Coffee Bloom, Review: Going thru the grind

Meet a Coorgi boy who speaks chaste Hindi with everybody, and practically no Coorgi or Kannada with anybody. Also, he in no way looks like his mother or brother. He meets his girl-friend in Bengaluru and she is a local. She speaks chaste Hindi with everybody too. Her husband is of a Coorgi-Keralite (colloquially called a Mallu after their language, Malayalam) mixed parentage. He has lived in the Middle East and in Australia, but it is Hindi and English he speaks, no Kannada, no Malayalam, no Ozzy-Stralian and no Ahlan Va Sahlan (Arabic for welcome). The only authentic character in the film is a Bengali prostitute, who speaks a quaint mix of Hindi, Bangla and English. It is a matter of conjecture that Manu Warrier (writer-director) and Sharath Paravathavani (co-writer), who had together written a short earlier, did not write the Hindi that the characters speak. If they did, kudos. If they did not, kudos to whosoever did, uncredited.

Visually soothing, as any film shot in the coffee plantations (Elephant Corridor) of Karnataka’s hills should be, the film begins as an ode to the plant that binds the native to the earth. Nestled in the midst of a 20 acre coffee, pepper and orange plantation, Elephant Corridor is where the mind, body and soul gets rejuvenated. (Looking at it does some rejuvenation already). Towards the end, the premise shifts focus partly, to promote one particular estate, where it was shot, also credited in the titles.

A good-for-nothing young man, who spends his time listening to recordings of a Godman’s lectures and visiting a prostitute for purely platonic intercourses, sells-off his ancestral coffee estate to meet expenses, without his mother’s consent. They survive by running a coffee-grinding unit. After her death, he regrets his ill-deeds, goes to the estate to try and buy-back the property and scatter her ashes on it. As destiny would have it, it is now owned by a man who has married the boy’s estranged beloved and he wants the protagonist to help him grow good coffee on it. It becomes a four-way emotional volcano, when the prostitute lands-up, because her keeper has migrated overseas.

Characters, cast by Tess Joseph, have very credible screen names: Devanand Cariappa (Arjun Mathur, model and seen in My Name is Khan, Fireflies, Arjun Arora Murder case), Anika (Sugandha Garg, from Jan Tu Ya Jane Na and My Name is Khan), Srinivas ‘Vas’ Pannicker (Mohan Kapur) and Shonda (Ishwari Bose Bhattacharaya, born in France—Dutch-made Bollywood Hero and French TV series Rani). Arjun is the only actor who goes through the entire gamut of emotions, performing above par, in a role that is better written than most others in the movie. Sugandha is more uni-dimensional, natural to the point of being uninvolved. Mohan is loud and brash, and though in character, he becomes an ear-sore after a few minutes. He gets some of the best one-liners. Ishwari fleshes the part out and oozes oomph. Hers is the least delineated character, and requires a matter-of-fact brazenness. Served in good measure, with the help of two good pieces of dialogue (the fear of spoilers is omnipresent). As a sub-inspector whose ‘vacation vocation’ is temple-priesthood, Sharath (now the actor) gets a good laugh, not because he is funny, but because it is poor humour.

Manu Warrier grew up with a lot of Malayalam films. Several film-makers like Mani Ratnam and Santosh Sivan have been a major influence. He then moved on to Bollywood and used to like Ram Gopal Varma’s work. Coffee Bloom is Manu Warrier’s first feature film. It was planned for three years and shot over 25 days, in 2014. This works well, since the time frame in the film is also around 30 days of real time. The compulsions of a quickie style of similar shot-taking are inevitable, yet Manu has kept them out for most of the film

Not exactly the kind that will have coffee-addicts making bee-lines for dispensers, but it does hold promise and tastes interestingly different. “Many people say that you don’t learn anything from your first film but I’ve learnt a lot from this experience,” confesses a wise Warrier.  It is common knowledge that unlike instant coffee, filter coffee takes time to brew. For the time being, Warrier is weeding out the non coffee-bearing pink flowers and collecting the white coffee blooms, preparing them for the grind.

Rating: **1/2

Trailer: http://www.bollywoodhungama.com/more/videos/view/id/4796589

*Ex-PVR man, Shiladitya Bora (Long Live Cinema) stands solidly behind parallel/independent cinema, with Coffee Bloom being an initial outing. May a thousand coffees, and teas, bloom, with the help of champions like Bora.