Yavanika aka Curtain [dir. KG George]

On a trusted friend's recommendation, I recently checked out Yavanika, a celebrated mystery drama by KG George.

Yavanika is centered around a musical drama troupe, whose main tabla player Ayyappan (Bharat Gopi) suddenly goes missing. As he is a habitual drunkard, it takes a while for the other members to regard his disappearance in a serious light. When they finally do, an investigation is launched. Jacob (Mammootty), the inspector leading the enquiry, conducts a series of interrogations with the rest of the  troupe, and other characters. He gauges their relationship and attitude towards Ayyappan, probing to see if any of them is responsible for his disappearance and possible death.

Terms like 'Rashomon Effect' have been used to describe Yavanika's story, but it's more like one of Agatha Christie's mysteries. You have a gallery of possible suspects, each giving their stories; the detective has to find out if one or more of them is lying. Struturally, much of Yavanika is narrated in flashbacks as Jacob reconstructs the character of Ayyappan and his equation with the other drama company members. Jacob's approach is to be confrontational: he accuses the subject of being behind Ayyappan's disappearance with the aim of breaking down their composure and getting them to blurt out information. This also serves as an examination of the other characters in the narrative. A similar approach was later adopted with Saswata Mukherjee in the Detective Shabor films.

Unfortunately, there is little subtlety in the flashbacks: From the very outset Ayyappan is a blackguard - a drunk lecherous chauvinist that corners and uses women for sex and to extract money from. His abrasive behavior frequently gets him into quarrels with the other men in the troupe, so they are suspect too. I have to confess that the lack of nuance in Ayyappan's personality makes the repeated flashbacks across the 2.5 hour running time a bit of a slog. There are moments of pleasure when the other characters reveal facets of themselves. The film has a large cast of recognizable names in the supporting cast and, within the script's limitations, they acquit themselves well. One striking bit is when Jagathi's jokester character reveals that he keeps making wisecracks because that's the only way he can cope with his life's miseries. While the central mystery isn't a particularly devious one, I liked the device of the play-within-the-film, in which certain events are foreshadowed in an oblique way.

Another interesting aspect was the contrast between Ayyappan's dominant stance towards his women and Jacob's equation with his wife - Jacob and his wife address each other as friends, he canvasses her opinion on the case and she is not diffident about rebuking his lapses of judgement. This depiction of equal camaraderie in a marriage certainly wasn't a norm in 80's Indian movies and is therefore refreshing to see.

On the whole, Yavanika is not as gripping or layered as I should have liked, but definitely interesting at least as a one-time watch. The full film in rather decent image quality is available to stream on Youtube with hard-coded English subtitles: