Parava

Malayalam film industry is witnessing the emergence of a new genre. It is a mixture of the old Italian realism, New Latin American, Spaghetti Westerns and Neo-Noir. It has some very distinct characteristics.

1. It pays attention to minute details of life in lower and lower middle class sections of the society, sometimes more than what is necessary.

2. Heavy use of extreme close shots, low depth of field focus and slow motion to stylize and romanticize otherwise mundane facets of life.

3. Deliberate unscripted dialogues with emphasis to local culture.

Let's call it Faux-realism for the moment. Parava is the latest and perhaps the best example of this genre.

Tendencies of this way of film-making started showing in the early 2000s with films like Stop Violence, Black, Ivar etc. The importance of story and subtext was more during those days and the use of stylization was more of a choice in treatment. Gradually, the focus on content waned and stylization became an end product. Perhaps the emergence of directors like Amal Neerad and Sameer Thahir, who are basically cinematographers, must have contributed to defining this genre of film-making.

Faux - Realism stands in awe of the superficial characteristics of its parent genres and most of the time fails to understand their purpose and reason. To its advantage, it is quite easy to create a smokescreen effect for an average audience with such a stylization of  local subculture and cinematography circus. But once the smoke clears, you can see through it. I think one can draw parallels with the DSLR/Facebook photography trend and people's need to be connoisseurs in everything which in turn mutated into the current Malayali obsession with things like food, travel and rain. Parava successfully feeds this fetish. Of course it requires talent to create this artful deception . It is yet to be seen how long the audience will keep receiving these "realistic portrayals of local subcultures". We've already had a number of Fort Kochi/Mattanchery movies, countless Malabar movies, one Angamaly, and a few Thrissur movies.

Parava's story explores the themes of dealing with a loved one's demise, friendship and family relationships. It progresses through the eyes of two high school students growing up in Mattanchery, Irshad and Haseeb. They are surrounded by a bunch of people who are coping with, or in some case, in denial with the death of Imran - a cheerful young man loved by all in the community. Imran's death has resulted in the virtual disbanding of the local cricket club with most of the members moving on finding employment. While their rivals in sports remain unchanged, Irshad and Haseeb tries to keep alive their former glory by winning the pigeon flying tournament.

The film is quite charming to watch, but remind yourself that this charm exists only for the purpose of its existence. Its not generated from the story or plot, but a characteristic of this genre. The lead actors - Amal and Govind do their job perfectly - being themselves, fits into the genre which takes acting out of acting. Shane Nigam shows promise to be your regular psychotic/teen heart-throb who can easily be typecast if he is not careful. Dulquar Salman, as usual, plays Dulquar Salman.  Soubin Shahir skillfully weaves thin air into a movie which any day is better than his mentor Aashiq Abu's works.

Rating: That douche-bag friend of yours who has existential angst whenever he steps into Lulu mall, but feels immediately better after having a KFC burger.