Machante Malakha

A certain machine-like uniformity marks the male and female characters in Boban Samuel’s Machante Malakha. While almost all the male characters are good-hearted and submissive, a majority of the female characters are scheming ones trying every trick in their book to make life difficult for the men around them. This unmissable pattern in the writing of the characters serves the purpose for which the film appears to have been made – to put into cinematic form the grievances of the men’s rights associations that have cropped up in recent times. Machante Malakha begins as a typical boy meets girl story, with Sajeevan (Soubin Shahir), a bus conductor, falling in love with Bijimol (Namitha Pramod), a regular passenger in the bus, after a series of fights. But the prologue to this love story, when a fellow bus conductor whom Sajeevan is in love with leaves him to get married to a rich man, signals the film’s intentions. Whether it be due to this underlying agenda of the film or plain bad writing, Bijimol is written with confusing character traits, changing her behaviour multiple times even within a single scene.