Hareendran Oru Nishkalankan
Monday, November 19, 2007

I have just made an agonizing discovery of a masochistic streak that robustly runs somewhere deep within me that prompts me to good naturedly watch yet another Vinayan film. With Hareendran Oru Nishkalankan, the director plummets further depths, digs up spanking new atrocities and concocts atypical follies that I valiantly endured in the name of an appreciation for cinema and which would without doubt, gain me a spot in paradise; my soul having already born the worst conceivable travails in hell.

The plot, such as it is, can be done away with swiftly. Hareendran (Indrajith) is the naive chap in question; a software giant who competently runs a flourishing firm along with scheming accomplice GK (Jayasurya) who harbors vile intentions of a potential usurping. Hareendran gets plausibly framed for a gruesome murder and is later let off the charges as innocent, but meets with an unforeseen end, albeit of a quite different sort.

It’s not often that you come across a film that’s bad almost any which way you look at it – be it the slapdash acting, the shoddy script or the hit and miss screenplay or even the tactless technicalities and the parched music. It’s here that the gates to the netherworld unlock before you, and the grisly torments that await you are many. When it’s a film that states in unsullied terms that a woman is the most expensive commodity on earth, it isn’t really a surprise that the fairer sex is treated shoddier than soot. Demoted to an unutterably stumpy state, she gasps for a breath of fresh air when she isn’t being coldly raped or when the dubious camera isn’t hovering lazily over her curves. A revival of sexploitation that had made a hushed exit with the soft porn of the 90’s is palpable, and the impact nothing short of dire.

A film that’s terrible beyond belief, Hareendran Oru Nishkalankan, is a total disaster that exerts a vicious enthrallment. It’s garish, over-sexualized and tedious when it’s not being vigorously distasteful and deserves to be shredded apart for the heights of dumbness that it shamelessly flaunts. There’s utterly nothing in it that hasn’t already materialized in innumerable similar situations before, in much brainier ways and manners. A movie as unfathomable as it is repressive, it inches its way to a climax that is almost startling in its hollowness.

Inexorably infantile and sopping in stereotypes, Hareendran Oru Nishkalankan is dead and deader than an alley rat run over by a screeching tire. It is so exceptionally appalling and pot-headed that it makes you gape at the screen open mouthed. As dreadful as the film's notion is, the implementation is indescribably poorer; a repulsive jumble of gluttony, lust, and squalid harassment that even the stone-hearted will in all likelihood be disgusted by.

This despicable, expansive and ultimately redundant farce makes the director’s earlier flicks emerge as true classics! There is nothing considerate or appealing about this cranky drama; there's not even anything remotely sharp. It’s a yarn of a film that’s shockingly unfunny and built on the most wretched of circumstances and the most exasperating of performances. To cut a protracted story slick short, there’s real awful cinema, there’s the intolerable stuff and then, there’s Hareendran Oru Nishkalankan.
 
posted by MM at 12:05 AM | Permalink