‘Aadujeevitham – The Goat Life’ movie review: Prithviraj’s performance drives a survival drama that borders on monotony
March 28, 2024 05:57 pm | Up to date 06:15 pm IST
If arduous work have been the only real benchmark for a movie, ‘Aadujeevitham’ would rank proper up there among the many finest
Prithviraj in ‘Aadujeevitham: The Goat Life’
| Photograph Credit score: Particular Association
Unimaginable are the methods during which adversities can reshape a human being. The bodily transformation is the obvious of those. However, Blessy’s Aadujeevitham — based mostly on the real-life story of a person who finally ends up dwelling in slave-like circumstances in a goat farm in the course of a desert — offers with far more than this.
As an illustration, it’s attention-grabbing how the movie treats the ill-fated man’s struggles with language. Initially, when Najeeb (Prithviraj Sukumaran) winds up with a youthful compatriot at a Saudi airport, one sees him struggling to speak in any language apart from Malayalam. This additionally has an enormous position to play within the unlucky flip their life takes afterwards.
Later, after years of herding goats and camels within the farm, and with no human interplay (apart from the abusive phrases from his ‘proprietor’), he loses the one language he knew, virtually bleating like a goat when he sees his long-lost good friend. Aadujeevitham, which in any other case is generally crammed with excessive struggling and heightened feelings, has a couple of such delicate touches. One of many others being an emaciated Najeeb discovering sufficient time to savour a shower after lengthy years, within the small window of time that he acquired to flee from the farm.
Benyamin’s guide, probably the most learn books in Malayalam, on which the movie is predicated, drowns itself in struggling virtually to the extent of monotony. The movie sticks to the fundamental textual content, apart from a couple of adjustments, particularly in the way it stays away from the way in which Najeeb offers along with his sexual urges.
Aadujeevitham: The Goat Life (Malayalam)
Director: Blessy
Solid: Prithviraj, Amala Paul, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Okay.R.Gokul
Run-time: 173 minutes
Storyline: Najeeb Muhammed heads to Saudi Arabia with the dream of a greater life, however leads to slave-like circumstances in a goat farm in the course of a desert
Blessy, a filmmaker who has a knack for pushing the emotional levers over the utmost restrict, makes an attempt the identical right here. Certainly, there are some genuinely shifting sequences, however on the identical time, there are rather a lot that go away one untouched, regardless of all the plain hardships in depicting them on display screen. A few of these repetitive sequences go away one with a way of vacancy that an individual who trudges up a sand dune feels as he sees one more expanse of sand extending until the horizon, as a substitute of that anticipated signal of life.
Amid all of the expansive photographs of the blazing scorching desert, huge sandstorms and the reasonably inconsequential people who’re lowered to a mere dot, Prithviraj holds his personal with some outstanding bodily and emotional transformation to turn into a personality who went via unbelievable struggling. He does issues that may solely be carried out by internalising the character — one thing he’s typically accused of not doing — and pulls off maybe one of the best efficiency of his profession.
AR Rahman, in his uncommon work for a Malayalam film, comes up with a soundtrack that fits the theme and setting, with ‘Periyone’ and its varied iterations being the excessive factors. The few sequences of Najeeb’s life again residence are strictly practical, apart from that breathtaking shift from the river to the desert on the finish of a track. Amala Paul will get a task so quick that leaves no scope for efficiency.
If arduous work have been the only real benchmark for a movie, Aadujeevitham would rank proper up there among the many finest. And, various the arduous work does repay too. But, it leaves one with the want that the script had sufficient to interrupt the monotony that units in at some factors.
