The amount of greenery that’s been felled simply so that visiting celebrities can be felicitated is simply appalling. YOU THINK TURKEYS ARE TERRIFIED this time of the year in America? Spare a thought for the rosebushes of Panjim – for I were one, I’d be quaking from the roots to the tips of my slender stems.

It’s perhaps like making a film that’s carried along by the poetry of Bharathi, and allowing subtitles to convey the emotions. Adayalangal is based on the works of the Malayalam writer Nandanar, and for all its intermittent bursts of gentle power and a gentler beauty, I got the feeling you had to really know Nandanar before the film truly spoke to you. (The announcer too did a fair bit of swooning, by announcing, “This one is the girls in the audience.”) The film, however, merely evoked a hushed, respectful silence. Before the film was screened, the director called upon his leading man to the accompaniment of the only squeals I’ve heard so far in the festival. THERE WAS A GREAT DEAL OF CURIOSITY ABOUT MG Sasi’s Adayalangal, not so much because it beat out Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Naalu Pennungal at the Kerala state awards but due to the hunkaliciousness of its young actor, Govind Padmasoorya. Is there anyone who’ll pay a hundred bucks to take home Mohiniattam:Through the Ages? And as if being reminded of the noble-but-numbing efforts of the Film Division weren’t bad enough, there’s a stall that actually sells DVDs of those documentaries that routinely assaulted us, in an earlier era, before the feature presentation. Finally, amidst the tinniest of Films Division music, a sign appears that we are at the IFFI. Then the image of a golden peacock takes over the globe, which now descends through the clouds and falls into the calm seas of Goa, palm fronds on one side, the roving beam from a lighthouse on the other. A globe spins madly in outer space, as multi-hued reels of celluloid wrap its circumference in evenly spaced swirls, as if the earth took a tumble in a high school playground and had to be swathed with Technicolor Band-aids. The clip that precedes every single festival feature is far more exasperating. – I THOUGHT NOTHING COULD BE MORE ANNOYING during a film screening than the barrage of textile and jewellery ads that no Chennai theatre can apparently afford to live without – but I was mistaken.

Adayalangal malayalam movie