Machante Malakha movie review: A competition between regressive ideas and outdated filmmaking

Boban Samuel's Machante Malakha portrays male characters as victims and perpetuates regressive gender stereotypes, making it a dated and uncomfortable watch.

A certain machine-like uniformity marks the male and female characters in Boban Samuel’s Machante Malakha. While almost all the male characters are good-hearted and submissive, a majority of the female characters are scheming ones trying every trick in their book to make life difficult for the men around them. This unmissable pattern in the writing of the characters serves the purpose for which the film appears to have been made – to put into cinematic form the grievances of the men’s rights associations that have cropped up in recent times.

Machante Malakha begins as a typical boy meets girl story, with Sajeevan (Soubin Shahir), a bus conductor, falling in love with Bijimol (Namitha Pramod), a regular passenger in the bus, after a series of fights. But the prologue to this love story, when a fellow bus conductor whom Sajeevan is in love with leaves him to get married to a rich man, signals the film’s intentions. Whether it be due to this underlying agenda of the film or plain bad writing, Bijimol is written with confusing character traits, changing her behaviour multiple times even within a single scene.

While there are indeed a handful of cases of women misusing laws related to cruel conduct in marriages to win cases in family courts, the number of genuine cases of harassment as well as dowry deaths are considerable. But in the world painted in Machante Malakha, men are hapless victims across generations. Kunjimol (Shanthikrishna) is portrayed as a perpetually angry woman who has made life hell for her husband (K.U. Manoj), an ex-serviceman. Her daughter Bijimol also appears to take lessons from her in the treatment of her husband. In case the message did not get through, Kunjimol’s granddaughter is seen beating up a boy from the neighbourhood towards the end of the film. The message is hammered home in the last scene of the film which has a character speaking at an event of the All Kerala Men’s Association, infamous for organising receptions for men accused in harassment cases.

Matching the outdatedness of all the regressive thoughts, which makes the film an uncomfortable watch, is the dated filmmaking approach and the equally listless performances. If the film were made in the 2000s, arguably one of the worst periods in the history of Malayalam cinema, it would still have been called outdated and regressive. The sorry attempts at humour pile on the agony of the audience. Dhyan Sreenivasan, who is in almost every other film, pitches in with an ineffective cameo.

Machante Malakha appears to be the product of nostalgia for a time when regressive ideas were celebrated in Malayalam cinema. Fortunately, that ship has sailed, with such creations being rare aberrations.