'C U Soon' movie review: An idiot’s guide to a happy relationship

C U Soon (Amazon Prime Video)

Director: Mahesh Narayanan

Cast: Fahadh Faasil, Roshan Mathew, Darshana Rajendran

Rating: 2.5/5

A big issue with films made during the pandemic is that the camera is fettered. The bigger cameras may have given way to smaller ones but few leave the comfort of homes. The limitations offered by web cameras and selfie cameras would make even the uninitiated miss the liberties that filmmakers' cranes, trollies and drones offer.

However, it would be a mistake to look at pandemic cinematography as something that the pandemic pushed into existence. There have been precedents.

Found footage films like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity had already used handycams and security cameras for various effects. But in their time (TBWP came out in 1999), these were films from the fringe that the mainstream happened to take a liking to. In our time, when we are around multiple cameras at any given point in time, no footage is passively ‘found’; we are creating it actively and constantly.

This is where Malayalam film C U Soon comes in. It goes further than any movie before in exploring the possibilities and limitations offered by the pandemic. In fact, C U Soon’s frequent jumps between tabs and aspect ratios are bizarre as far as classical cinema is concerned. Yet, in a world where gadgets are central to our lives, we will feel quite at home with the film’s experiments.

There are times when the film does away with the camera altogether, the way animation does. We only see what is on the computer screen, which may be anything from WhatsApp chats to 360-degree images on Google Earth. Not that films have not done this before, but C U Soon stays on it longer than other films have. And given that the history of cinema has been a love affair between the camera and the human torso, this is a good break.

C U Soon, however, is a let-down because the story does not match its originality in form. It tells the story of the young, urbane Jimmy (played by Roshan Mathew) in the UAE who falls in love with a woman on Tinder, proposes to her without ever meeting her or her family, and then starts living with her. All of this happens in the span of approximately a week. In fact, the whole film is a sequence of poor choices that he makes, and yet this nincompoop is, for all practical purposes, the film’s hero. Somewhere in the middle, he and his mother get his cousin (Fahadh), a computer expert capable of making dangerous intrusions into people’s privacy, to do a thorough search into details that are no one else’s business but the owner's.

The suspense is set up perfectly. Jimmy’s family is shady: they have no issues spying on a young woman. Hints are dropped that Jimmy has had a few brushes with the police earlier. Kevin is sleeping with his boss, whom he calls a bitch during an office meeting and manhandles in front of the camera. They are truly what Kevin’s boss-partner somewhat jokingly refers to, with a glorious Malayalam accent, as a ‘kumbleetly misogynistic family’. Not to mention the fact that the theme of invasion of privacy through an IP address is perfectly in keeping with forms of pandemic filmmaking.

But all this goes nowhere. Illegally spying on people turns out to be a good thing, Jimmy’s shady past is never spoken about, Kevin’s partner comes crawling back and all is forgiven, and the film turns out to be about an issue that Malayalam cinema has already squeezed out like a well-served tube of toothpaste. Even if you forgive the fact that some camera or another around a character is always on when there is no need to be, the hacker’s apology towards the end that “I should have searched her background more thoroughly” makes it irredeemably tone-deaf for our times.

The viewer's loss with C U Soon is from the tangents that it did not explore. It is nonetheless a pioneer of form and is laying out a large playing field for its successors.