Bitter half

Yesterday, we took Mira for her first movie in a theatre. For Ash this was the second, since he joined us for a movie we saw around this time last year. That means it is exactly or more than a year since we have gone to watch a movie in a Cinema Kotteka (the colloquial term for a movie hall). Coincidentally, the film we watched was in the banner of Cinema kottaka. A return to the roots, I guess.

Veruthe oru Bharya (A wife for nothing is the approximate translation; it actually conveys that the wife is simply there and not doing much in the house and for the husband) exposes the average Malayali man's attitude to his wife and the wife's travails is what many women in Kerala, especially the countryside, go through. It is Gopika's swansong, now that she matched and despatched to Ireland. For Jayaram, it is a comeback film. The girl who acts as their daughter has an attractive face. It is also the first time that I am seeing Gopika on screen and she looked quite gorgeous in her simple cotton saris, befitting the wife of a pennywise and stern husband - finding fault with her cooking, not lifting a finger around the house, not letting her visit her parents, belittling the umpteen chores she does till she hits bed etc etc. She does look a bit young to be the 32-year-old mother of a 14-year- old. Whereas yesteryear megastar Jayaram looks older than his 37-yr-old self in the flick.

The second half, where the wife leaves him and he gets paranoid about the safety of his daughter, gets a bit melodramatic. Police officer (actor) Rahman's sermon about how cell phones and the Internet should be used by children is not uncalled-for in contemporary Kerala where sex scandals involving teenaged girls trapped into the profession abound. As Gopika the mother says, none of us needed them in schools and colleges but now children cant live without them. And parents think that their children are at perennial risk, and so need to have them. I wonder when my kids will start asking for them!

The kids were not too restless as we had feared though Mira made me take her out for a call of nature that made me miss a good 10 minutes of the movie. We had to buy a ticket for Ash since he was over 3 years but he watched most of it playing musical chair on the laps of the three of us (the maid came too). The power supply failed a couple of times (maybe because of the the power outages in the city in the past couple of months) and Ash asked us for the remote to switch it on - a habit from his TV viewing.

After the film's "happily ever after" ending, we trooped out for a dinner at Sanjeevanam, Medimix's health restaurant.