‘Jackson Bazaar Youth’ movie review: An unconvincing mish-mash of issues, without any punch

‘Jackson Bazaar Youth’ 

If the most key element in your script is replaceable with something else, and it won’t still make a difference to how the movie pans out, it is a clear sign that the edifice you are building up is on shaky grounds. At the centre of Jackson Bazaar Youth is a band of trumpet, horn and snare drum players, whom we are told are quite popular in the area. The initial sequences attest to these, with large crowds swaying to their performances and their social media reach shooting up.

But as we get into the core story, about land acquisition for a highway and the attempted eviction of a community from poramboke land, we get a realisation that this band was just a wrapper that would be discarded and forgotten. The band and its music could have been the community’s tool to fight back against injustice, but what the scriptwriter prefers is the introduction of a random, unconvincing character at the mid-way point, whose purpose is clear to everyone from the moment he walks in.

Shamal Sulaiman’s debut directorial, based on Usman Marath’s script, is marked by the sheer artificiality of some its sequences, though in the beginning it gives quite the opposite impression. Especially when Jackson Velayyan (Jaffer Idukki), the leader of the band, patiently cleans his trumpet and joins the band for the journey to the next performance. In that scene, one feels the presence of a musician who has been doing this for years, just for the joy of it, rather than for the pittance that he gets paid.

The attempt here seems to have been to use the band, and the background of its members, to raise many issues, from evictions of the landless for development, to casteism and police brutality… but none of it gets conveyed in a striking manner. When the entire action shifts to a police station, we feel as if we have ended up in a different movie, where some elements from the original plot appear once in a while!

It is all quite a muddle, with characters being introduced for the purpose of delivering one social message or another, and then forgotten. The funniest case is that of a couple, who are taken into custody by a moral-policing policeman for the crime of kissing, and are made to sit at the station almost till the end of the movie, getting the same punishment as the audience.

Lukman Avaran gets to do a couple of stunt sequences in the end, which are shot in such a way as to remind us of his popular kicks in Thallumala. Originality clearly is not one of the strengths of this movie. Somewhere towards the end, the makers are reminded of the band again, leading to a musical epilogue. But all the music cannot save what is an unconvincing mish-mash of issues, without any punch.

Jackson Bazaar Youth is currently running in theatres