In recent years, several Bollywood big-shots with varying degrees of wealth and intelligence have said that South Indian movies are performing better than their Hindi counterparts because they’re more ‘rooted’. The word has become a part of the lexicon, alongside terms such as ‘elevation scene’ and ‘BGM’. Anurag Kashyap has said it; Javed Akhtar has said it; if they’d asked the women, they’d have said it as well. But what does the word ‘rooted’ even mean? The one movie that perfectly captures all the ingredients that are missing from Hindi cinema these days, the one movie that Bollywood would do well to emulate, is the Malayalam-language sports comedy Alappuzha Gymkhana, which debuted recently on SonyLIV after an excellent theatrical run.
It’s as rooted as they come. But the definition of this kind of cinema could vary. While Kashyap thinks that ‘rooted’ cinema refers to stories of the heartland, Akhtar has complained that Hindi filmmakers are losing touch with the language. He forgets that his own children write in English and have their scripts translated. For most Bollywood producers, ‘rooted’ is merely a code word for a very specific kind of big-budget movie; the chauvinistic and bombastic sort of cinema popularised by the Telugu industry and bastardised by the north.
A still from Alappuzha Gymkhana.
Were something like Alappuzha Gymkhana pitched in Bollywood, it would be laughed out of the room. It has no major stars, it has neither scale nor stakes, and most surprisingly (for a sports movie), it has no villain. Directed by Khalid Rehman, Alappuzha Gymkhana is a hang-out movie, where the characters dictate which direction the plot should go in, and not the other way around. It follows a group of teenage boys in the Alappuzha district of Kerala, who concoct the kind of plan that only teenagers staring at an uncertain future can. After flunking their class 12 boards, they decide to enrol at the local sports club and become boxers. This way, they figure, they could probably get into a college through the sports quota.
At the same time, they could impress all the girls they have crushes on, get away from their nagging parents for several hours a day, and have a new excuse to chill out with each other. Led by Jojo, the boys aren’t defending the world; they’re defending their pride. Forget delivering ‘larger-than-life’ action and spectacle, Alappuzha Gymkhana barely leaves its district. It goes against all the rules that Bollywood has convinced itself it must follow in the post-pandemic era. And this isn’t the first time that the Malayalam industry has proven that smaller stories have just as much of a chance at the box office than those hyper-masculine revenge epics that Hindi filmmakers have devoted themselves to aping.
Speaking of hyper-masculine cinema, there’s a scene in Alappuzha Gymkhana in which Jojo invites his buddies for a house party. He takes the girl he’s been talking to up to the bedroom, where she throws him off balance by asking what kind of kiss he’d prefer they get things started with. After panicking for a second, he tells her that he’s too nervous to make out, and promptly gets dumped. If this was Rocky Bhai, he’d have physically restrained the girl from leaving the room despite her protests. In case you’d forgotten, this is exactly what happens in the first KGF movie. The blockbuster Kannada film has proven to be incredibly influential, paving the way for a new wave of angry cinema in which everybody shouts at each other. Just because their protagonists hail from villages doesn’t make stuff like Kantara and Pushpa ‘rooted’.
Naslen, who plays Jojo in Alappuzha Gymkhana, broke out with the similarly lowkey Premalu last year. But when Bollywood tries to make small scale films these days, they typically end up being inauthentic farces. Even when they’re competently made, like the film Laapataa Ladies, they tend to have a condescending gaze. Heck, Hindi filmmakers can’t even be bothered to go shoot in real-life locations, because the people making them have no idea what separates one culture from the other. It’s some strange form of reverse racism, where the entirety of the ‘north’ is presented as a place populated by Thar-driving, pakoda-popping loudmouths. The films Jayeshbhai Jordaar and The Great Indian Family — both were headlined by A-list movie stars and produced by YRF — were shot entirely on indistinguishable soundstages.
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A still from Alappuzha Gymkhana.
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The thing that really stands out in Alappuzha Gymkhana, besides the cultural specificity, is how tactile it all seems. Although most of the second half is set inside a stadium and filmed with the sort of music video-style flashiness that Rehman displayed in Thallumala a couple of years ago, the first half unfolds on the streets of Alleppey. It gives the movie character; you can see the post-rain dampness on the narrow lanes, and the paint chipping off the walls of old homes. Jojo and his gang feel like real people, experiencing real growing-pains. They aren’t invulnerable superheroes bashing up their enemies. In fact, the inciting incident of the film — the moment that pushes Jojo to enrol at the gymkhana — is when one member of the gang gets sucker punched for flirting with another guy’s girlfriend. Rahman’s Thallumala kicked off on a similar note, when someone stepped on the protagonist’s brand-new sneakers.
Malayalam cinema seems to have cracked the code. Even when they make a big-budget superhero movie Minnal Murali, it feels intimate. In Alappuzha Gymkhana, Jojo and his friends’ inadequacies manifest during the boxing competition that takes up much of the film’s second half. It wouldn’t be a spoiler to reveal that Jojo doesn’t magically become a heavyweight champion at the end. But he scores something far more valuable: a purpose. A road that could’ve led him towards drunkenness and despair is, hopefully, avoided. Jojo and his buddies could’ve very easily turned into Pepe and his gang from Angamaly Diaries, but it seems like they’ll turn into the Manjummel Boys instead. Hallelujah.
Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.
