Bheeshma Parvam Movie Review A epic self-aware homage to the gangster saga

 

Director: Aman Neerad 

 Cast: Mammootty , Soubin Shahir , Sreenath Bhasi.

 

Can any self-respecting gangster drama bypass the urge to cram in call backs and reverent nods to the basic tenets of the genre without riffing off Francis Ford Coppolla’s seminal classic The Godfather, probably not? Bheeshma Parvam, the latest association between the mythic like duo – Mammootty and Amal Neerad, reuniting after their earlier cult classic – “Big B” that released thirteen years ago. As a cinema obsessed Malayali millennial, I can’t even begin to break down, the promise that the movie held right from its day of announcement through to the various tit bits shared by the team by way of promotional content. Bheeshma Parvam had a benchmark to live up to and even, surpass the quality of mainstream commercial movie making in Malayalam, which it does in its own way. The film is an homage to the many family feud based, that have dominated the sub-genre of mob-based films that places its conceit around a bitter large family where the depth of relationships, often cast under the shadow of mistrust and betrayals and, following a path down a Shakespearean saga of human follies gone wrong.

The film set around the end of 1980’s is the familiar tale woven around a family of wealthy business group headed by the ageing patriarch Michael (Mammootty), an earned nod to the name sake antihero from Mario Puzo’s Godfather. Michael here too is told to be a good meaning heir to a sprawling empire, who had to leave behind a life of normalcy in the face of eminent danger to the family’s existence after the untimely death of the family head, his father. The parallels don’t just end there, the writers take special care to drive home the point that Michael always had hope in his early days to lead an uneventful life as a lawyer but was forced into the family trade and left to protect his loved ones at the cost of turning a controlling obstacle to their own wild ambitions. We also get the “Kay” stand in with a romantic partner who is a friend that unmarried Michael carries from his younger days, a confidant of his pent-up energies and bloated loneliness amidst his scheming and sometimes disdainful family.

Bheeshma Parvam is a solidly mounted production that goes out of its way to lend texture to the time period that it is set in, with the infusion of period appropriate props and production design, that for never ones feels out of place or jammed in to dominate the visual beats of the period detail. The writing felt refreshing as many of the unsaid flourishes in character work and background history is filled in through acerbic one liner’s and to the point exposition, that goes beyond generations and familiar references with great economy. What Amal Neerad and his co-writers builds here are vignettes of images and characters that feel terribly familiar in their broader strokes but possess minutely observed quirks. The screenwriting often integrates narrative shorthand’s that build the world around Michael as if entering his world right around the characters midpoint – as if the stage has been set already. The storytelling is not meant to be an exercise in subversive genre reworking but a rather sincere love letter to the genre itself.

The narrative unabashedly follows the template to the tee with clichés like the evil murky yet moronic side players from within the family whose dissolution with the way things are run, leads to the conflicts escalating into the familiar tropes of catastrophe and ultimate reckoning. The filmmaking grammar is so joyous that even the most mundane passages in the screenplay are staged with the fluidity that surpasses any level of predictability to the events unfolding on screen, Neerad for some reasons places dogs as a visual presence in and around key moments used as a continuation to the decision to use raw, Kodak era inspired aesthetic of larger than life histrionics on screen. Mammootty’s turn as Michael is a chapter in voice acting and nuanced control over physical movements. The part is literally one up’s his performance as Bilal from Big B, a very similarly stoic leading man devoid of any fathomable sense of emotional responsiveness. However, Michael wears his feelings of volatility, sensitivity and inherent aggression out in the open sans any inhibitions.

 

The brothers , Ami (Sreenath Bhasi) and Ajas (SoubinShahir) too work well in building some sense of intimacy in an otherwise emotionally distant film that never lets its side parts flourish beyond immediate story beats. The writing is too suggestive of these peoples lives and backgrounds, forcing us to make out our own versions of their intentions rather than show us who they are in their own stories. The downside of designing a movie around the unbreakable persona of its leading man is that it lends its side players stale after a point, mere convenience placeholders set aside to progress the plot points forward. Fathima (Nadia Moidhu) and Susan (Lena) felt like people who have been put through the extremities of life in a few sequences that never go beyond that to give them any sense of urgency, however the acting lends the unsaid layers of empathy and dread of cowing to the physical and mental intimidation at the hands of men, who have controlled and guided their miserable fates in love and loss.

The writing towards the final act did seem a little inorganic as compared to the earlier acts which had more of a chapter like feel with each event drawn out with creatively designed cross cutting that effectively paced the narrative without loosing out on the deftness on display during the opening sequences. The music and background score by Sushin Shyam help elevate the retro-ness of the time period and unleashes crucial releases during interestingly placed action set pieces. Bheeshma Parvam too has the antagonist problem in some share as we never feel the inevitable carnage posed by the villain but get a few stock encounters with the hero that starts to work in parts due to the decision to finish off the major players of the bad guys ensemble in a very convenient yet novel manner instead of having a final showdown with twenty odd henchmen and the hero fighting it out to emerge victorious. The writing suddenly subverts its own massive setup with a relatively straight forward closure that does not necessarily tie all the loose ends but wraps things up quickly instead of dragging on and on, a much-needed lesson for many overlong, over drawn out entertainer films that overstays its welcome in the recent past.