Charlie

Tessa leaves home and moves into a flat in Kochi. It is empty and untidy; the previous tenant left in a hurry. Among the things she finds a sketchbook. There is an unfinished comic in it and its hero is a man. Tessa is curious. She starts looking for the owner. Everyone she meets tells her a story: the man helped someone one night, changed another person's life, came somewhere and left. Charlie stops nowhere. The more Tessa finds him the more she loses the trail. Martin Prakkat directs. Dulquer Salmaan plays Charlie and Parvathy Thiruvothu plays Tessa; Aparna Gopinath and Chemban Vinod Jose are in the cast. The language is Malayalam. Parvathy won the national award for best actress in India for the part; the film took other national awards as well. Its form is a search; Charlie is almost never shown directly and the character is built through other people's accounts. The photography is colourful and the old quarters of Kochi work inside the narrative. The matter it treats is entering someone else's story; Tessa changes her own life while looking for Charlie. The film uses the comic as a motif and the pages of the sketchbook set its structure. The narrative was criticised as too romanticised; the character of Charlie is not realistic. Its limit is structure; the sections are independent of one another and the narrative does not advance. Who it is for: viewers who like Malayalam cinema and narratives built on searching for a person. Who it is not for: it is romanticised, the plot loose, and the ending where expected.