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'Dominic and the Ladies’ Purse' Movie Review: An Epic Mammootty Character, A Not-So-Epic Investigation
Mammootty’s joyous interpretation of Dominic makes you want to forget the flaws in Gautham Menon's mystery-comedy and wait for him to be entrusted with another case soon
Director: Gautham Vasudev Menon
Writer: Neeraj Rajan, Gautham Vasudev Menon
Cast: Mammootty, Gokul Suresh, Lena, Sushmitha Bhatt, Vineeth, Viji Venkatesh
Language: Malayalam
10 minutes into Gautham Vasudev Menon’s Dominic And The Ladies’ Purse is all it takes for one to fall in love with CI Dominic (Mammootty), the eccentric, pompous detective with a serious cash-flow issue. We meet him through Vicky (Gokul Suresh), Dominic’s new “Watson” on his first day of work, in what can best be described as a “zero introduction” scene. Dominic works out of his dilapidated home-office filled with props and furniture (his office chair is an abandoned salon seat) well past its glory days. So when he hires Vicky in a matter of seconds, it’s probably not because he’s finally found an intellectual equal, it’s just that Vicky has enough money at home to not ask for a salary.
This intro may have been written for laughs but it’s also delicately thought-out and detailed. Take the example of how quickly he admits that his deductions as detective may be wrong "20 percent of the time". Almost the entire film works on this margin of error. The same can be said about the various things we see in his apartment; not only do they appear used or borrowed, but his apartment gives you the feeling that you’re at a museum of unwanted goods, with Dominic himself appearing to be a “used good” that society no longer has a place for.
Dominic was once a celebrated police officer, or so we are told. There’s no trusting anything he says, but through the jokes and through his attempts at bravado, we see a man so obsessed with finding everything that has gone missing, that he hasn’t yet realised he’s the one who is lost.
You feel this most in the way he hides his entire backstory with simple throwaway lines. When his ex-wife Lakshmi (Lena) visits with her new husband a day before she’s leaving the country, he speaks of her with love and fondness, introducing her to Vicky as a wonderful person. Lakshmi also leaves with him their pet dog whom he lovingly calls “Bro”. When Dominic happily takes charge of Bro after what appears to have been decades of living alone, he says he’s finally found someone... anyone.
It’s this sort of emotional heft that makes Dominic so much more than a silly detective. At the onset, we’re led to believe he will do anything for money, including blackmail unsuspecting adulterers. But when his house-owner asks him to find the rightful owner of a missing purse, you know him enough by then to realise that he’s not doing this to save on rent; it’s probably because doing a good deed might finally make his life feel a bit worthwhile.
The setup for the film’s central investigation is nuanced and layered. It might start off with the case of something as innocuous as a missing purse, but the motivations, including that of his house-owner's (she’s been waiting for her missing son for 20 years) give us enough reasons to invest in emotionally. This missing purse soon gets attached to a missing person and this further leads Dominic to a man who has been missing for over two years. “The game is afoot,” as Holmes would have said.
Oddly, this is also where the cracks begin to appear. Until a certain point, there’s so much that goes into writing Dominic and the characters around him that the film takes its plot a tad too lightly. As we jump entirely into the investigation, moving one from clue or suspect to the next, the film begins to forget the lightness with which it embraced the first half. The sort of detail that went into writing Dominic and Co. suddenly seem to have gone missing when we meet people on the other side.
What makes any investigation great is the illusion that just about anyone could be the bad guy. But in Dominic.., we move into a large chunk in the second half that feels so underwritten that a few characters here might as well have walked around with T-shirts that read, “Red Herring”.
These portions are flat and frustrating, but Mammootty gets just enough to do to ensure we stay with the film. Which means that even when the investigative angle feels like it’s going nowhere, we get a cheeky fight scene in his apartment that makes Dominic feel even more endearing. It’s a strange, inconsistent mixture of moods, oscillating between a thriller and a comedy in which neither gets the space it deserves.
What exposes these cracks in the second half even more is some gimmicky editing by editor Anthony (also seen in a cameo) in which we cut to a fight that’s no longer relevant to the plot. You feel the same with composer Darbuka Siva’s music as well, desperate to fill even the gentlest of scenes with the most restless of scores; the piece that plays during a crucial car chase is especially noticeable and jarring. It’s mostly the solid cinematography by Vishnu Dev that reminds us of the director’s signature vision, including shots we will only see in his movies.
Even if the film brings it all back with an ending that’s sure to be polarising, Dominic.. still works to a large degree as an origin story for a detective you want to plan a franchise around. You might end up feeling like you just watched a weaker sequel of this franchise, but Mammootty’s joyous interpretation of Dominic makes you want to forget the flaws and wait for him to be entrusted with another case soon. Perhaps... the curious case of the missing plot from this film?