The film focusses on certain tumultuous events in poet Kumaran Asan’s personal and political life
With a myriad fascinating aspects to his personality and having been a part of some landmark events in Kerala’s history, chronicling the life of poet and social reformer Kumar Asan can be quite a challenge for any filmmaker. But, in Gramavrikshathile Kuyil, veteran filmmaker K.P. Kumaran has chosen not to do a conventional biopic.
After a few sequences on the poet’s early years, the director shifts focus completely to the last few years of his life, which were marked by tumultuous events in his personal and political life. Music composer Sreevalsan J. Menon, who plays Kumaran Asan, has quite some resemblance to the poet.
More poetry, less dialogues
In another interesting choice that the filmmaker has made, there is more poetry than dialogues in the film. The film is interspersed with familiar and not-so-familiar lines from Kumaran Asan’s vast oeuvre of poems as well as some of his writings related to the political positions he had taken at that time. The poet’s ruminations on nature, drawn from his sojourns to deep forests and across waterbodies, accompanied with sweeping, evocative visuals make for some of the best moments in the film.
Dialogues, a damper
But, the same cannot be said about the rather dramatic and forced dialogue delivery and performances, which at times make one wish for more of the sequences built around poems. Many of the dialogues sound like they were written to inform the audience, rather than as conversations between two people, a feeling accentuated by the style of delivery of most performers.
The script, for a good part, revolves around Kumaran Asan’s marriage to the much younger Bhanumathi, his former student. The marriage sets off a storm inside the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam, of which he was then the secretary, with several members opposing the marriage. The poet’s inner turmoil is conveyed in the film through the poems that he had written during that period. The film’s title itself is drawn from one of those poems, in which the poet sees himself as a bird about to fly away from the tree that was the SNDP Yogam.
The silent presence
Although Sree Narayana Guru is shown only in a handful of sequences, the reformer and his ideas are a silent presence throughout, for the lasting influence that he had on the poet, especially in Asan’s fight against caste discrimination. Gramavrikshathile Kuyil is valuable for its moments laced with poetry, but the rest of it disappoints.
