Abhinav Sunder Nayak and his collaborator Jakes Bejoy may have had the choice to use absolutely any background music during crucial, life-altering moments of Vineeth Madhavan's (playing Naslen) career as an aspiring filmmaker, but there’s something ridiculously fitting about their choice to use a lullaby repeatedly. The track reworks ‘Rock A Bye Baby’ and each time it plays, we witness Vineeth during the formation of one of his core memories. This could be the first time he experiences a movie (The Mummy) in DTS surround sound in his neighbourhood theatre, or it could also be the first time a work of his generates a reaction. But as life throws curveballs at Vineeth at every step of the way, we see him reconsider the magical impact of cinema and how it ceases to soothe him like it once used to. Mollywood Times is a film that lives up to its tagline of being ‘A Hate Letter To Cinema’, and it’s clearly the work of an eccentric filmmaker who finds a special reservoir of pleasure in pain.
The director calls Mollywood Times the second film in his Success Trilogy, but it’s perhaps more convenient to call it his own narcissistic cinematic universe. In a sense, it’s not impossible to find parallels between Mukundan Unni, the protagonist of his first film and the thoughts and calculations of Vineeth. If Mukundan was driven by a pragmatic desire to achieve materialistic success no matter what, Vineeth aspires for nothing short of greatness. Both are Machiavellian, and they’re both willing to do just about anything to get where they want. If Mukundan finds nothing wrong in endangering the lives of a bus full of children to make a killing out of the insurance payout, Vineeth doesn’t flinch before deleting the first feature he directs, just so people don’t perceive him as a lesser filmmaker. Their narcissistic pursuits define them to such a degree that they look at being termed ‘selfish’ as a badge of honour.
These are qualities that make Vineeth the absolute opposite of the template good guy that populate our movies. When he dreams of making a movie, he doesn’t want to change society, nor does he want to speak for the voiceless. He wants to make the scariest Malayalam movie ever, and he takes pride in believing that his grandfather became comatose after watching his film. In a highly complex sub-plot, Vineeth’s voiceover problematises the plight of his friend, who seems to benefit from affirmative action. But unlike taking a safe position to repeat the democratic nature of cinema, Vineeth’s personal politics is such that he underlines the notion that cinema is as prejudiced as the society outside of it.
All of this makes for a meta movie that is so philosophical that you begin to buy into its own nihilism. The second half, especially, operates in a realm where hope isn’t even up for debate. We meet Vineeth after he has debunked myths from every self-help book on the shelf, and we also see him as he navigates through life’s tougher and more bitter lessons. What adds another layer to the metaness of Mollywood Times is also the names of the films that are being made within the film.
At first, these philosophical debates are limited to the scope of Vineeth’s long-term dreams of simply becoming the scariest horror filmmaker, so we see films with uni-dimensional titles such as Yakshi (vampire), Rakshasan (demon) and Mrugan (beast) being used as titles. But as Vineeth matures to realise the cruelty of his world, the films getting made sound like Deivam (god), Nidhi (treasure) and Manushan (man). Not so ironically, the creatures that once made up Vineeth’s imaginary horror world have fully become realities of the real world once he enters the movie business.
This is also the reason why Mollywood Times feel distinctly different from earlier films about the struggles of a filmmaker. If those films delved into the emotional, financial and creative crises faced by a filmmaker along their journey, Mollywood Times probes into the isolation felt by a person who has to abandon every belief system along the way. We see Vineeth abandon hope, religion, ethics and his belief in humanity during this journey, and all of this makes for a film that’s extremely difficult to hold on to. Just when you start to see a sliver of hope, we see another sledgehammer of fate being directed towards Vineeth. Even the idea of a happy ending feels so ridiculously naive in a film like Mollywood Times that you begin to worry about the point of it all, because that too is a part of its design.
And yet we feel urged to read the film like a coming-of-age story because Naslen humanises Vineeth to an unmatchable degree. Depending on where you’re at in your life as you watch Mollywood Times, chances are that you have a way of either fiercely rejecting its brutal honesty or finding cold comfort in knowing that you’re not the only one to feel as isolated by the big bad world as you have. In his desire to make a film about a boy who grew up dreaming about making the scariest film of all time, Abhinav Sunder Nayak ends up making a film that’s so idiosyncratically hopeless that it makes ghosts, vampires and demons feel like fluffy soft toys.