Heroine, a beautiful, mod, live-wire, brilliant college student, always one up on everyone she encounters, including her own teachers and the Principal. One of her classmates is a serious, circumspect boy whose surname indicates a mighty rich lineage but turns out to be a very poor fellow struggling to pay even the fees. The girl agrees to fund his studies. And then comes the clincher- the girl is a poor orphan who is working as a maid servant in six or seven houses during her free time to eke out a living and to finance her own studies! This was the theme of one hit Malayalam film in the recent times.

 

Orphans have invaded Malayalam films like never before. But these are not ordinary orphans. One can find the hero, a barely literate orphan right from the street, suddenly regaling the audience with rare classical ragas, which even a talented person, would take years to master. In the next scene, he would be seen participating in an intellectual discourse or advising a senior police officer on the latest developments in criminology, or displaying rare prowess in martial arts as he pounds the villains. Same is the case with the heroine, who coming from abject poverty or from some orphanage, can suddenly be seen performing rare nuances of Bharata Natyam or Kuchipudi or singing intricate Carnatic tunes to perfection or rendering rare insights into some complicated legal issue or on matters of ecology or for that matter, anything under the sun . These orphans are precocious, outstandingly brilliant all-rounders. They excel in all areas of human endeavor, be it studies, art, sports or quiz or any such field.

 

After a lot of songs, dances and melodrama, in the end it would be known that the orphan in question is from the noblest lineage or of extremely rich parentage!  

 

Simultaneously three or four Malayalam films will be on the air, thanks to the proliferation of channels. One can switch from one film to the other without feeling any loss of continuity as the story lines are the same. What has happened to this industry which produced geniuses like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Aravindan, John Abraham etc...?

 

More than five decades above, a progressive writer of Kerala had found fault with the  then prevailing literature in the State as one in which a charming prince would fall in love with a beautiful and virtuous beggar girl, they getting married after the usual turmoil and living happily thereafter. Film industry was virtually non-existent in the State those days as otherwise the same could have applied to it also. Progressive literature then took roots in the State and the films of the 50s and 60s used to adopt stories from it. As a result the films those days were near to realities of human life and Malayalm films used to stand out different from the rest in the country. Films used to be different in contents and themes.

 

Sometime in the 70s, the films started falling into a rut. A talented hero of those days, who is no more with us, once lamented that his undoing was that he had to act in so many films as the long lost boy reuniting with his family after many years and a lot of struggles! These types of clichéd characters have now become the order of the day. 

 

Stories which would not even qualify to be juvenile fantasies, convoluted dialogues, scenes unfit even for sitcoms and talented actors performing as if a fancy dress competition is on- these have become the hallmarks of most of the present day Malayalam films.  Quite a number of the films of this genre are big hits in this state of the “progressives”. Escapisms of the worst order, these films only debase everything. Only sociologists can say whether it is a case of the audience getting what they deserve or the films getting the audience they deserve! Whatever it is, I cannot help quoting what Joseph Pulitzer said about journalism.

 

“..a cynical, mercenary, demagogic, corrupt press will produce in time a people as base as itself.”

 

With appropriate changes, one can say the same thing about the present day Malayalam films.