LIVE MOVIE REVIEW: EXPOSES SENSATIONALIST NEWSPERSONS WHILE SERVING UP ITS OWN SILLY SENSATIONALISM
Cast: Mamta Mohandas, Shine Tom Chacko, Soubin Shahir, Priya P. Varrier, Jayaraj Kozhikode, K.P. Mukundan, Akshitha, Rashmi Soman, Krishnaprabha, Radha Gomati
Director: V.K. Prakash
Language: Malayalam
Amala Sriram in Live is a celebrated doctor in Kochi known for her large-heartedness. Amala, played by Mamta Mohandas, mentors a poor man’s granddaughter while the girl works towards her goal of becoming a medical professional. Her name is Anna Chirayath (Priya P. Varier). One day, Anna is mistaken for a sex worker being pursued by the police in the area, and is arrested. Her face is splashed across media, and an editor called Sam John Vakathanam (Shine Tom Chacko) pushes her further into the spotlight and state-wide infamy.
Director V.K. Prakash’s Live written by S. Suresh Babu is about how a callous news media desperate for followers, subscribers and hits can destroy a human being. The script, direction and editing are efficient even if not remarkable in portraying Anna’s world unravelling due to a split second of confusion involving the police. The basics of the plot – covering the lethal impact of media unscrupulousness on an ordinary citizen’s existence, and the solidarity among the women who support Anna and her granddad Kuruvachan (Jayaraj Kozhikode) through this trauma – are established in a convincing fashion. While all this is happening, one assumes Amala’s rocky relationship with her husband (Soubin Shahir) will add up to something at some point and that the thread about her anonymous stalker will make sense when a bigger picture emerges at last. The assumption proves to be wrong.
Soon after the half hour mark, Live falls prey to a messy script, pretentious storytelling and ultimately, a limited understanding of journalism. Defamatory speculation with no thought given to how it affects innocents is a familiar sight to any observer of the rise of yellow journalism in India in recent years. Live presents believable, repugnant images of mediapersons swarming like insects over their prey. Once the point is made though, the imagery and the commentary get repetitive and after a while, even uninformed. That scene in which a couple of low-brow website reporters find a secret location but instead of swooping down on a potential exclusive, inform the rest of the media of their finding, defies credulity or common sense. Forget unethical journalists, the fact is that no good journalist would or should share such crucial, confidential information with rival outlets except, perhaps, to serve a greater cause such as in a scenario where the boss is blocking a report because it could antagonise those in power. It’s as if the screenwriter could not think up an imaginative reason to conjure up a crowd of reporters in the given situation and so went along with whatever popped into his head.
Here, Live mimics other films on the media that prefer broad sweeps of the pen and hyperbole over intricacies. It’s surprising that VKP, whose works include the thoughtful Natholi Oru Cheriya Meenalla and the brilliant Oruthee signed up for this poorly researched film.
Live soon wanders about in an effort to create mystery, intrigue and its own version of silly sensationalism. The conclusion of the sub-plot with Amala’s stalker completely diverts attention from the primary theme and relegates Anna to the background.
A question: why is Amala, not Anna, Live’s main character? Commercial cinema tends to centre upper caste, upper class, male and/or white saviours instead of writing members of oppressed castes, financially deprived classes, women and other marginalised folks as leads. Acknowledging allies (not saviours) is good, but chronicling the achievements and struggles of those who face persecution and recounting these stories from their perspective has to be a priority considering that this does not happen as often as it should. Even tales of allyship are unacceptable if the narrative marginalises the person or community to whom the allyship is offered. This is the issue with Live – the script is focused on wealthy, educated, professionally successful, glamorous Amala while the characterisation of Anna and Kuruvachan is skeletal. In fact, in the climax we see that Anna was only a device used to lend colour to Amala.
This is a self-defeating choice since Anna is the more interesting of the two women. The result is that Live is as bland as its bland title, and no amount of manoeuvring in the end can redeem it. Inserting a Rebecca West quote in the mouths of a couple of characters cannot mask the truth that your script is unmindful of the hierarchies of privilege within woman-dom.
Mamta Mohandas, like the rest of the cast, is a victim of substandard writing and questionable direction in Live. Priya as Anna has nothing to do but look sad. Soubin is entrusted with even less. Shine Tom Chacko gets Sam’s cockiness and swag right, but that’s all there is to the man. There can be few better illustrations of how good acting can only be a team effort involving an actor, writer, director, editor and cinematographer, than a scene in which the camera at an elevated angle slowly goes into an extreme close-up of Mamta’s eyes, she lifts her lids, and a tear is unveiled glistening in each eye. The studied shot sucks the emotion out of that scene.
DoP Nikhil S. Praveen does have his moments, however, with the early visuals of media mobs, and a spectacular aerial view of Kuruvachan cycling home as glimpses of a water body are revealed through a thick canopy of trees while the camera moves backwards to track a tiny human figure on a thin strip of road in the middle of this lush greenery.
Every other element in Live is secondary though to its mediocre writing, from the story to the lyrics. It boggles the mind that a song with these words was deemed worthy of being in a film:
This is life, this is why it’s full of joy
And that’s a lie
I was a little girl, with a big smile and big eyes
Big as the sky
Big dreams, big dreams
Medicine, medicine.
This is not a translation of Malayalam lines. This is an English number, and it plays in a scene that is meant to be extremely poignant. Enough said.
Rating: 1.5 (out of 5 stars)
Live is in theatres
Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial
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