John Paul George’s dazzling directorial debut’Guppy’ is a one-of-a-kind film that is a brilliant, methodical deliberation on human struggle, strength and survival. Aided by a sturdy screenplay that refuses to be bogged down by compromises, ’Guppy’ is a superb puzzler of a film that amply rewards!
Mikhael’s(Chetan) small world revolves around his ailing mother(Rohini), and the guppy seller boy dreams of buying her a wheel chair some day. When Tejas Varkey(Tovino Thomas) sets foot on the seaside village to oversee the construction of a railway over bridge, it throws a few lives onshore into turmoil, with overwhelming outcomes.
’Guppy’ is without doubt a film that navigates along sundry lanes, and its take on human relationships is distinctly unlike to most films that we have seen. It does require the viewer to be an adventurer who would take an audacious plunge along with it into the numerous unconventionalities that it has in store.
Here is a movie that would latch on to you, long after it’s over, with its vagrant repercussions continuing to ebb their way into your psyche. There are challenges aplenty that the film maker takes up here, and he mixes up the strange and the surreal to create a merger effect that quite plainly stuns.
It isn’t only the unique ambience of the film that is dissimilar, but also the unsettling and imaginative mode in which the narrative acquires a visual form. Having its heart totally on its sleeve, ’Guppy’ gallantly displays a touch of audacity that is quite scarce.
There are the inevitable questions regarding those opposites that confront us in life, day after day - the right and the wrong, the protagonists and the antagonists, the probity and the depravity - that are dealt with an almost deadpan sense of humour, that never really answer the queries themselves, but rather prompt an introspection.
’Guppy’ would probably be remembered for a long time, for the tower house performer that Chetan is, and the boy effortlessly moves mountains with an unsurpassable feat that deserves nothing short of a standing ovation. Never for a moment theatrical, Chetan appears so much in control of his histrionic skills that it easily strikes us as one of the best performances as yet.