Aadujeevitham aka The Goat Life [dir. Blessy]

Some way into Aadujeevitham / The Goat Life (TGL), I started to wonder if the hall was playing it without the mandatory intermission. Normally, outside of festival screenings, cinemas in India have to have this mid-break for people to buy snacks or empty their bladders, even with sub-100 min films. It was then I realized with a sinking feeling that this tedious survival saga of a Gulf-bound Malayalee in the 90's shanghaied as slave labor for an isolated goat farm in the searing desert was going to run for around 3 hours. My feelings then mirrored those of the harrowed protagonist.

I realize that sounds rather insensitive. I'm not against downbeat survival dramas, no. Some amazing books and films have come from this genre. But throughout the running time, I was never once able to sufficiently empathize with the character to feel his plight. It's a real pity, since it is based on an affecting true story, and there is certainly a lot of effort taken in the making, not least by lead star Prithviraj Sukumaran. As the protagonist Najeeb Mohammed he dons a rigorously de-glammed unkempt avatar for most of the film, and even undergoes a body transformation to represent what Najeeb had become after two years of slavery. I also appreciate that the film remains faithful to the idea of Najeeb barely surviving his ordeal, not becoming some kind of hero that fights back and defeats his oppressors.

The film offsets the scenes of Najeeb's grim fate in the desert with memories of his life in Kerala where he has left a loving wife (Amala Paul) pregnant with their first child. Water and greenery feature heavily in these memories (and fantasies), contrasting with his arid, sandy present (DoP Sunil KS). It reminded me of Shaji Karun's 1994 film Swaham, which contrasted the grim present of the widow protagonist with her happy past by depicting the former in black and white and the latter in color.

Sadly, those are the only good things I can say. A great survival film is made by its little gestures and micro-moments. I can empathize with the character's plight only if I find the character interesting to begin with. In TGL, writer-director Blessy's script is cringingly broad-strokes and pedestrian. At one point, Najeeb and a fellow Malayalee team up to escape with a North African slave (Haitian actor Jimmy Jean-Louis, who looks like he was participating in an Idris Elba lookalike contest). I get that the African guy is better used to surviving the desert environment than these Keralites, but they behave like such headless chickens, you want him to throw up his hands and abandon these idiots to their fate, instead of being the noble Samaritan who repeatedly pulls their asses out of danger. A little later he literally disappears from the film, suggesting that he preferred to commit suicide than bear any more idiocies.

But the worst part of TGL was AR Rahman's score. It's so bad in its choppiness and overbearing sentiment it made me nauseous and feeling like my ears were being bored by a power drill. I was undecided whether I wanted to repeatedly stab at his jugular, wrench his balls off with rusty pliers or ram a barbwire wrapped club up his butt.

I understand the hype this movie has got, and the trailer did a great job of selling it as an edgy saga, but after surviving through the ordeal I felt like an utter goat for having signed up.