A Journey through Rustic Goodness in Malayalam Cinema.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it was Sathyan Anthikkad‘s movies that played a major part in shaping up the composite memory of the Oduvil we all have in our hearts. And that memory, across all age-groups, am sure, its surprisingly more or less the same. In fact, a journey through the varied ‘faces’ that Oduvil portrayed on screen, at times with more than one in a movie, is also a journey through the rural heart of Kerala, an environment that is scarily being reconstituted to resemble the glass-and-chrome monstrosities of its urban peers. Also Sathyan Anthikkad’s movies would bring together a delightful set of regulars in his movies that usually spoke of the ‘hearts and heart-breaks in hamlets’ – characters that came alive through Paravoor Bharathan, Shankarady, KPAC Lalitha, Philomena, Sukumari, Maamukkoya, Innocent, Jagathy – with a rock-solid script from Sreenivasan who most of the times joined the fun. The stories most often spoke of current issues with dark sarcasm and pure humor, through this set of actors who essayed characters who were no different from the ones we knew from our neighborhood. Oduvil took to this fraternity like fish to water!
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