‘Pookkaalam’ movie review: A feel-good family entertainer with a novel theme

A nonetheless from ‘Pookkaalam’
| Photo Credit: Saregama Malayalam/YouTube

Happiness is Ganesh Raj’s calling card; one would battle to search out an sad second in his work. Even the most important of crises would appear quite inconsequential when handled light-heartedly. In the world that he envisions, heat colors come out of each different body. Light, feel-good music goes on and on within the background. Tears are principally out of happiness, quite than sorrow. For that matter, his debut movie itself was titled Aanandam (happiness).

While Aanandam was set round a group of children on a school journey, in his sophomore work Pookkaalam, it’s the older technology — a couple who’re practically a hundred years outdated and have been married for eighty years — who takes centre stage. On the day of their granddaughter Elsy’s (Annu Antony) betrothal, Ittoop (Vijayaraghavan) by accident discovers an outdated letter written fifty years in the past. The letter threatens to forged a cloud on the completely happy event, bringing as much as the floor the family’s buried secrets and techniques

The novel theme is what drives a lot of the movie, however Ganesh, who has additionally scripted it, ensures that it doesn’t tread on terrains which can be too sizzling to deal with, simply stopping quick each time the movie threatens to slide out of the feel-good zone. Well, it’s not incorrect to play to your strengths. It is the form of materials which might have ended up as a heart-wrenching story if dealt with by another person.

Much of Pookkaalam focuses on the nice and cozy relationship between Ittoop and his spouse Kochuthresia (KPAC Leela), and the big prolonged family round them, at current. Yet, it takes periodic shifts to the previous, of their early days of struggles and private losses, which provides us an concept of the influence that the disaster would have on the close-knit family. The disaster additionally shines a mild on the disagreeable episodes that individuals wilfully overlook to maintain the ship crusing easily. People who appear sober of their outdated age may need achieved horrible issues previously. At one level, Kochuthresia ominously tells Ittoop, “We have been living in this house for eighty years. If we dig deep around here, we might find uncomfortable things.”

Ganesh makes an attempt to stability each emotional second rapidly with a light-hearted scene, some working and a few don’t. For occasion, a operating joke involving a junior advocate (Basil Joseph) and his outdated good friend (Vineeth Sreenivasan), who’s now a decide, appears a bit compelled. Despite all of the youthful forged of actors round them, Vijayaraghavan and KPAC Leela hog all of the limelight with their shifting performances because the couple who’re dealing with a disaster late of their lives. In the moments that he acts stern, Vijayaraghavan brings again reminiscences of his father N.N.Pillai’s iconic character ‘Anjooran’ in Godfather.

Pookkaalam is a feel-good family entertainer with a novel theme that ends quite tamely and predictably.

Pookkaalam is at the moment operating in theatres