The Sun is just back in sight.
You cannot call Mohanlal the King of Comebacks. You cannot call him a Survivor either. Both these denote a downfall of sorts. Unlike most other legendary superstars, Mohanlal has never actually gone down so that he would have to bounce back. His Sun had just been shrouded by a stupendous fog of mediocre cinematic attempts; the world had started missing his sunlight for a while.
Mired in formula and revelling in self-imitation, the Superson had allowed the fog to mature into a Jupiterian storm cloud that could have convincingly (and even permanently!) blacked him out of fan-sight.
Jeethu Joseph, it seems, has effectively employed a cloud-dispersal canon that has finally brought the sun back in sight.
On the personal front, Mohanlal, Lalettan to me too, has initially appeared to me as someone who wears the garb of a nonchalant observer, who attributes everything to chance and describes everything as a ‘happening’.
But, I later deduced that he, beneath that almost frozen sheen of coolness and detachment, entertains a will to succeed, the intensity of which is akin to something that the Rhonda Byrnes of the world so vociferously vouch for. Every nerve of this man knows that he cannot fail; and that has been the Secret of his longevity, his endurance and his consistency with success.
He lives success, and so is wonderfully oblivious of what his competition is capable of.
Mohanlal does not do his homework before he works. His homework seems to be naturally manifesting in him. He does not consciously prepare for his character; his character naturally makes him its medium. Elementary to the extent of being without character, he is almost like a wild fire that catches on to anything that comes near it, and this, surprisingly, includes water too!
The magic of Mohanlal lies in the fact that the superstar is magnificently clueless about his own phenomenon. He remains an enigma not only to the world but to himself as well.
Seriousness of every kind seems to terrify this man out of his wits, and he always employs a profanity to battle the straight-faced world whenever it tries to get into his personal space. He seems to agree with Osho, albeit on a defensive note, that seriousness is as illness.
Having written this far about #Lalettan, I tend to imagine myself reading this out to the protagonist himself. Am sure his response would be something like this-a whisper-like drawl-- modulated naturally in that much-loved manner, pausing at all the unlikely places, stressing on all the unlikely phrases: Enthaa mone… eh? Ithokke…eh? Inganeyokke aano njan…eh? kallam parayaan...eh...? padichchu, alle…eh? (The #eh? is an indispensible feature of the Mohanlal sentence.) That charming wink is certain to follow. Disarmingly mischievous. That is the Man, for you.
Survival of the fittest, they say. With that kind of a paunch and that kind of an anatomy, I wouldn't dare say that in his case.
His is not the victory of brawn. It is not the victory of brain either. It is just that he is The Chosen One. The #Superson.
(Article by Murali Gopy)
Comments
Post a Comment