It is a sad sight when young filmmakers and scenarists humbly follow worn out formulae rather than venture out from the morass that Malayalam cinema is in to challenge the status quo and strike new or, at least, interesting paths. But filmmaker Akku Akber and scenarist Girishkumar, like their hero Sugunan, seem to be imprisoned within the puerile life of that little family, scared to look out and find something different and fresh.



One finds the echoes of several films in Veruthe Oru Bharya. It is sort of a remix of various characters, situations and even dialogues that we have seen and heard earlier. Proceeding on very predictable tracks, it never bothers to disturb or startle the viewer in any way. It may be its aversion to any kind of thinking or reflection that drives the dizzyingly hurried pace of editing and the loud, unending sound score, both dialogues and music. The moral of the story is that ‘the wages of a wife’s labour is care and love of the husband’. With messages like this, a viewer or critic has no option but to resort to the same old feminist cliches to approach the film’s audaciously anti-women stances and ‘proclamations’.

Though the film is supposedly about a harried and overworked wife who is not recognised for what she is and does, we have two ‘authoritative’ men, one a police officer and other a doctor, to pontificate on the family and its foundational values. While one warns us about the use of new technologies like mobile phones and Internet (though the film has nothing to do with Internet) the other preaches to us about the ‘compromises’ that one has to necessarily make in order to maintain a family. The only voice on the other side is that of an all too loud feminist, a very stereotypical figure who is also the protagonist’s boss. She is an engineer and a feminist activist who takes time off from office to ‘go out’ to make speeches about women’s liberation. Interestingly, the withdrawal of the wife from the family mentally unsettles the husband who falls into a kind of phobia of the outside world, all men, who in his imagination are out to spoil his daughter. It is as if the walkout of the wife/mother creates a rupture in that enclosed space called the family, through which the world enters now in the form of scary men.

Significantly, the moral economy of the family collapses when the daughter ‘connects’ with the outside world of men, when she is presented a mobile phone by her father. This rupture can be filled only by the return of the woman, which is what happens in the end. She is back and in the climactic scene we find all the kitchen equipment working - the mixer, washing machine, cooker. The tabula rasa is reclaimed and that little family is safely ‘closed’ all over again.

It is not a comeback that will in any way permit her to realise the dancing career she had dreamt about before getting married, but only to be a good wife, lover and mother to that family.

She will again be one among the many tamed, domestic animals he loves - the cow, the dog and the fowl.