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The Kerala Story Movie Review: After watching Bollywood's latest attempt to divide people - pardon me, I am not going to mince words in this review - which is The Kerala Story, I called up my usual friend with whom I sound my first opinions of any movie. His first question was - is it made good, unlike the other 'propaganda' film that came couple of years back? I was like, a propaganda film that is well-directed is an even more dangerous tool. It's another matter that The Kerala Story is quite ineptly made, but it does its purpose right - raising up the hatred levels through melodramatic storytelling and fabrication of 'facts and figures'. The Kerala Story Review: Critics Bash Adah Sharma's Controversial Film, Call It 'Manipulative'.
The Kerala Story is directed by Sudipto Sen, though once #MeToo accused Vipul Amrutlal Shah is claiming 'creative director' title here (apart from being the producer). The story follows Shalini Unnikrishnan (Adah Sharma) a naive Hindu girl from Thiruvananthapuram who goes to study nursing in Kasaragod. When her grandmother asks Shalini's mother why the need to send her as far away as Kasaragod, there is an ominous tone played at the utterance of the city's name. Reason, Kasargod is a city where the majority of the residents are Muslims.
Anyway, Shalini goes to that college, where the walls are scribbled with anti-India slogans. Her hostel roommates come from the diverse religious groups. There is a Catholic Nima, a Muslim Asifa and a girl from an atheist background, Geetanjali (though her Hindu upbringing is quite clearly underlined). No twists here, the Muslim among the girls begins to brainwash the others into accepting her religion, get trapped by Muslim boys, get pregnant, go through religious conversion by marriage and get sent to Syria as part of ISIS.
Watch the Trailer of The Kerala Story:
The narrative is told in form of two parallel flashbacks by a captured Shalini, who is rechristened as Fatima after conversion, to a UN-American army force, where there is one gora who suspiciously looks like Johnny Simms. The first flashback is how she and her friends get indoctrinated into their roommate's vicious terrorist agenda. The second flashback is the suffering Shalini goes through once she is in Syria. And both the flashbacks have the same agenda - to increase Islamophobia by using ISIS as a 'Shikhandi' here, and to target Kerala, a state where the ruling party has won zero seats in the last assembly elections.
Look, I know that what The Kerala Story wants to portray isn't a complete work of fiction. There is a grain of truth about certain girls being brainwashed and folded into ISIS to carry their terrorist activities. I also don't deny that many youngsters are trapped by the radicals of their religion and go on to do hate crimes. But The Kerala Story uses the tragedy of a real-life incident and overcoats it to make it thoroughly one state's problem. In one scene, Shalini even says that Kerala is a ticking time-bomb that needs to be rescued. The makers might have recanted in court about the teaser's claims of 32,000 women being trapped in ISIS from Kerala, but the movie not only sticks to around this large unvalidated number but even goes on to increase it to 50,000. The end-credits mention that the makers submitted an RTI regarding 32000 conversions but didn't get any reply from the state government's non-functioning website. But why not ask the same question to the central government? Surely, they might be having the figures, right?
I am not going to get into the fact and figures in this review, you can read it all here. What I can say is that The Kerala Story is a much manipulative piece of storytelling, where every sequence, every dialogue is skewered to increase your misconception about people of a certain religion and of a certain state. It even takes digs at the communist ideology - a victimised girl asks her communist father why he didn't teach her Hindu traditions, instead of communism and western ideology. The film tries to question the agency given to young girls to choose their own life partners, because they could be trapped in a 'love jihad' and then go on to prove how wrong these girls are.
There is a clear outsider purview in the film, that just can't be ignored. Like putting the characters in their brackets. The Christian girl coming from Kottayam, the Hindi girl from Thiruvananthapuram and the weed-loving confused girl from Kochi. Not to mention, the Muslim girl is from Malappuram, which Shalini guesses without knowing, because for North Indian WhatsApp believers, Muslims in Kerala are only restricted to the northernmost part of the state. There is no redeemable Muslim character in the film, who are either shown manipulative, or sex-depraved, and/or fetishes in violence. If you are one of the WhatsApp agenda proponents, there is a lot for you to root for in the film and it gives you more material to send to the family groups about 'Hindu Khatre Mein Hai' and about 'Kerala being a mini-Pakistan'.
Even more insulting is the butchering of Malayalam and the accent by the actors who have nothing to do with Kerala. The performances are pedestrian, the writing and the direction aim only to insert shock-value and the screenplay is just pieces of propaganda stitched roughly with each other. There was an opportunity for The Kerala Story to narrate a Not Without My Daughter kind of hard-hitting survival story, but in the enthusiasm of appealing to its fanbase, restricts itself to being another Hate Story!
Final Thoughts
The irony about The Kerala Story is that it claims to expose the psychological 'engineering and programming' done by people of a religion, whereas in fact, the movie acts like a tool in the RW-machinery to do exactly that for its followers. Sudipto Sen recently asked his detractors to first watch the film and then make the opinions. Well, I watched The Kerala Story and I can affirm it is still a propaganda cinema that is badly acted, conceptualised and directed. Go figure!
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 05, 2023 06:14 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
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