A survival thriller centred around Kodaikanal’s Guna cave has set the cash registers ringing across Tamil Nadu. Just that Manjummel Boys is a Malayalam film even if a significant chunk of the movie slips into the Tamil zone. This celluloid spectacle with its hat-tips to Kamal Haasan’s Guna and the Kanmani anbodu song has struck an emotional chord with the audience on either side of the Palghat Gap.
While box-office chatter veers towards the biggest Malayalam hits in Chennai and the rest of Tamil Nadu, it is also time to take a leap back in time to the 1980s when the cinematic offerings from across the Western Ghats had a different connotation. Back then, the presumption was that Mollywood either dished out award-winning fare, movies that were telecast on Doordarshan during the Sunday afternoon slot, or films laced with erotic content.
The tedious or the smutty seemed to be the stereotype and even the rare mainstream hit like Karyam Nissaram featuring Prem Nazir and helmed by Balachandra Menon, which ran at Anand theatre, was lost within the avalanche of presumptions. It didn’t help that a few movie halls out to make a fast buck often spliced in soft-porn bits into the content on offer.
To say a Malayalam film had been watched often drew extreme judgments. Just as this shadow of shame lingered, the innate quality of movies directed by Joshiy, I.V. Sasi, Bharathan, Hariharan, Priyadarshan, K. Madhu, and Sibi Malayil, to name a few, slowly found a discerning audience in Madras. The game-changer was the Mammootty-starrer Oru CBI Diary Kurippu that ran for more than 200 days at Safire.
This was in 1988 and slowly the tide changed. You laughed and cried with Kilukkam or went home with a heavy heart after seeing Amaram. And could Kamal be far behind, especially after his initial stint with Mollywood? His Chanakyan, released in 1989, remains his last full-fledged role in a Malayalam flick. It ran to packed halls inside the Devi complex.
This slow-burn revenge saga witnessed Kamal at his finest and even if this film inexplicably doesn’t show up in significant movie lists these days, for those who saw, it remains a special one. This was Kamal locking horns with Thilakan and the movie also mined Jayaram’s mimicry talent, an ability that went viral, thanks to his ‘pasikkudhu Mani’ skit during the Ponniyin Selvan audio launch.
Finally, we could say that a Malayalam film was seen and the parents didn’t take any offence! This appreciation continued when Nivin Pauly’s Premam hit the screen in 2015. The film was a mega-hit, a trend that has quadrupled through Manjummel Boys, much to the delight of the Malayalee diaspora and the art-embracing Tamil audience.
