CIA: Pushing reel boundaries
Amal Neerad, the director of Dulquer Salman starrer CIA (Comrade in America), says the film has multiple sub-texts, and audiences take away what they can relate to, writes Deepa Gauri
In the cacophonous world of social media chatter, you will not find Amal Neerad. In chat shows of empty rhetoric, again, the man will be the last to fit in. But that is the way Amal likes it: not to turn battles into wars and not to be seen or heard more than what is required. Amal, the man, guards his personal turf, holds true to his ideologies and lets his film do the talking. And when he talks, it is always self-assured, measured and gracious.
Comrade in America (CIA), now playing at theatres in the UAE, is his seventh film as director, counting Kullante Bharya in the anthology, 5 Sundarikal. But the evolution of Amal, as director, is remarkable for artistic eclecticism, and a journey that is marked by heady highs and experimental lows. Perhaps it his experience with experiments that also made him stronger, so much that people do not refer to his failed Bachelor Party as a write-off anymore but as something that was necessary in Malayalam cinema’s path-breaking transformation in the past decade.
And Amal has been at the heart of this change, though he says, in no fake modesty, that he does not feel as if he has made any contribution at all. “Malayalam cinema has such a profusion of talent; there has been an extraordinary team of actors and technicians who made our cinema what it is today. I do not think I have made any contribution to it at all,” says Amal.
But he agrees that the industry has evolved tremendously in the past decade, “and that change is progressive and positive. There is space to experiment, to do more and to push boundaries.”
THRILLER WITH A TWIST
With CIA, Amal breaks away from patterns. It is not a crime thriller in the mode of Big B or Sagar Alias Jacky Reloaded. It is not about terrorism as in Anwar. It is not experimental like Bachelor Party. It is not emotionally as intense as Kullante Bharya and it does not take a historic sweep as Iyobinte Pusthakam does. Yet, as Amal says, “it takes from where I left at Iyobinte Pusthakam in its ideological mooring.” The story of a young leftist (played by Dulquer Salman), who illegally crosses over to America through the Mexican border, going all the way for love, CIA offers many sub-texts.
“It is a romance; it is about the refugee crisis, and it is about the socialist ideology,” says Amal. It is for you, as a viewer, to take what suits you best, as none of these is in-your-face. As geographic footprint goes, CIA could be the most ambitious to date by Amal, who had started the project in 2015, had to endure months-on delay in getting the US visas, and drew on several first-hand experiences to visually embellish the script by Shibin Francis.
That is why Amal reiterates that CIA is not made following any trends, coming as it is after the release of two films centred on leftist ideology. And Amal is the unabashed, unambiguous leftist. “I believe that the ideology outlined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – some 180 years ago as Humboldt University students - is relevant even today for Kerala and the world,” says Amal, quickly adding that “it
is not in reference to political parties or governments. It is about the humanism in the ideology.”
REFUGEES AND BORDERS
Amal says his choice of CIA was also shaped by the subtext of the refugee crisis that the story presents. Shooting the film just as Donald Trump had announced his candidature and declared his policies, there is a contemporary universal relevance to the story that won’t miss the obvious eye.
As for critics who thought the border crossing was simplistic, Amal has the answer: “Every day, as we say at the beginning of the film’s second half, at least 400 people cross the border from Mexico to the USA. I have seen the crossing – by women and children – and also observed many realities associated with border-crossing. The crossing per se is not dramatic as you think. So, I could not have made the hero jump across the border polevaulting, simply for effect.”