Vivekanandan is the kind of character that most stars would avoid playing. With hardly any redeeming quality, the role requires the actor to make an exhibition of an evil, psychotic streak; not something that would garner them the easy applause that a do-gooder, super hero role would get. Shine Tom Chacko, who is most creatively anointed as the ‘shining star’ in the credits of Vivekanandan Viralaanu, is one of the few who is not averse to do such roles, despite his recent proclivity to bring in his interview mannerisms to his characters.
With filmmaker Kamal too returning after a long gap of five years, with an intent to make a film that would reflect the changing times, there was much to look forward to. Yet, what one sees throughout the movie is the wasting away of an opportunity for a hard-hitting take on a serious issue, drowning it all in an excessively loud drama that spells out everything a million times and does not let the audience think. In case the viewer did not get the intended message of the film, there are multiple characters repeating, ‘My body, my rights’ and a poet explaining it all again in the end credits.
Vivekanandan leads a dual life, with both the women in his life (played by Swasika Vijay and Grace Antony) bearing the brunt of his violent sexual perversions. To much of the outside world, he is just another normal man, while both the women continue to suffer silently, until the day one of them decides to take charge. In taking up such a subject, one can see a veteran filmmaker attempting to be almost as daring as the new crop of filmmakers, but the film falls flat in execution and fails to have a clear grasp on the weighty issues that it attempts to tackle. The recipes for disaster are all rightly mixed, from stilted conversations to half-baked narratives and a dramatic background score that never stops.
Vivekanandan Viralaanu
The video-going-viral trope has become so overused as an easy method to address the major conflict points in the script. One can easily predict the frames that would follow, from people staring at the screen in railway stations and offices to almost the entire state or even the country coming to a standstill over the said viral video. In Vivekanandan Viralaanu also, things proceed in this fashion, with such visuals filling the intervals between the heightened household drama. But then, that was to be expected in a film with ‘viral’ in its title itself.
Perhaps the only positive that can be said about the film is that the filmmaker did not choose to even slightly whitewash the character played by Shine Tom Chacko, which so often happens in films with known stars playing such characters. But such glimmers in an ocean of nothingness does not make a big difference.
Vivekanandan Viralaanu is currently running in theatres
