The Great Indian Kitchen movie review: Startling, scathing, stunning take-down of patriarchy and its eternal sidekick, religion-Entertainment News , Firstpost

chops, slices, dices and grinds. she cooks, washes, cleans, sweeps and rubs.

Meanwhile, she does yoga before breakfast and the office. in another part of the house, his mother-in-law waits for a woman of the house to put toothpaste on his toothbrush and take it away while he sits relaxing or reading the newspaper on the porch.

While the men exercise their bodies and minds, she picks up the trail of trash they leave behind.

she takes out the trash. she keeps out the holy lamp. she is the first to wake up and the last to go to bed, there to be raped by the one to whom she is legally and socially attached.

Writer-director jeo baby’s

great Indian cuisine, also known as mahaththaya bharatiya adukkala, is a great Indian film that captures a little-discussed horrific reality with pinpoint accuracy. amazing, simply replicating on screen what happens in millions of Indian homes. It’s in Malayalam, but the title reminds us that patriarchy knows no state borders. the characters don’t have names because it’s you and me and everyone around.

(minor spoilers in this paragraph) a wife who leaves her husband’s shoes for him to put on when he leaves the house, a man who cooks a meal and leaves a mess for the women clean it up while praising himself for giving those women a break; these are not just fictional scenes in a movie, they are snapshots of homes we inhabit or have visited, where women’s hard work is romanticized as a mark of a limitless capacity for love and sacrifice akin to devi in a preemptive attempt to demonize women who break free. (spoiler alert ends)

I walked into the great Indian kitchen expecting a pleasurable food movie, and sat enthralled for 1 hour and 40 minutes watching a gem like no other.

It could have been called portrait of a wife as cook, cleaner, full maid and sex slave, but that would not fully capture what this extraordinary film conveys.

There is no story to tell, so here is a recap of the first 9 minutes. nimisha sajayan plays a dancer in the great indian kitchen. the film begins with her family preparing for a pennu kaanal (a potential boyfriend who comes to see a girl for an arranged marriage). comes the character of suraj venjaramoodu. he is the future husband. we’ve seen his house and his family, but we’re told nothing about him, his occupation, or financial background in those early scenes, except bits of a fleeting conversation that implies he belongs to the kind of family that is considered “prestigious.” .

The paperwork is completed, the rituals are done and dusted off, and soon the new bride arrives at her new home, where her routine as wife and daughter-in-law is established.

watched jeo baby’s latest movie, kunju daivam (the little god, 2018), which won adish praveen the national film award for best children’s artist. it was sweet and clever for a while, but the storytelling lacked polish and it didn’t occur to me. nothing in kunju daivam prepared me for the sheer brilliance, the keen power of observation, the subtlety and delicacy of great Indian cuisine. note the song sung over the end credits, the lyrics brimming with literary tropes that have long been summoned to glorify women and thus keep them in chains.

sajayan here lives up to the formidable reputation she has built for herself in her brief career. from his debut in thondimuthalum driksakshiyum (2017) to eeda (2018), chola (2020) and a host of other films, his strength has It has been the ability to immerse herself so completely in a role that it becomes almost impossible to believe that she is not that same person in real life. in the great Indian kitchen she runs through the veins and breathes through every cell of the anonymous wife.

venjaramoodu, his main co-star in thondimuthalum driksakshiyum, demonstrates remarkable artistic intelligence playing the husband of great Indian cuisine not as an overtly repulsive fellow but as a seemingly Shy man with a nice-guy demeanor whose regressive attitudes emphasize the fact that the villains are usually the regular neighbors.

jeo baby has done well to pack his uniformly flawless supporting cast with unfamiliar faces: sidhartha siva is the only ‘star’ among them. the rest are kozhikode stage actors who look like real people pulled from real life for the movie.

The simplicity of his performance is complemented by every technical department, from supervising sound designer tony babu’s finely detailed palette of hisses, drips, bubbling oils and human mouths chewing food, to the filming of dop salu k Thomas from the protagonist’s dimly lit marital prison to that glorious finale with its explosion of brilliance and light. the editor, francies louis, makes sure that every shot in the film counts. and costume designer dhanya balakrishnan dresses the characters in outfits that provide a variety of insights into Malayali culture, right up to that delightful final scene where she unleashes her imagination. even the subtitles are top notch.

The only scene that lacks subtlety in Great Indian Cuisine involves a phone conversation between the female lead and her friend. no other point in the film is underlined so much.

jeo baby weaves the sabarimala temple’s refusal to allow menstruating women to approach the deity so gently into its story that it’s hard to tell when it begins. this film is different from lal jose’s relatively insipid nalpathiyonnu (41), which used sabarimala as a hook, but was hesitant to make any controversial statements about it.

It should be a point of pride for the Malayalam film industry, also known as mollywood, that in the span of a year it has given us stinging criticism of both Hinduism (this film) and Christianity (anjaam pathiraa) in the state. there are many such films in Malayalam and there is no space here for an exhaustive list. at a time when muslims are being demonized across india, delivering a fair and balanced critique of islam is more difficult because the community is on edge and liberal filmmakers may fear their works will be mistreated by anti-muslim elements, but mollywood has shown the intellect, sensitivity, and courage to do even this. In a post-9/11 setting, for example, producer Aryadan Shoukath and director T.V. chandran made paadam onnu: oru vilapam (2003), skewering a reprehensible Muslim social practice.