of Pattabhiraman with conviction. The shift from being perplexed to becoming someone who is determined was portrayed effectively by him. Murali Gopy in his usual style becomes the graceful and venomous Mahashay in a convincing way. Apart from these three, the cast of the movie is very elaborate and the screen space they have is pretty minimal.

Tiyaan has a very predictable story with a theme that has a bit of fantasy elements along with some self realization philosophies. But the amalgamation of all these elements was not quite correct and thus the experience isn’t that overwhelming.

Rating: 2.5/5

By Aswin Bharadwaj

Founder and editor of Lensmen Reviews.

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