Many of these films had young actors playing parts without a care about “image” or the other things young Tamil heroes are typically concerned about. Another one ended with a villain’s penis being lopped off. (There are niche films being made in Tamil – like Soodhu Kavvum – but not enough to constitute a movement.) How, then, were these Malayalam films being made, and in such numbers? One of the films I saw was Da Thadiya, which was the love story of an obese young man. Whenever you ask Tamil filmmakers why they continue to make movies for the “family audience of all ages,” they say that the recovery of your investment becomes difficult if you target niche audiences. You expect Bollywood to make these multiplexy films because Hindi movies are seen all over the country and recover their costs from high-priced multiplexes. Let me explain that last statement, which is purely about economics. And there were the “new generation” films – Thattathin Marayathu, Ustad Hotel, Annayum Rasoolum – that I simply could not believe were being made. There were indifferently made commercial films, the kind we see in Tamil. Malayalam films returned to my life in 2013, when I was on a jury panel – I saw something like 60 films over three weeks. That’s not really how you want to see films. I remember watching Amaram at Safire theatre with a friend whose patience was frayed thin by my need to know what every line of dialogue meant. But then Doordarshan stopped showing these films, and without subtitles it was impossible to follow anything. I remember, especially, the Malayalam films like Koodevide and Alicinte Anveshanam, which were neither all-out arty nor fully commercial – it was the middle-of-the-road-style that I saw in Tamil filmmakers like Balu Mahendra and Mahendran. Once upon a time, I used to watch cinema from all over India – every Sunday afternoon, on Doordarshan. Is the Malayalam film industry making the best mainstream cinema today?
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