'Alappuzha Gymkhana' Movie Review: Khalid Rahman and Naslen Punch Above The Genre

Director: Khalid Rahman
Writer: Khalid Rahman, Sreeni Saseendran
Cast: Naslen, Lukman Avaran, Ganapathi, Sandeep Pradeep, Anagha Ravi, Kottayam Nazeer
Language: Malayalam

Five boys collect around a table, a pot of toddy as the centerpiece around which they nervously wiggle — Shifas Ahmed (Sandeep Pradeep), Shifas Ali (Franco Francis), David John (Aabish Rahman), Jojo Johnson (Naslen), and Shanavas KL (Shiva Hariharan). Before checking their exam results, they make a promise to each other that whether they pass or fail, they will get drunk. It is not an insurance against failure as much as an insurance against loneliness. In celebration, failure, as an exception, or a rule — they want to hold together.

Save for Shanavas, they all fail, and save for Shanavas, they all get drunk, but soon, together, they train to become boxers — not kickboxers but "one-two" boxers, for their coach makes them practice their one-two left-right jabs for monotonous weeks. With sports as an alibi, they hope to earn grace marks, pass, and get into a respectable college through the sports quota. It is such a unique and strange, touch-the-nose-from-behind-the-head method of poking through school, it could only be culled from life — and director Khalid Rahman notes in interviews that, indeed, his friends and him paved the same path as his characters.

Why boxing? Because some local boxing champion humbled their ego in a street brawl over a girl. Ego is the leaking engine male arcs run on — Rahman knows this, and he makes these provocations of the male ego so silly, it turns the very idea of muscling each other into a sweet-salt peacocking. For this, he needs his men to be charming — a sort-of anti-Lijo Jose Pellissery.

Rahman’s previous films Thallumaala (2022) and Unda (2019), made him a patron saint and author of the Mallu Male Collective genre, where he prefers his men in groups. His latest, Alappuzha Gymkhana, pulling that thread further, is not the story of a boy but a boys — there is nothing spectacularly ‘the’ about this collection of playful wastrels who seek pop, not purpose from life, whose aim is not to reach but to coast. This is not a story about lost youth or found meaning, because these boys, they don’t necessarily want to find anything.

Other boys join this group — Deepak Panikkar (Ganapathi) and Kiran (Shon Joy) — and together, coached by Antony Joshua (Lukman Avaran), they represent Alappuzha at the state level. 

You rarely see them alone with their thoughts, you always see them congeal. If you put a scalpel to the film and miraculously carve out an individual character and ask — who are you? — you won’t get an answer, but a whack on the head and a flick of the shirt collar.

A still from the film.

These boys derive their selfhood from the collective, and Rahman is of the firm opinion that character is not who you are but what you do, so his scenes are filled with moments not of character intention, but character presence — the fights, the dance, the thick conversations which make reading subtitles an act of competitive sports. None of the boys get a strong individual track as characters lazily walk in and backstories are carelessly thrown up — why would anyone name two characters of their film Shifas? 

There is total comfort with each other’s bodily fluids — vomit, saliva, sweat, blood — and each other’s bodies — resting under the armpit, over the crotch, as bodies that begin to resemble one thing.

Homoerotic is not really the word, because they are barely separate bodies. Yes, Jojo — a character held beautifully with the limping charm of Naslen — might seem to be the central thread, his eyes falling and faltering over many girls, his arms turning granite, his grin turning sombre, but as the film culminates, it makes clear what the purpose of a ‘hero’ in such films is. They might not be the “king”, but they can be the “kingmaker”, slipping the idea of a hero being on a pedestal to being the pedestal. (Watching him turn being punched by a girl into a pout that resembles a kissed lip is a masterclass of being both jilted and joyous.)

And this is precisely where Rahman’s flaring vision bears blinding fruit — one he has co-written with his regular cinematographer Jimshi Khalid and editor Nishadh Yusuf, and music composer Vishnu Vijay, with whom this is his second outing. Each scene is strongly grounded that the whys begin to matter less. The camera is unhinged, sometimes moving between extreme close-ups with the limelights burning the image, and wide lenses, to taking the perspective of the person boxing, being boxed, to taking the perspective of being above their head, over their shoulder, to taking the perspective of a bird that flies into the ring — about which a character asks rather anticlimactically, why is it a square?

A still from the film.

At one point during a fight, the camera takes on the speed and repetitive motion of a punch. At another point, when the girls are boxing, the sport turns into a choreography that excites Jojo like little else in his life ever has — at what point does the sports director become a choreographer when a punch resembles pirouette?

When the text is this thick with life, context strips away. After all, Rahman made a whole film about just a string of fights, moving across time so recklessly that you sometimes found yourself in a flashback within a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. (I am speaking of Thallumaala) To call that film non-linear is to call a road a non-river.

Rahman is not working under the constraints — time, genre, time-based genre. He might be one of the most original cinematic voices in India today, weaving across genres, weaving towards destabilising genres. His is a mind that makes films as though it has never heard of the three-act structure and this he holds not as ignorance but indifference. Watching his movies is the thrill of not just total cinematic presence, but of being exposed to a new language altogether that is being crafted on the go — one of unstudied but not careless brilliance.