Director: Sameer Thahir; Writer: Sameer Thahir, Unni R; Producer: Listen Stephen; Cinematographer: Jomon T. John; Editor: Don Max; Cast: Fahadh Faasil, Vineeth Sreenivasan, Roma, Remya Nambeesan, Niveda Thomas, Jinu Jose, Sunil Sukhada, Dinesh Panicker, Jijoy Rajagopalan
Duration: 02:10:10; Aspect Ratio: 2.353:1; Hue: 146.971; Saturation: 0.109; Lightness: 0.299; Volume: 0.385; Cuts per Minute: 29.699
Summary: The film revolves around the lives of two people: Arjun (Fahadh Faasil), a wealthy man in the construction business in Kochi who has an affair with his subordinate, Sonia (Remya Nambeesan), even though he is preparing to be engaged to his family friend's daughter Ann (Roma); and Ansari (Vineeth Sreenivasan), who lives in a slum and works in a supermarket doing odd jobs who is mocked for his appearance and has a crush on his co-worker Nafiza (Niveda). When Sonia learns that Arjun is getting engaged to Ann, a fight occurs between the two and in the heat of the moment he forgets to take his cell phone. The phone accidentally reaches the hands of Ansari. Arjun gets upset over his lost phone because it had videos of Arjun and Sonia having sex with each other. Arjun tries to recover it because he is afraid that the videos will be uploaded onto YouTube. Arjun makes several calls to his missing phone but Ansari always turns it off. Arjun gets terribly frustrated. Finally, Ansari attends a call, but not ready to give the phone back to Arjun. Ansari undergoes a total change in his character after the phone incident and Nafiza notices it. Under pressure from Nafiza, Ansari opens up. Realizing the seriousness of the matter, Nafiza asks Ansari to return the phone to its rightful owner. When the phone's battery runs out, Ansari cannot afford a charger for the phone, so he takes the phone to a shop. After watching the clips, the shop owner uploads the sex video onto YouTube where it quickly spreads. Arjun is shown to be regretful of having taken advantage of Sonia's trust in him when she allowed him to record them. Sonia too finds out about the YouTube video, and after making a call to Arjun, is shown to be preparing for suicide. A chase follows when Arjun tries to find Ansari. The two meet in a confrontation that is vicious and bloody before finally settling down and resignedly going their separate ways. Sonia, whose intimate video clips are all over YouTube, decides to leave town instead of killing herself. Arjun finds out and is seen seeking her out at the airport. He's all bruised from the fight, and the film leaves them at that point while the film ends with Ansari standing up to people who mock him.
Chappa Kurishu, (Head or Tail) shot on a DSLR (Canon 7D) camera, includes this sequence in its climax in which the protagonists Arjun and Ansari are engaged in a fight set in a constricted rest room. At the end of the fight, we don't have a winner, but an acknowledgement of each other. To get the scene right, shot in a real location, the production team scouted across the state of Kerala for a restroom with white tiles on walls.
Entangled Bodies
When a new wave of commercial cinema emerged in Malayalam during the 2010s-- which commentators dubbed as Malayalam's 'New Generation Cinema'--one of the defining tendencies in them was the shift away from the mainstream cinema format of couching the story as a conflict between two opposing sides/values, at the end of which either one side emerges victorious or the factions reunite. Instead, in many of these films, the conflict ended in an uneasy synthesis which, however, is also not unification or the formation of a coalition. Emerging as an unfamiliar affect without a ready representational register, its expression often took the form of male bodies being entwined in an uneasy embrace--most often in climactic scenes in this strand of contemporary Malayalam cinema.
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