Charlie

The best use of a jet-lag waking me up at 2am can be a blog piece. And here it is. This one is on Charlie, a Malayalam movie I watched on the plane back from San Francisco this weekend. Meenu once told me its story. She in fact insisted I watch it. That was a year ago. Since then I have been looking for it. No one carried it, Singapore and Emirates carry a wider selection of Indian regional movies. Lufthansa is bare, Air India is hopeless. But it is Air India who finally got me to watch it. That made this flight nicer.

Charlie is about the lightness of being. An artist living that lightness. The lightness of a compassionate mind, someone who truly cares, and journeys a life living that compassion, leaving deep impressions in people in pain, often healing them, and at times letting them surrender to destiny.

The movie begins with young artist, Tessa, looking for ways to stay away from her home, and her mother who wants her to marry and ‘settle down’. She is pretty, she is intense, and she is free-spirited. She is a painter. A wanderer she finally finds a room on rent. She enters the room to realize the mess it was. Angry she calls the landlord and complains. The landlord agrees to get it cleaned. The cleaner never turns up. So, she ends up cleaning it herself. While cleaning the room, she comes across strange articles, books, notes, paintings and a whole lot stuff a possible ‘nomadic’ who stayed there has left behind. The room had an old telephone. A day later, she gets a call on that phone, she takes it; it was the man who used to stay in that room. She asks him ‘why don’t you come and take your stuff away’. He laughs. Tells her ‘hey that’s all that was part of that stay. She can take it. If she doesn’t want, she can also leave them behind’. Strange, she didn’t persuade. The rest of the call was just a long laughter by the man who called.

A pencil sketch she happened to see when cleaning the room carried a story, but ended abruptly. It was the sketch of a robbery attempt. Two men, scaling the roof of a building, to break into, lifted the tiles on the roof, one peeped inside, shocked, the other follows. The sketch ends with the two looking into the room, in shock, from the rooftop. Tessa gets intrigued about the rest of the story and the man who sketched it, and begins a journey to trace him. That’s where the movie really begins – Charlie.

Charlie is his name. A free-spirited artist. As she begins walking his trail she meets people who he touched, left deep impressions and left. Maria an abused woman, who he takes deep into the sea on a boat at midnight to celebrate her birthday. Touched by his unadulterated love, she jumps into the sea, never to return. A thief Charlie befriends, as if he is just another regular guy. His father, a boatman living on the sea coast, imageries of the lightness of Goa, whose madness he says his son inherited. Charlie advertises his own obituary on a local newspaper. Just to feel the fun to watch who cares. And people did care. His mad ways of finding fun in death.

Charlie is a wanderer. He has no phones. He lives where he lives. With whoever he lives. Live their lives. He is an artist, a magician, he is single, un-attached, his father lets him be, his life is like a kite that broke off and floated away into the sky. His father is still that string. Also his compassion. Hence he walks back his trail to meet people who care for him. Kite with its string broken, but unbroken.

Tessa travels through each one of them. And one day, while walking along a local water-side market street, she sees police folks chasing a thief. Police lost him. But she traced him that evening. She asks him to tell her the rest of that story. He tells her he is a burglar, who one night broke into Charlie’s room, he was asleep, drunk, but woke up hearing something that got dropped on the floor. Unperturbed, sitting on the bed, Charlie asked him to get him some water, then food, then a meal together – the thief finally ends up telling him his story. Charlie now wants to accompany him for his next adventure, a theft in the neighborhood. They scaled the wall, climb on the roof, lifts up a tile, and it was the thief who first peeped inside. He was shocked at the visual. He wanted to run away. Charlie pushed him aside, looked down to see a young girl about to commit suicide, a rope around her neck, standing on a wooden stool. Charlie jumps into the room, rescues her. She runs out of the home, rides off on her bike, Charlie running behind her. The thief paused. He doesn’t know anything after that. Tessa doesn’t give up, finally traces the girl, a medical doctor at a hill-top old-age home run by a hopeless romantic, a military veteran, Kunjachan in his 60s still waiting for his childhood lover. She tells Tessa her story, of a failed surgery, the death of a patient, a broken relationship, a miscarriage and the depression that took her to that moment. And now after meeting Charlie, living a new life at Kunjachan’s old age home looking after the inmates and the tea garden laborers.

The movie ends with Tessa meeting Charlie at Trissur pooram, a festival of drums, colors, elephants and more. Charlie challenging Tessa to trace him amidst the huge crowd. She does. And connects up and joins him on his next journey to wherever.

The movie left in me two contrasting thoughts. Many people live the way they live out of social compulsions. Are they then real or just mirrors of social patterns enforced by others? Patterns that becomes life. Patterns that one must confirm to live as families and as communities. Some become even the custodians of them, the pattern-enforcers. People who live the way they live out of social compulsions are like bombs. Waiting to explode. All they need is a trigger. A trip to Thailand! But what about people who have no social compulsions at all. Social free radicals. Just kites with no strings. The ones you meet in Rishikesh, Badrinath, Kathmandu or Bali. People whose life doesn’t conform to any patterns. They travel from one community, geography and culture to another. They have no identity of their own. They become shells. Soul-less, no identify except a name, no pattern to conform to. No one expects them to be just anyone. Mere shells.

The beauty of Charlie is that he is not a shell of a vagabond wanderer. He is more soulful than most people who live the way they live out of social compulsions. Kite with its string broken, but soulfully un-broken. That makes this movie, beautiful.