Fables like ‘Aadujeevitham’ make us choose between two things, I feel. Whether you would be content with the mundane life that sees you live and die with not much trouble like the flow of a paper boat in a stream of water, or you would want to be The Almighty’s chosen one where you face hell on earth, cross oceans and deserts and make it alive on the other side to become a beacon of hope to millions.
I still have no clear thoughts on how Blessy and Prithviraj’s ‘Aadujeevitham’ made me feel. At times, I wonder that this might be one of the best things to happen on celluloid that I was able to witness on screens and sometimes it feels quite underwhelming, to be honest. Prithviraj Sukumaran as Najeeb brought the pain and sorrow of being a prisoner of hope. He was so great at capturing the haplessness of Najeeb and the harshness the desert exerts upon a person who had nowhere else to run.
As the novel covers the story of Najeeb mostly via his internal musings, faith, doubts, loss of hope, lies, and love at some tiny corner of his heart, Benyamin’s novel feels so personal on many levels. His interactions with the goats, all his life flickering in his mind just when a tiny hope of escape appears, the faith that kept him sane for most of the time, his acceptance of his life among the goats, his acknowledgement of his transformation from a human to an animal, the novel buries a whole lot of secrets just like an actual desert.
The movie’s biggest strength as I always lean on, is THE AR Rahman. We doubt him, we look at his past and feel nostalgic in the sense that nothing greater can happen, but he comes back like Virat Kohli and says, ‘I think, I still got it’. He filled the movie with all the hope and pain, he believes he gets from The Almighty in the form of his music. He believes he is the messenger of music that God bestows upon him and ‘Aadujeevitham’ is just another instance of him showing us proof of what he believes in. We may or may not agree with him, but the music is real. It instills a belief, that I cannot escape, or maybe I do not want to escape.
Having read the novel (in Tamil), after watching the movie, I think that will be my go-to strategy for book-to-movie adaptations from here on. Yeah, there are chances that the excitement might get the better of me like Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming Dune: Messiah, Rendezvous with Rama, Vetrimaaran’s Vaadivaasal and all, but I hope I remember myself of how Aadujeevitham the movie was enhanced by Benyamin’s Aadujeevitham novel and will try repeating it.
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