Chaaver Review: Style Trumps Substance In Kunchacko Boban-Starrer

2/5

PERHAPS as a one-liner, Chaaver has some heft. The grand idea was to give viewers a peek into the lives of the faceless foot-soldiers of political parties. What goes on in the minds of these henchmen who have pledged to kill for a party that has always made them scapegoats for their political vendettas? But this intriguing thread is never explored beyond the fringes in this film written by Joy Mathew and directed by Tinu Pappachan. Instead what we are served is a tiresome, weakly written narrative executed by a woefully self-indulgent filmmaker.

We get a hint of Tinu’s fixation with stylish, pretty frames right from the beginning. The night shots are tinted in red, with a smattering of neon leading us to a gang of men fleeing in a Tata Sumo, after committing a brutal murder. All the men look raging and drained, and that’s when we get the first of many pointlessly polished shots in the middle of this mayhem. The leading man’s leg has been slashed and he is bleeding profusely but his intro is given an unnecessary swag, bathed in luminosity. Meanwhile his mates are still struggling to appear fierce. That stretch goes on forever, the car traversing through many roads back and forth. Chaaver is set in the interiors of North Kerala and as if to remind us about the topography, the characters sporadically slip into the local slang.

The narrative never attempts to delve deeper into any of the characters or their motives, so all you get are some random names. There is Asokan (Kunchacko Boban), the leader of the gang, identified by his thick dark eyebrows and grizzly beard. He replies in grunts, raises his voice to prove a point, and is supposed to be fearsome and reliable. It is Boban’s most weakly etched character in recent times. The actor neither has the gravitas to add authenticity to Asokan nor does the writing offer him any crutches. Mustafa (Manoj KU) seems to be the team’s leveller, and gets a generic sketch too. You get a stale joke about one member who sells goat meat and therefore listens in rapt attention when he hears goats bleating. The twist is provided by Arun, a medical student who is called in to treat Asokan’s injuries. Typically he is the unwieldy fifth man — the innocent victim who has been dragged into this situation against his will. In the end, the faceless foot-soldiers remain just that.

Arun is the only one who seems to have some sort of a backstory. His deceased father was a popular Communist leader, and his mother was also a member of the party. As if to validate this theory, there is a badly written scene of the mother walking into the police station to bail out her son’s friend. Joy Mathew has proved in Uncle that he is one of those writers who prefers agenda peddling to narrating evocative stories and Chaaver isn’t an exception.

For the most part, instead of investing in any characters, we are fed appealing long and mid shots of dusty, antiquated constructions, green landscapes, an extensive homicide sequence staged with agonisingly lengthy slow mo shots with splashes of red and Theyyam costumes, as well as a bloody closure framed with a detachment that leaves you cold. It’s dreadful to include a renowned ritual art form like Theyyam without a scrap of nuance, just to add insignia or primal emotions to a frame.

In an earlier scene that involves death, you have shots of a crowd closing in around a corpse, the weeping parents, a frail grandmother carried gingerly to the body, and a background score filled with profound verses and maddening beats that are gasping for breath. It’s such an unsympathetic but stunning framing that we watch it bereft of any emotion. That in a way underlines Tinu Pappachan’s narratives. An associate of Lijo Jose Pellissery, this is his third film after Swathanthryam Ardharathriyil and Ajagajantharam, films filled with hypermasculine men who indulge in mindless fist fights to satiate their egos. They are all larger-than-life, instantly gratifying, and fail to move us in any way. True, Lijo’s films may also lack emotional heft, but he makes up for it with his craft and originality. Tinu lacks both.