Mammootty's Many Reinventions

I HAD ALMOST WALKED away from a ghostly Bengaluru mall, one evening last December. According to Google Maps, it housed the multiplex screening of the latest Malayalam release, but the building looked abandoned—hardly the kind of place where people might gather for the collective pleasure of cinema. I eventually found a side entrance leading to its only functioning floor. Inside the auditorium, I was pleasantly surprised. There sat several families and young people who, unlike in the Malayalam screenings of my childhood, were not all necessarily from Kerala.

The film was Kalamkaval. It opens with a family of four watching television at home. The father appears to be at peace with the average domesticity of his life, until he excuses himself to step out for an urgent meeting with a “Kumar sir.” We soon understand he is actually having an affair with a younger woman. At a lodge, amid flirtatious banter, he lights a cigarette and casually muses about how easy it would be to kill her. She laughs when he loops a shawl around her neck and tightens it, mistaking his casual menace for play. Only in the final seconds does she realise the danger. He watches her die, then reclines, cigarette in hand, her body limp across his lap. I felt a chill running down my spine and could sense a similar stir through the hall.

This was Mammootty—Mammukka to generations of Malayalis—one of Kerala’s most well-known and beloved film stars. Across nearly five decades and more than four hundred films in Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi, he has remained a constant presence. In Kerala, his baritone greets you even at shop counters: complete a UPI payment and an automated “thank you” in his voice follows, as instantly recognisable as that of Amitabh Bachchan in Hindi-speaking states.