Hawk’s Muffin review: A strange Malayalam film that remixes Churuli and Stalker
Krishnendu Kalesh’s characteristic movie debut Hawk’s Muffin (Malayalam title: Prappeda) is a bizarre movie, sharing DNA with such Indian movies as Q’s Tasher Desh or Lilo Jose Pellissery’s Churuli. It was premiered within the Vibrant Future part of the Worldwide Movie Competition Rotterdam this week. Will Hawk’s Muffin create as a lot buzz as Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s 2017 Malayalam movie Horny Durga (launched in India as S Durga) and PS Vinothraj’s 2021 movie Pebbles (Tamil title: Koozhangal)? Each movies received the IFFR’s prime Tiger Award and received heat notices in India, the latter changing into India’s entry for the Greatest Worldwide Function Movie award on the 2022 Oscars.
Regardless of supposedly tackling heavy themes (patriarchy, battle, military-industrial advanced, setting and ecology), Hawk’s Muffin is simply too obscurantist for Kalesh’s considerations to land. A simple label will probably be “surreal”, but it surely’s not surreal in the best way, say, David Lynch movies are. They’re puzzles that function on dream logic, with a narrative and screenplay backing up the narrative. Hawk’s Muffin was reportedly made with no screenplay. Most of it was improvised. What we get is one unusual scene after one other. The easiest way to look at that is to take a seat again and soak within the weirdness, considering “Okay, what subsequent?”, hoping that the logic will reveal itself. In case you maintain questioning “What does this imply?”, you would possibly get annoyed, as a result of the writer-director doesn’t need you to know the story in literal phrases.
Properly, there isn’t a narrative within the first place. There are solely concepts, which Kalesh desires you to get a grasp of, after which make you go “WTF” along with his therapy. He’s undoubtedly an imaginative filmmaker, but when he severely wished to speak his ideas with the viewers, as an alternative of simply attempting to impress them with the photographs he can give you, he ought to have turned his concepts right into a story and screenplay.
Shot in a rubber property in Kerala, Hawk’s Muffin is ready in a post-pandemic India and unfolds in an otherworldly area much like the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) or the labyrinthine jungle in Churuli. A younger girl Ruby (Ketaki Narayan) is the only real inheritor to the property, however she is held captive by a collective of males emboldened by custom and weaponry. The caretaker is Xaviour (Jayanarayan T), a army man with a mysterious previous.
Ruby’s forefather, a military pilot, had arrange this jungle neighborhood after he dropped a bomb someplace and was commanded to enter hiding. For many years, this distant property has been run like a jail. The caretaker ensures that the household’s girls by no means go too removed from their home, the labourers silently work, and there aren’t any trespassers. The arrival of a stranger (Rajesh Madhavan), who’s in all probability a robotic (or alien, who is aware of?), and a cop, Thumpan (Nithin George), who claims to be Ruby’s relative and desires a stake within the property, shakes issues up. There’s additionally Ruby’s paralysed mom (Nina Kurup). She shares a second along with her daughter, which jogged my memory of the hand-pump scene from Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D.
Kalesh had beforehand made a black-and-white quick movie, Karinchathan, which is obtainable on YouTube with subtitles. Meant to be an announcement in regards to the Charlie Hebdo capturing of 2015, the movie follows two males who attempt to kill a cartoonist however get trapped in what seems like a foul dream. Hawk’s Muffin shares a bunch of motifs with that movie.
Each movies characteristic a home the place there’s some unusual energy at work. The story will get transferring when outsiders barge in. A non secular advisor is concerned, and there’s a chase within the jungle. There’s an try and create audio-visual dissonance, utilizing anachronistic music, modifying jumps, and odd cinematographic selections, similar to tremendous 8mm filters. Kalesh begins his movies with lofty quotes and dedicates them to the masters.
Hawk’s Muffin begins with a dedication to Georges Melies, Andrei Tarkovsky, George Miller and Hayao Miyazaki. I noticed components of all 4 director’s works in Hawk’s Muffin, presumably as a result of Kalesh dropped their names, and I used to be attempting to suppose how they’re related. Kalesh’s thematic concern in these movies is the triumph of the human spirit in opposition to power-hungry and reactionary forces, which is ok, however I’m not a giant fan of his filmmaking. I’d relatively watch a movie which doesn’t make me suppose that the director is fumbling at the hours of darkness, with some half-baked ideas.
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The most important asset of Hawk’s Muffin is its manufacturing values. I feel the largest beneficiary of this manufacturing will probably be visible results artist Thoufeek Hussain, who offers the movie its uncanny really feel with its supernatural creatures, Chinook helicopters, and large machines drilling into the earth. Manesh Madhavan, who shot the 2018 Malayalam thriller Joseph, is the cinematographer. Kiran Das (Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum, Moothon) is the editor. Nithin Lukose (Thithi, Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar) is the sound designer. Standard Malayalam composer Bijibal scored the film. The lesson right here is: get an excellent crew on your first characteristic movie.
Hawk’s Muffin (Prappeda)
Director: Krishnendu Kalesh
Forged: Ketaki Narayan, Rajesh Madhavan, Nithin George, Jayanarayan T, Nina Kurup
