Freedom at midnight

Imagine Visaranai meeting The Shawshank Redemption at a Kottayam sub-jail and you may arrive at the high-concept Malayalam thriller Swathanthryam Ardharathriyil. The movie is about Jacob (Antony Varghese), a manager at a finance firm, who is behind bars for allegedly stealing money and protecting his girlfriend from made-up murder charges. Most of the movie is about him finding accomplices to dig a tunnel beneath the prison to burrow his way to freedom.

Debut director Tinu Pappachan has elevated a generic plot to a rambunctiously entertaining ride solely on the basis of jaw-dropping gags. Pappachan, a former associate director to Lijo Jose Pellissery, displays shades of his mentor's penchant for finding the absurd in abject situations. Pelliserry, who recently made the genre-smashing Angamaly Diaries, co-produced this prison drama. The climax is a heady chase sequence in the bylanes of Kottayam with police running after prisoners on the lam. The whole vibe is reminiscent of the equally intoxicating pre-interval sequence of Angamaly Diaries.

Antony Varghese is growing from strength to strength and his brooding performance in an Abu Ghraib-like setup attests to the fact that, after Dulquer Salman, Malayalam cinema has found another actor who is here for the long haul. Pappachan peppers the movie with brilliant secondary characters who provide the requisite impetus. In the first half, there's Vinayakan who delivers yet another assured performance as Simon, an outlaw on the brink of bankruptcy trying to get his bail papers in order. An unfortunate turn of event botches his escape through the tunnel. Another feather in Vinayakan’s cap after Kammatipaadam.

His place in the cell is taken by Chemban Vinod Jose, who is a riot in his boisterous performance as Devassya, a petty thief. There are also bit actors, including two twin brothers who generate the movie's biggest funny-as-hell moment when they exchange mundus in a flash. Rajesh Sharma as the corrupt prison warden snarls and seethes at the tiniest of misdemeanours. To call the plot formulaic is like saying pinot noir is wine. Pappachan's tunnel vision, so to speak, gets able support from Girish Gangadharan, who is firmly establishing himself as the Robbie Ryan of South Indian cinema. His deft camera skills are visible throughout, especially when showing the squalor of prison cells and their nauseating milieu. Only Vetrimaaran's Visaranai matches up to the grittiness captured by this director-cinematographer duo. Another scene that had me hooked is an extended one when Jacob hatches an elaborate plan to get a crowbar into the cell. Pappachan's genius is that he makes the viewer root hard for Jacob to cross the finish line even though it always looks like a done deal. The tunnel-digging scenes are equally brilliant and, quite frankly, sui generis for Indian cinema. This level of granularity is rarely seen, unless Bala is at the helm of affairs.

A still from Swathanthryam Ardharathriyil

A superb escape sequence in the initial moments of the film is shot at such high definition and with such superior production quality that I wondered why rest of the country is going bonkers over the vapid fights in Baaghi 2. Wikipedia tells me that the jail sequences were shot in Thiruvananthapuram and a jail set was used for the extensive night shoots, for which art director Gokul Das deserves a national award.

The jail set looks so real that I thought Kathryn Bigelow might want to use it for one of her future ventures. The jail set is a primary character where each bar of the cell has a heart rending story to narrate. Bright bulbs are kept on even at night, the toilets are virtually unusable, the cops are tyrants, most of the inmates are hardened creatures who resent anyone who gets to leave, the food is execrable. Miserabilism comes naturally to Malayalam and Tamil cinema, a quality that the Telugu and Hindi film industries need to learn for authenticity's sake. Compared to the depressing conditions shown in Swathanthryam Ardharathriyil, the slum scenes of Hindi Medium look like straight out of a gated community in Greater Noida. 

Onward, Pappachan.

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