Kunjaliyan - an 'Avial' of half cooked bits and pieces

The opening shot of the hero indicates that the director had recently read Benyamin's 'Aadujeevitham'; the hero is one among goats and camels he is tending. Jayaraman aka Kunjaliyan (Jayasurya) is working as a herdsman in Dubai and is determined to do any work to earn money so that he could go back to his native place and live a life of dignity. He was literally thrown out by his three elder sisters and their spouses (Bindu Panikkar, Rashmi Boban, Tasni Khan, Vijayaraghavan, Jagadeesh and Asokan) for being a good for nothing fellow and living off them as a parasite.

Due to recession he loses his job and his friend (Suraj Venjaramood) devices a plan to survive at this critical juncture. He cooks up the story of a lottery worth 50 crore won by Jayaraman. Thus Kunjaliyan gets a more than warm welcome by his rapacious relatives as well as the whole panchayat on returning home. He becomes the most wanted, loved person in the village of Gopalapuram. There is only one person who sees through this and she, Maya, a very bold girl questions Jayaraman. A twist occurs in this story when a bunch of mediators comes to the village with the intent of setting up of a dangerous chemical factory. Maya (Ananya) is the only person who is aware of the truth. How the hero, when he leans the truth, saves the entire village forms the (hollow) crux of this (shallow) story.

During recession if a herdsman is the first one to lose his job, it must be a severe recession in Dubai! The hero battling the odds of the desert with the camels and goats looks wearied and tanned but the moment we see him landing in his country he is the 'fair and handsome' hero. He might have been using any of the fairness creams for men to impress his relatives
as he should present himself as the wealthy NRI. His native place 'Gopalapuram' must have been in the Kerala-Tamilnadu border as the village has a typical Tamil village flavor though the characters are speaking chaste Malayalam. The not so educated members have difficulty in pronouncing English words sometimes and they might pronounce 'naxalite' as 'naskalate'
or 'naklasate' but at other times they have no difficulty in uttering English words with the correct pronunciation and intonation!

The story is set in a Utopian village where the entire population is but a bunch of clowns except the heroine and her bedridden father. The money lender (Manikkuttan) vying for the heroine's attention and affection comes across the truth but a bunch of coconut that falls on his head causes memory loss. A scene which we have seen umpteen times in Malayalam cinema, but we can't help it as it is Keralam, the land of keram!

Unfortunately it's always falling on the viewers head not on the directors! According to the director Saji Surendran he gets the idea of the film when he realized that he is calling his brother- in- law as 'kunjaliyan' (eureka!) For the Malabar Muslims this may not seem as innovative as they have the practice of using that term. The director goes to his scenarist Krishna Poojappura and the film is born or rather stillborn. From another anecdote regarding the inception of 'Venice le vyapari', the director had said that it was from a title suggested by the actor Salim Kumar. The title seemed interesting and they created a movie out of it. So, is movie making as simple as that? Anybody could make a movie out of anything in a jiffy? And that too a comedy, especially when out of the nine Rasas, Hasya Rasa is the most difficult one to convey? Charlie Chaplin had once remarked that a comedian should be like liquid to acquire the shape of the mould that it is poured into; wish Suraj Venjaramood will realize it someday!