On the face of it, the Malayalam movie Manjummel Boys is a well-made survival thriller based on real-life incidents.
We know beforehand that Subhash, one of the boys hailing from a Kochi suburb called Manjummel, slipped into a deep cavern while visiting the Guna caves of Kodaikanal, the popular hill station in Tamil Nadu, in 2006. The caves get their name from the 1991 Tamil movie, Guna, starring Kamal Hassan.
Subhash was miraculously stuck on a ledge during the fall. He lay there bruised and blood-soaked, barely conscious and delirious when a torrential rain started pouring down. Many people in the locality advised the rest of the friends to return home, as none till date — 13 in the records and around 50 unofficially — could be retrieved dead or alive from the treacherous crevice estimated to be as deep as the height of the Kodaikanal hills.
Screengrab from video.
When the police were informed, they accused the youngsters of murdering Subhash and brutally assaulted them. None of the firefighters who reached the site were ready to launch a search although they could hear Subhash’s feeble cries from deep down in response to his friends’ desperate calls. Finally, one of the boys named Siju David, a.k.a. Kuttan, decided to go down a rope, provided by the fire department, into the dark, freezing cavern filled with sharp zigzag rock-formations. Overcoming impossible obstacles, he brought Subhash out of the pit, as the friends pulled them up in a daredevil mission carried out single-mindedly.
What makes Manjummel Boys stand apart is the way the tale has been crafted for celluloid and how an enormously popular love track from the Kamal Hassan movie Guna is expertly placed in the background, transforming it into a saga of fortitude. The song Kanmani anbodu kathalan… is in the form of a man’s love letter to his girlfriend with a lavish sprinkling of endearments. “For mere mortals to understand, this is no human love, but beyond that, so pure!:” goes one of its oft-quoted lyrics.
But the song proves to be absolutely in sync with the corresponding frames in Manjummel Boys, clues to which are speckled all over the first half. The film not only translates onto the silver screen a magnificent account of human bond and endurance, but also celebrates the commonest of men working as factory hands, welders, construction workers, and taxi drivers, whose stories are either ignored or patronised by mainstream cinema.
Screengrab from video.
The movie is a rare phenomenon where both the actors and the actual persons on whom the film is based are equally fawned upon by fans. Soubin Shahir playing Siju David and Sreenath Bhasi enacting Subhash are proven talents. The rest of the gang is a curious mix of familiar and fresh faces. They all get the Kochi slang just right and reproduce the mannerisms of the persons they represent flawlessly, as certified by the actual Manjummel Boys themselves in numerous interviews.
The film continues its victory run on OTT after becoming the highest-grossing Malayalam film to date. It has proved to be one of those miracles when a commercial film lives up to the hype, leading to repeat watches and a revival of associated materials — interviews old and new with the real “boys”; reports and documentaries on the accident; and the ambitious recreation of the daunting caves in a large godown at Perumbavoor, another Kochi suburb.
But more importantly, the movie celebrates the subaltern. The devastated youngsters tap into their own resilience and skillset when the police, the fire and rescue services, and the forest department turn a blind eye to their plight. They are ridiculed for inviting it upon themselves by entering a prohibited area and causing trouble to the authorities. Most tellingly, this gang of ordinary boys from a godforsaken Kerala village is not worth the risk because earlier, when a Union minister’s nephew fell into the same eerie cavern, a substantial reward was not enticing enough for the most daring men to go in search for him.
In that sense, Manjummel Boys at once becomes a record of the entrenched apathy, administrative and otherwise, for the disenfranchised poor.
Foregrounding such themes while not reducing itself into a run-of-the-mill real-life drama is achieved because of the passion that went into its making. The movie’s writer-director Chidambaram says that his protagonists, the original Manjummel Boys, are “very strong humans”. His regard for these men is reflected in the decision to explore their backstories and childhoods in elegant, poetic frames. There are ponderings on God and spirituality, life after trauma, and the transformative effect the event had on each one of them. The technical, behind-the-scenes crew rises to the occasion: Ajayan Chalissery’s production design, Shyju Khalid’s camera, Vivek Harshan’s editing and Sushin Shyam’s music cast a throbbing intensity to the film.
A controversy erupted in early March when renowned Tamil-Malayalam writer B. Jeyamohan made a sweeping statement in response to the film’s resounding success in Tamil Nadu that Manjummel Boys represented the unruly Malayali behaviour in public places, especially tourist spots.
Surely, Manjummel Boys topples some uppity assumptions, reiterating a simple, universal message: only truth and compassion can save humankind from bottomless pits of hate and divisiveness.
Rasmi Binoy is a journalist and author based in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.