Full Defence of Premam

Premam is still running in the theatres now, and it has gone on to become a special movie in Malayalam movie industry; it was the second highest grossing movie in Malayalam, the last time I read about it. Meanwhile, I have been hearing and reading a lot that Premam has been misleading the youth, and that the movie was rather not needed. I will not say that movies don’t have the ability to send the young men and women the wrong way, but this accusation about this particular movie is nothing but a strange thing. There are many reasons why I can say with clarity that the misleading has been minimal or never really happened.

1. The youth has never been perfect: So, this late defence starts with the ultimate realization of truth. The youth has never been perfect, and never came close in the eyes of the older generation. The situation will only get worse as time passes, and a newer generation can come up with things which were not expected by a much older generation. It is usually not a positive thing, but it is how it works. There are things which are waiting to happen, and there is no stopping them as the world gets immersed in more and more modernity and less values of the old times. Premam doesn’t contribute to that directly because it was always going to happen.

2. Premam brings nothing new at all: As the director Alphonse Puthren himself has suggested, Premam is the second movie from him and the very next movie after his own Neram which brings nothing new at all. Where the film succeeds is in the presentation of something which has been around for a very long time. It is the success of the movie, and not bringing something huge out of nowhere. Premam‘s magic wand comes much later. So, the argument that Premam has made that kind of a change doesn’t stand because it can’t bring something which already existed. Premam is just another stylish take on what you have seen already.

3. Premam is just a reflection of the truth: Premam is a realistic portrayal of the incidents. Most of the things which are shown in the movie have already happened here or there. People who have studied in colleges will know that the new generation is already like this only; not all of them, but a good number of them. The quality of the teachers as well as the students will continue to come down as long as the National Eligibility Test is done on the basis of an objective test with no negative marks. Instead, it should be done to test the quality, goodness and creativity of the teachers; students will be never better than the teachers and the parents.

4. There is a message right in the soul of this movie: You can say that some other movies have messages and all, but Premam is the one which has left us with a better message. There are movies like Bangalore Days, Neelakasam Pachakadal Chuvanna Bhoomi and 1983 which pretends to have messages, but the only thing that they all show is the pathetic state of youth in a fake way – they are all protagonists worthy of detest. Meanwhile, Premam shows how a protagonist finally becomes the good person and then he gets the girl – it has the traits of a morality tale when justice is served for the good guy, not for the person who had no clue of being good earlier. He finds his love when he becomes the better person, after leaving the third-rate life he had during the college life, learning to be a good person; it is the message!

5. The examples used are all wrong: I am really surprised that people have used so many ridiculous examples related to this movie. A lot of movies have shown the incidents in this movie in one way or the other, already. A good number of movies had terrible protagonists, compared to which our hero of Premam is nothing. It is to be noted that a lot of heroes of the past have been just criminals who beat up people. There have been smugglers, underworld dons, murderers, thieves and many others, and our protagonist in Premam is none of them. May be some people prefer Honey Bee and Kili Poyi as the great “righteous” movies. Or are they movies like Praja, Chattambinadu, Ustaad, Pokkiriraja and all with the right examples?

6. Misunderstanding is never the fault of a movie: You can have your own misunderstanding, but you just can’t blame a movie for the same, because you can’t understand what a movie can do in your life – you have to take the good things and leave the bad things behind. If you are not able to understand that, it is a serious mistake on your part. These days, people end up taking what they like and what they are comfortable with; if they had taken the good things instead, world would have been a better place. But if they try to take all the wrong things into their life, the director and the writer are not to responsible for the same. Movies don’t make things terrible unless you choose, but problems are there when some people choose the evil, but that applies in the case of every movie!

***The images used in this blog post are from the Official Facebook Page of the movie, used in defence.

TeNy

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