'Ponman' Movie Review: A Stunning Basil Joseph Shines In This Stressful, High-Stakes Drama

Director: Jotish Shankar 
Writers: GR Indugopan, Justin Mathew 
Cast: Basil Joseph, Lijomol, Sajin Gopu, Anand Manmadhan, Deepak Parambol
Language: Malayalam

Ponman seems like a silly title for the film this turned out to be. The title translates to ‘kingfisher’, but it’s also a play on the phrase ‘pon’ meaning gold and man, because it's about a man who deals in gold. By the end of the film, though, one might find other reasons to justify this title, but to begin with, you understand that it’s referring to the character played by Basil Joseph, a strange character named PP Ajesh.

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Going by the term the film uses, he runs what is called a “Madiyil Jewellery”, the kind of mobile jewellery in which the gold, literally, ends up on your lap. I’m not sure if this business is specific to Kollam, where the film is set in, but from my understanding of the trade, Ajesh is a broker who supplies gold to brides right before they get married, expecting to be repaid using the money they earn in the form of gifts during the wedding.

A still from 'Ponman'.

It’s a peculiar practice, something many of us will discover as we watch Ponman. It is also ideal as a plot device in a film that talks about dowry, that too within the fascinating Latin Catholic community of the region. So, when we first meet PP Ajesh, he’s supplying 25 sovereigns of gold to a bride named Stefi Graf (Lijimol Jose), a night before she gets married to the “big, mountain-like” Mariyano (Sajin Gopu).

But nothing is as simple as black and white in Ponman. In one of the first scenes, we enter Stefi’s kitchen in which her future mother-in-law is having the talk with Stefi’s mother. The mother-in-law states that she wants those 25 sovereigns of gold, albeit smilingly. There are no supplementary questions about what Stefi wants from the marriage or how she feels. Just when you think Stefi’s mother will reply idealistically with, “I will not give my daughter to such money-minded people,” she gives the opposite reaction. She agrees readily, and Stefi too oddly seems happy with the “deal” that’s being made.

A still from 'Ponman'.

The dialogues couldn’t be funnier. After Stefi’s mother agrees to this sum, she speaks highly of her family’s integrity and of how their word is good for it. But these speeches about personal integrity isn’t limited to just one character. Ajesh gets one about his undying spirit and perseverance. Stefi’s brother Bruno (Anand Manmadhan) gets another about his commitment to political ideology, and even Mariyano gets one about his ethics, even though we know by then that he’s married Stefi only for the dowry. It’s not that any one of these characters are inherently evil; it’s just that they are all a really dark shade of grey.

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It is this texture of Ponman that keeps you guessing about all these characters and their intentions. Ajesh, who you’d assume as the film’s villain within the first half hour, gets a flip a few scenes later. Wait for another 20 minutes and you think that he’s the bad guy after all. This applies even to Stefi’s mother; at first, we feel genuinely moved by her helplessness in getting her daughter married, but a scene later, you get a sense that she too will go to any length to simply push her away.

But what keeps you arrested right through the runtime is how the stakes just keep getting higher. So, it’s not just about Ajesh struggling to get his money back after Stefi leaves without paying him for more than half the gold. It’s also that Stefi is now with Mariyano — a beast himself — who lives in a remote island famous for its criminals. Like its unpredictable characters, the plot too remains tough to figure out.

As viewers, it’s never easy to hitch your loyalty to any one character in Ponman. In a shocking scene, you see a new side to Stefi when she blames her brother Bruno for having done nothing to make her life better. Until then, you were wrong if you reduced Stefi to be an innocent nobody who had no voice in her own life choices.

You feel this even stronger with a wonderfully-written character like Ajesh. Even though we laugh at his alcoholism at the start, he gets you to regret judging him when he opens up about how drinking is his way of finding some form of autonomy over life’s unending problems.

And yet what complements all the great writing decisions are the film’s great performances; be it an actor like Sandhya Rajendran, who plays Stefi’s mother, or the likes of Lijomol and Sajin Gopu, who continue to surprise us the ease with which they perform, even handling such complex characters.

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Eventually, it’s also a film that’s held together by Basil’s phenomenal interpretation of Ajesh. In a stunning scene, right after Ajesh gets slapped by a man twice his size, he speaks matter-of-factly about the football skills of this man, as tears begin to roll down his face. Framed in mid-shot, not only is the scene challenging to pull off as a single shot, but Basil also does this without getting us to notice his performance. It’s the kind of non-acting you find in actors with decades of experience. What this contributes towards is a tight, suspenseful drama in which there are no winners and no losers.