Vishal Menon

There’s something about PR Arun’s Pharma that takes you back to the whistleblower dramas of the 90s. Although it’s set in the dubious world of pharma and the corrupt practices there in the late 2000s, it recalls films like The Firm and The Street Lawyer, both based on John Grisham novels, in the way it takes an insider’s efforts to redeem himself for a major corporation to be taught a lesson. The arc of Pharma too is familiar and predictable but through its lead actor Nivin Pauly, one can sense the earnestness with which the series was written, especially when it handles a subject that requires patience to understand. By placing this subject within the realm of an experimental drug meant to be consumed by pregnant women, the importance of its message outshines the way it tries to say it.

Ever since directors like Karthik Subbaraj and Lokesh Kanagaraj made it socially acceptable for a film to be termed a “fanboy sambhavam”, we as the audience were aware that this sub-genre would eventually spread to all languages, catering to almost every fanbase. Dhananjay Shankar’s Bha Bha Ba is among Malayalam cinema’s most desperate attempts at cashing in on this cow and the film tries to do this by milking the fanbases of two of its major stars—Dileep (obviously) and Mohanlal.

There was a time in Tamil cinema when films like Revolver Rita may have been considered “cool”. This must have been around the early 2010s, when the first generation of Tamil filmmakers graduated from the Broadband Downloads School of Modern Cinema. Of course, they all cultivated their tastes with modern classics, but somewhere down the line, films of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie became the most important names in their taste-making. Revolver Rita, in all fairness, appears to be a film that was found in one of the old Seagate hard disks of that era.

In Sivaranjani’s Victoria, the most striking moment has more to do with a sound, rather than visuals. It feels like just another day at Victoria’s (Meenakshi Jayan) beauty salon when we hear this, as she waxes the arms of a customer. Until then, we see Victoria maintaining a happy face through it all, as she tries to manage the crowd at the salon with the worries of having to elope with her non-committal boyfriend. But each time Victoria tugs at a waxing strip in her hurry to remove them, the sound we hear is that of slaps falling on Victoria, along with the voice of a man shouting. Until that moment, we see bruises on her face, but the film doesn’t quite explain their origin. And with the sound of each waxing strip getting pulled, we listen in on the taunts being hurled at Victoria for her decision to marry outside of her religion. For women like her, the salon is therapy.

For a film named after the most fragrant sub-species of sandalwood, there’s a lot of talk about the stench people are forced to live with in Jayan Nambiar’s Vilayath Buddha. The most obvious of these stories belong to Bhaskaran (Shammi Thilakan), the out-of-work politician who cannot reverse his reputation, after he gets caught visiting the neighbourhood sex worker. Then there’s the stench Chaithanya (Priyamvada) wants to get rid off of her for being termed this sex worker’s daughter. She has no identity outside of her mother’s occupation and she fears she too will be seen as one. Then of course is the story of Double Mohanan (Prithviraj), the sandalwood smuggler, who will forever remain a thief to everyone in the hill station of Marayur.

When we meet Aneesh (Roshan Mathew) and Anjana (Zarin Shihab) for the first time, Aneesh refers to this ex-girlfriend of his as… Anjana. They’re meeting after seven long years, after their respective heartbreaks, and yet through their easy comfort, we begin to feel like “Anjana” is still too formal a name for Aneesh to be calling her. It’s the easiest name to shorten to Anju and yet, by the end of this meeting, when we realise Anish’s Anjana has now become Anju again, we cannot remember when this shift happened.