KOCHI: From a filmmaker’s point of view, Randamoozham has love, internal conflicts of the characters, betrayal, emotions, action and twists. Of course, the novel offers immense potential for a film, if well made, which can attain a classic status. That is one of the reasons why popular filmmakers of the past and present decades have thought of making a movie based on Randamoozham.
The canvass it offers is very wide. It has dialogues which have immense depth and soul-stirring moments. For instance, just listen to the dialogue delivered by young Bhima, who was born to Vayu Deva, while communicating with his father. “O Deva who use to even put greatest tempests in chains, I am here. Your son, a five-year-old child.”
It is Mahabharata through the eyes of Bhima. The characters which were given divine touch in the epic were rewritten by MT. Here, heroes become villains and villains become heroes. During the 90s, late director Bharathan started the preliminary works for making Randamoozham - the movie. However, at that time, it was difficult to find a producer willing to invest such a huge amount in a Malayalam movie.
Later, it was director Hariharan who came up with the plan to make a movie based on the novel. The plan was to cast Mohanlal as Bhima. The plan mooted by Hariharan was to make the movie in three parts as he believed restricting Randamoozham to a single movie will kill the originality of the novel. That plan too did not materialise.
It was V A Shrikumar Menon, who was relatively a newcomer to Mollywood, who finally came up with the announcement the project is very much alive and will be helmed by him. He also roped in businessmen B R Shetty to produce the movie at a whopping budget of Rs 1,000 crore.
“MT is always a selling point in Malayalam cinema,” film critic CS Venkiteswaran told Express. “Randamoozham, in a maker’s point of view, is very fascinating due to multifarious factors. The scope,
the canvas, the emotions, the drama and the feel. It has everything in it. The present-day youth had a special liking to novels based on Puranas. That is why some of the books written by contemporary writers based on mythology have ended up as best sellers. The filmmakers also may have noticed that trend too,” he said.
However, with MT announcing on Thursday that he is backing off from the project, the fate of the project is again hanging on the balance. If the project gets cancelled, the admirers of the novel will have to wait further to witness the classic on screen.
‘Project will happen’
Director V A Shrikumar Menon told Express the project will happen. “I will meet MT Sir very soon. I was busy with the post-production of Odiyan. That has resulted in a delay in meeting MT Sir. We will resolve the issues/confusions and the movie will happen,” said Menon.