Ee Maa Yu

After a long time I saw a good Malayalam movie in the theater .
Ee Maa Yau a film on death,
no not morbid but a tragic satire .
Eeso mariam Yauseppe is whispered in the ears of the dead body as a habit amongst the coastal christian community in kerala the title is an abbreviation of this .

Vaavachan mistiri is an old man with a daughter and a son who is married ,vaavachan is a loving father but has long bouts of absence from home and also has a second wife and son nearby .
He comes home after a long time and when he gets down in the bus stop one local ridicules him about a love affair of his unmarried daughter and he hits that man and goes home ,

He never talks to his daughter about this as he loves his family but is disturbed ,he and his son get drunk that evening and he tells his son how he gave his father the best funeral in that coastal village of chellanam off Ernakulam ,the slang of the coastal village and the dashing waves ,the wind rustling the coconut fronds and the eerie dusk is well portrayed by the camera with the larger than life music looming behind , foretelling of tragedies ahead .

While the duck Vaavachan brought home is being cooked by the women of the house the son promises his father that he will one day give his father a funeral which will surpass what his father gave to his ! and then when the son sneaks for a smoke the old man happily drunk just falls down and dies and in the fall injures his forehead and has some bleeding ,there is lot of fuss and in minutes the neighbors arrive they all know the old man is dead and gone .

Here is when the close friend of Eashy the son enacted by Chemban
vinod arrives
He is Ayyappan a panchayat member and a good Samaritan of the village .
To me Vinayakan who took up this role and had proved himself as a good actor surpassed all in this film with his superb acting .

Eashy tells his friend what he promised his dad and Ayyappan knows Eashy has no money to keep up the promise so they pawn Eashys wife's only necklace and Eashy buys a costly coffin spending half the money though Ayyappan tries to dissuade his foolish friend the best .

They also send word to the local parish priest who by now had heard there was something suspicous of the old mans death as he had some bleeding from forehead ,the priest who loves reading detective novels sees shadows in the plot and calls up the local circle insector and with his authorirty asks him to look into this ,
Meanwhile the night drags on like in any death house with the crowd trickling down by dawn the current going off and an angry Ayyappan forcing the line man to repair it in the heavy rains .
The priest comes down and insists that the body has to be seen by the doctor in the morning as he smells something wrong and just certifying by a nurse wouldn't be enough .
This angers Eashy the son who is frustrated at all the blocks for his dear dads funeral he hits the priest in anger who swears he wouldn't allow the burial in the church cemetery by any chance .
Morning comes and the father is put into the new coffin which promptly gives way and the body falls prompting confusion and clamor then the big pandal collapses in the rain all foreboding signs .
Finally ayyapan brings the police inspector to clear the air and the doctor also says the old man died naturally and rest was rubbish but since the priest was unwilling for a burial in cemetery Eashy goes wild and starts digging a grave in the house compound like a mad man and no one could stop him finally he does that .
The last scene is shown wherein the dead father in white along with a couple more who died that night stand on the grey dark dawn looking to a big boat full of lights and hooded figures to go into the nether world
All about a death but taken well by Director lijo jose pilliserry