Peranbu: Mammootty starrer is a taboo-breaking film

02 February, 2019

193

Peranbu also forces us to accept that it’s very natural for humans to explore their sexuality. Even people who live with spastic cerebral palsy are no exception to this basic human instinct.

Director Ram’s latest movie, Peranbu, follows the inner journey of a single middle-aged man with a spastic daughter. In the course of the journey, he learns to accept the nature of various things in the external world without forcing his own opinions on them.

Q: What is love?
A: Attachment.
Q: What is Peranbu (Great Love)?
A: Accepting a person without any reservations about his or her sexual orientation, gender, cast, class so and so forth.

Amudhavan (Mammootty) is introduced to us as a defeated and guilt-ridden man. He takes his daughter Pappa (Sadhana) to a small piece of land, which is protected from men with a broken moral compass. Amudhavan thinks that he is doing a solid favour for his differently-abled adolescent daughter. But, in reality, he was just trying to escape from his miserable past filled with poor decisions he made due to his timidity.

Amudhavan, by his own admission, is just an ‘ordinary’ father, who could not accept the ‘nature’ of his own child. He spent 11 years of his life in Dubai, far away from his daughter in Chennai, slaving as a taxi driver as he was not ready to share the burden with his wife of raising their daughter together.

As they say, karma is a boomerang. His wife writes him a spiteful letter and elopes with another man, leaving the responsibility of Pappa in his weak hands.

Despite his flawed nature, Amudhavan tries to do right by Pappa, who now is not ready to accept him as her father. He is constantly subjected to extraordinary situations that changes his perception about everything under the sun. He eventually learns how not to flinch at something or someone that falls outside of one’s narrow view of right and wrong.

The place Amudhavan picks to settle with his daughter is always foggy, just like his life. He has no clarity on how to play the hand that he’s dealt. But, still, he tries to enjoy the brief warm sunlight that cuts through the mist-enshrouded landscape as and when he can. Even as it lasts for just a few hours or days, like the moments when his daughter finally stops punishing him and begins bonding with him.

His happiness, however, is short-lived. The world around him turns upside down when he finds out that his daughter has hit puberty.

leads