In the universe where Kamuki happens, women identify themselves as a pair of breasts. Men – young and old – are obsessed with women’s bosom and rear, so much so that they often miss the fact that female bodies have a face. Also, women are invariably tagged as gold-diggers through scenes that reek sexism and perversion, without slightest imagination. No, this isn’t moral policing, but pointing out the fact that there is a line that separates sensitive coming-of-age dramas from two and half hours of celebration of outright silliness and obscenity. Directed by Binu S, Kamuki is built on a script weaker than the comic skits staged on television reality shows.
Don’t pass it for a feminist film just because it has a woman playing the titular lead role. It is essentially about male fantasies, and the woman is just an object to reaffirm the popular myth that world view is fundamentally and absolutely man’s perspective of the world.
The film is, supposedly, a romantic drama that does lazy gender role-reversal trick. Achamma and her friend Jeena (Kavya Suresh), after wading through an uneventful and sexually frustrating teenage, join a post-graduate degree course in social work. Absolutely not interested in academics, the duo are determined to celebrate college life to the core. They run into Hari (Askar Ali), a visually challenged student, and his friend Jaffer who acts as his eye. Studious, kind and sensitive, Hari is a perfect foil to Achamma. A few hiccups later, they become friends, and eventually, Achamma falls for Hari’s inspiring attitude towards life. However, he feels she isn’t good enough for him, and she decides to prove otherwise. One tiring hackneyed scene after another, Kamuki comes to a close in a scene that is so unintelligent that films such as Chunkzz and Happy Husbands start looking high-brow.
Recommended
The desperation to milk some humor out of every situation is evident. Characters are made to act goofy, sans any rationality, mirth or sign of life in the writing. For instance, in the initial sequence, a revered school teacher (Baiju) heaves a sigh of relief when his wife delivers a baby girl in an auto-rickshaw in the middle of a junction. Mind you, he hasn’t even checked if the baby and the mother are alright. A voice from the background declares, “Lucky man, he didn’t have to spend any money at the hospital,” and immediately the veteran teacher, who looked like a sane man in the previous scene, says out aloud, “Thank god!” It takes a seriously erratic script to make a formidable performer like Baiju seem bland and cringe-worthy on screen. Kamuki manages to do that. Aparna Balamurali’s earnest performance in the lead role is the sole redeeming factor. She easily outperforms his co-star Askar Ali who seems to be still approaching films as though they are his high school project works.
Kamuki, unintentionally though, exposes the young filmmakers’ severe lack of understanding of women’s universe. Achamma’s adolescence, for one, is marked entirely by scenes revolving around her sexual frustration, staged like comic scenes. The utterly tone-deaf scenes reduce teenage girls’ rebellion to their curiosity about sex and sex organs, further worsened by distasteful dialogues. That a film as this got made is nothing short of a wonder.
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The Kamuki review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the movie. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have any commercial relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.