This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on September 9, 2020.
In the town of Manjadikunnu, the local school begins organizing a function to celebrate the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. The head of the PTA suggests to the recently arrived headmaster (Maniyan Pilla Raju) that there is only one person suitable to be the chief guest on such an occasion: Gandhi Jotsyan (A.V. Anoop), respected not only for his work as an astrologer, but also because he seems to be someone who lives a life according to the principles of his namesake.
Gandhi Jotsyan’s grandson, Appu (Master Ridhun), is a student in the school. When we first meet him, Appu is praying fervently to God to allow him to pass the mathematics exam, to no avail: “The dreamy Appu failed in Mathematics” says his teacher, much to his dismay. The teacher wryly suggests Appu looks so downtrodden that she wonders if Appu is worried if he takes that answer sheet home, he’ll be given the “police treatment” by his father (Sudheer Karamana), who is known as Mohanan Police. Appu is – we understand that Appu’s poor past performance at school has previously found him at the end of his father’s belt. To Appu’s dismay, the teacher requires him to get his marks sheet signed by his father.
After school, Appu mulls this over with his friend Jithu (Master Rohan). The two of them contemplate running away from home – but the friend’s mother is making chicken for dinner, so they can’t leave before that, and the next day is a cricket match, so they can’t leave before that either. Appu says that he’s actually afraid to run away, because he loves his mother and his grandfather, and cannot bear the thought of leaving them. Jithu advises Appu to not tell his mother that he’s got his marks back, even if she asks, and to sign the answer sheet for his father – something Jithu does all the time, because his father is working in the Gulf. When Appu wonders if it’s wrong to do that, Jithu counters that he saw a report on television suggesting it’s wrong to fail students – there should be no success nor failure, so that all students may be treated alike. “It’s called socialism,” according to Jithu.
There is still some time before Appu needs to turn the signed marks sheet in, which gives both us and him some time to think about things, and to observe the people around him and how they behave. Appu himself clearly understands that forging his father’s signature is wrong, even as he’s tempted to do it to avoid a beating. It’s also clear that Appu gets mixed messages from the adults in his life: the teacher, who scolds the ones who don’t do well, and then slips out of class before school is over to go to the movies; the headmaster, who advises him to make sure he’s taking part in sports and arts to be well-rounded; his mother, who tells him just the opposite, to stay away from playing cricket so he can get good marks and avoid a beating from his father. A man who lies to someone on the phone, saying he’s in a business meeting in Dubai, when he’s clearly playing cards (which another man sneaks a peek at while he’s on the phone). A woman tells her young daughter that if she doesn’t stop crying, the police will come and take her away (an empty threat and a white lie). The men who try to fiddle the money set aside to fix the Gandhi statue at the school before the birthday event. His father, who comes home very late, very drunk, and who never provides enough money for running the household. Appu’s mother takes money from her husband’s wallet without his knowledge (bribing Appu with chocolate to keep him quiet). Even his own friend Jithu bribes the officials in a local cricket match to ensure that the weaker team will win, so their team will win in the final match on Sunday.
It’s no wonder Appu needs to go in search of truth. But at the centre of his life is a man who may have some answers for him: his own grandfather. Appu’s grandfather seems to be the one decent person that he can ask about the nature of right and wrong. For Appu’s grandfather, everything we do in life should be towards the goal of permitting absolute truth to win out.
But even Appu’s grandfather finds himself involved in moral dilemmas. He clearly plays down issues in the horoscopes of his granddaughter and the man she wants to marry, because Appu reminds him that she will be sad if he blocks yet another marriage proposal as he’s done in the past. It’s something that we see weighs him down so much that he needs to go to the Guruvayur temple to pray for forgiveness. When someone asks him if he’s going to join in a protest against a local bar, he wonders how he could do that that when his own son is a heavy drinker? Echoing the movie Sandhesam, he suggests that you first have to clean up issues at home, and only then try to change the world. He finally comes to terms with things by the time he makes the speech at the Gandhi birthday event. Grandfather talks about an event in Gandhi’s childhood, when he and his brother took a gold bangle and sold it. Gandhi, feeling remorse, didn’t have the courage to tell his father what he had done, so her wrote it in a letter. To his surprise, his father didn’t get angry, or punish him, or scold him. Instead, he tore up the letter, and forgave him. For Gandhi, forgiveness was one aspect of Ahimsa (non-violence), and it is important to forgive people who realize their mistakes and try to make amends for them. It’s a lesson Appu takes to heart, writing a letter to his own grandfather to confess his own mistake of finally forging his father’s signature on the marks sheet.
I wish I could love Appuvinte Sathyanweshanam wholeheartedly, because I really like the idea of this boy confronting his own personal dilemma and trying to figure out what he should do, a task not made easy by all the conflicting behaviour he sees around him. But I find the messaging a little long and heavy-handed at times – how many examples do we need of people behaving badly in order to hammer the message home? I wish the story had been trimmed, and the film edited just a little more. But I can’t deny that the film’s cinematography is gorgeous – clear and crisp, bright, and sun-drenched, giving us one more chance to enjoy the work of the late M. J. Radhakrishnan. Finally, there is the hero at the centre of the film. Master Ridhun won a Kerala State Film Award for Best Child Actor for his performance, which sees him as a mostly mute observer of the people around him. I’m reminded of the song “Children Will Listen” from Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods: be careful what you say, be careful what you do, because children will watch, will listen, will learn from you. And Appu finds himself, in the end, truly regretting the choice he made, so much so that he, like in his grandfather’s story about Gandhi, finds himself writing a letter to ask for forgiveness.