"Necessity bestows a man with courage he did not know he possessed."Benyamin, Goat Days
Benyamin's novel Aadujeevitham or Goat Days may be many things. But this particular line is the crux of Blessy's interpretation of the novel that we see on screen as the movie Aadujeevitham – The Goat Life. The will of a broken shell of a man to somehow survive against all odds.
While Benyamin's Goat Days traverses into its protagonist Najeeb's inner turmoil – and his unique spiritual awakening – Blessy's The Goat Life flushes out his more visible hardships and his great escape from captivity.
A migrant worker from Kerala, Najeeb, like many others from the state, lands in Saudi Arabia in the year 1992, in the hopes of building a better life for himself and his family. An Arab, pretending to be their employer, takes Najeeb and his co-traveller Hakkim from the airport to the rural interiors of the country to work in a goat farm in the middle of the desert.
What awaits Najeeb is the most harrowing experience any human would ever go through – from being enslaved in a desert with hardly any food or water and being tortured at regular intervals by the person in charge of the farm, to having no contact with the outside world, and with nothing but the haunting vastness of the desert surrounding him.
Benyamin's 'Goat Days' goes on to explore the spiritual connect of a helpless man in such a situation, the bond he forges with the goats – the way he calls them the names of his kin from back home – flashes of his Stockholm Syndrome, and his eventual, unbelievable escape from captivity.
The book is difficult to be adapted into a movie. No wonder then that director Blessy saw it to fruition only after 16 years. There were many hurdles – including the world shutting down due to COVID-19 when the crew was shooting in a desert in Jordan.
The Physical Aspect of Survival
The film Aadujeevitham – The Goat Life opens with a stony, lifeless stare of an emaciated Najeeb. He looks up after drinking from the goats' water trough.
He is one among the goats – and he is unrecognisable. He would be alive for as long as he would serve his purpose for the person who "owns" him, just like the goats. This is one instance in the movie that invokes pathos like no other, where the lines of existence between Najeeb and the goats are blurred.
The first half of the film establishes how Najeeb finds himself in this dire situation with flashbacks of home, his mother, and wife who is in the early stages of her pregnancy. Despite slight clichés, these flashes are seamlessly weaved into the narrative.
From there, one can choose from the varied dimensions that the book holds, but if one is to chase behind all those dimensions, the end product could be all over the place. Perhaps, it is because of this very reason that Blessy seems to have taken the visible, physical aspect of Najeeb's story and has used it as a tool to narrate a survival drama.
When the story is being told from that narrative, Prithviraj Sukumaran becomes an apt choice to portray Najeeb, for his strength clearly lies in encapsulating the essence of Najeeb's plight physically, rather than tapping into its psychological core.
The effort and time that Prithviraj has put into this is laudable. It also reflects how big a phenomenon the book Goat Days is in the literary landscape of Kerala – and how the role of Najeeb could be the role of a lifetime for any actor.
This could easily be the career-best performance of Prithviraj, along with his role as Joshua Thomas from the movie Koode.
The Escape Sequence
Most of the second half of the film etches out the escape of Najeeb and Hakkim, guided by the latter's friend Ibrahim, played by the Haitian actor, Jimmy Jean Louis. As Hakkim introduces Ibrahim to Najeeb, he says Ibrahim knows his way around the desert, and that perhaps he is godsent, like how God has sent Musa Nabi to guide people.
This is something that stays with the audience and is emphasised further in the way the director places Ibrahim in the following scenes, with a slightly god-like aura, if one cares to take a closer look. This, combined with the remarkable performance and screen presence of Jimmy Jean Louis, was a great tether to hook the audience to the otherwise tiresome and uncomfortable ordeal of the escape sequence.
The debutant actor, KR Gokul, who played Hakkim, too, has delivered a stunning performance with great restraint, especially when his character spirals into delirium. He has effortlessly held his space against the seasoned actors whom he shares screen space with.
Amala Paul as Sainu – Najeeb's wife – appears in the flashbacks and in songs but has little to perform. While she fits into the role visually, the dialogue delivery feels quite other-worldly for a woman who has lived in a little village in Kerala.
The music by AR Rahman seems generic at best and has nothing to write home about, maybe except for the track 'Periyone Rahmane'. Sunil KS's camera, along with Resuul Pookutty's sound design has done justice in providing a near-immersive experience for the audience in the desert sequences, which constitute more than three-fourths of film.
The visuals in Kerala were shot by KU Mohanan – and they have been blended in seamlessly. The CGI falters slightly in places but doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. Ranjith Ambady and the makeup department need a special mention for their flawless job of transforming Prithviraj and Hakkim.
Where the Film Falters
In terms of its scale, The Goat Life may be the biggest movie Blessy has done yet as a director; despite that, his former outings such as Thanmathra, Kazhcha, and Pranayam had an emotional core that resonated deep within the audience, which The Goat Life lacks. This might be the case, because Benyamin's Goat Days is a book that is layered and spiritual, and so widely read and interpreted that nothing would sate the readers as much as their interpretations of this book.
The sequence where the sponsors come to get the workers who have fled from them could easily be one of the most haunting episodes in the book, where a runaway worker's trauma would trigger him to scream in agony at the sight of his "owner" even before the owner recognises him in the line-up.
The juxtaposition of human cruelty and vulnerability in the same page – and the emotions it evokes in readers – was one of the high points in the book. However, the portrayal of this strong, moving sequence somehow fell flat in the movie.
Then again, there is the question of how much human suffering one can watch. Or did the scenes preceding this desensitise the viewers so much that they've checked out emotionally by then?
Having said that, Blessy's The Goat Life too has carved its own niche among the blockbusters Malayalam has produced this year, and it is highly appreciated that a small industry like Malayalam is bold enough to take up grand projects like these and execute it far better than most of the industries in sensible, convincing, and palatable ways.
The Controversial 'Goat Days'
While at the topic of human suffering, it would be a massive oversight not to address the controversies surrounding both Benyamin's work as well as the 'parading' of the person on whom the book was based – Najeeb – for the promotional activities of the movie. It has even come to the fore that Najeeb, in real life, primarily goes by the name Shukoor.
Benyamin's Goat Days, from its early days, has been at the receiving end of the criticism that it has adopted elements from Mohammed Asad's The Road to Mecca, but the author claims in the book that he has taken bare minimum creative liberties while telling Najeeb's story because his lived experience itself is stranger than fiction.
While Shukoor alias Najeeb, in his interviews, uncomfortably and squirmingly recount the experiences he has been through, answering the intrusive questions he is asked, he also negates a few of the accounts described in the book.
The author has now come out and defended his book as a work of fiction with only about 30 percent of it being from the experiences of Shukoor. Whatever it may be, the blatant commodification of a man's suffering and the insensitive manner is almost as hard to watch as a few sequences in the movie.
(Meenakshi Sajeev is a writer, published poet, and corporate communications consultant based out of Bengaluru. She has worked with the UN Environment and is currently with IBM. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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