5

Angamaly Diaries

Angamaly is a small town located north of Kochi in Kerala. The Malayalam film Angamaly Diaries (2017) is about the lives of the people who live there. Which sounds prosaic and perhaps even un-cinematic. But from this material, director Lijo Jose Pellissery fashions a furious rollercoaster of a film. He doesn’t just take us to Angamaly. He soaks us in its sights, sounds and smells: there are so many close-ups of food that you can almost inhale the aromas. Movies are often described as an inexpensive way to travel the world. Few Indian films have transported me to a new place as completely as this one did.

The sensory overload begins with the opening credits. A series of quick cuts introduces us to a church, busy streets, railway crossing, telephone exchange, religious processions, cop directing traffic, meats being fried and cooked in vast vats, small hotels and cinemas, nuns walking on a busy road, and more. It’s a frenzied introduction. Even if you’ve never heard of the place (I hadn’t), you become a local instantly.

Angamaly Diaries is designed to look scrappy and un-designed. As Lijo said in an interview, you don’t feel like you’re watching cinema. The cast consists of eighty-six newcomers, all of whom feel like they belong on these streets. The film is narrated by Vincent Pepe (played by the charming Antony Varghese), who breaks the fourth wall and looks at us as his voiceover starts with: ‘I am an Angamalian.’ Vincent narrates his story, beginning from when he was a choirboy at the local church. He grows up idolizing one of the local goons and, taking a cue from him, forms his own gang, which is called the Palliyangadi Team. These aren’t hardcore criminals, even though they occasionally throw bombs and carry guns. The bombs they use are homemade—the guy making them embraces a tree while doing it, so that if something goes wrong and the bomb explodes in his hands, the damage will be contained.

The film is peppered with such black comedy. In another scene, we are at a funeral being attended by both the wife and the mistress of the deceased and the mistress is wailing much more than the wife. It turns out that his body won’t fit in the coffin, so a few quick karate chops are administered to break bones and squeeze it in.

Even the violence has strains of comedy—early on in the film, a fight breaks out in a bar and involves men dressed up as Jesus, a Roman soldier and a nun. One minute, the men are knocking back drinks. The next, they are punching and kicking. If feels like a scene from the Gaul village of the Asterix comics.

There’s plenty of carnage in Angamaly Diaries. Vincent and his team face off against a tougher gang led by the brothers Ravi and Rajan, who have served time in jail for murder and now rule Angamaly’s thriving pork trade. Ravi and Rajan teach Vincent and his gang how to make money hand over fist with pigs, but the two teams fall out when Vincent’s people start undercutting their mentors. Their battle spills out onto the streets and eventually leads to death and murder in Angamaly.

The story might be grim but the telling never becomes sombre. The narrative continues in its scrappy, charming way, taking time to educate us on the delicacies of the town—we are told that the best ‘parotta and beef fry in Angamaly is at the Paris Hotel, best omelette is at Kunju’s street-food joint and best biryani is at Thachil hotel’. The enmity between the gangs isn’t set in stone either—once they sort out their differences, they start making plans to have drinks together. The brawling and the posturing don’t stem from any deep-seated ideological differences. They’re just a way of life.

This is, of course, an extremely male world. Women—wives, sisters, girlfriends—make only fleeting appearances. They stand on the sidelines while the men create mayhem. All of which culminates in a bravura, climactic, 11-minute, single-shot sequence that fuses religion and violence. Lijo and cinematographer Girish Gangadharan create a dazzling set-piece—the camera snakes in and out of homes and through a religious procession; the men fight and stab, firecrackers go off and ultimately, people die. The exhilarating action of Angamaly Diaries is accompanied by composer Prashant Pillai’s propulsive score. It underlines the highly combustible nature of these people.

There is something primal about these men—in the scenes in which pigs are being slaughtered, you sense their almost guttural need for violence. Lijo went on to explore this in greater detail in a later film, Jallikattu (2019). Here, he doesn’t let the mood get too dark. After all, it’s Angamaly and there’s always some fun to be had.

You can watch the film on Netflix.