The main thought behind the making of Upacharapoorvam Gunda Jayan appears to have been to make a film with a lot of “comedy” in it. Nearly every scene is written with this idea, you can see. The problem with such ideas is that if the comedy fails, the entire film comes crumbling down faster than a house of cards. That’s what happens with Upacharapoorvam. Lead actor Saiju Kurup, and others including Sabumon, Johny Antony, Shabareesh Varma, Shailaja Ambu and a number of newcomers do try their best, but it really isn’t in their hands to save the film.
The whole premise is a wedding that is about to happen in the house of ‘Gunda Jayan’ (Saiju Kurup), a man who had once been notorious as a goon and has, since then, reformed. He runs a grocery store and has a family, but appears to carry remnants of his older life in his mannerisms and behavior. He hardly smiles, and snaps at everyone. He also has a quirk about the bathroom being dry and spotless when he has to go.
The bathroom plays a very important role in the film. There are scenes leading to it and a thread running around it until the last scene. It would have been interesting only if the writing was any better. Bathroom-related humour has been used quite a lot in Malayalam cinema, and many times, in poor taste. Director Arun Vaiga and writer Rajesh Varma slip into the latter category, taking it too, too far. At some point you would want to leap into the screen and build them a bathroom.
They try to weave a story around the things that can go wrong in a house that’s preparing for a wedding. A lot of the messing around is deliberate. The bride – niece of Gunda Jayan – doesn’t want to get married to the man her uncle had found for her. She has a relationship that everyone in the family, for reasons unexplained, doesn’t even want to hear of.
Watch: Trailer of the film
Newcomer Nayana Prasad, who plays the young bride, is visibly upset, pulled into the wedding shenanigans by relatives taking photos with her and putting saree and jewellery on her. For most of the film’s run time, she looks helplessly trapped and hardly has a line to say. Her mother – played by a pretty Radha Gomati – tells her she too was not pleased with marrying her husband but she did, and that’s how most marriages are. The whole setting reminds one of the award-winning film Thingalazhcha Nishchayam by Senna Hegde, in which a young woman is being forced into an arranged marriage she doesn’t want. But there is no comparison between the two films.
Upacharapoorvam’s failing is in trying too desperately to be funny instead of letting the script run its natural course. At the heart of it, there is a promising idea – how a crowd can be easily manipulated, and how a turbulent mind cannot have the same faculties as a calm one. But the writing failed terribly in expanding these ideas.
Talented actors are wasted in clichéd ideas of humour. Karamana Sudheer, an excellent performer, walks around clumsily as the cliché of an ex-military man, with lame digs at Hindi and army discipline. Sabumon plays a man who is inebriated but also always ready for more drinking. Johny Antony becomes your textbook lecher, filming women with his phone camera. Even the gifted Jaffer Idukki, in a cameo, plays the stereotype wedding crasher who spreads rumours everywhere.
Siju Wilson and Shabareesh Varma are more or less their usual selves, hanging around the premises, making ‘useful’ interventions. The women in the film do not have much to do, except play supporting characters to the men outside the house.
The movie comes with the inevitable twists in the end, but it doesn't do much to lift your spirits.
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