Garba Sreeman movie review: Not labour pain, Sreeman would get head pain

Movie: Garba Sreeman
Cast: Suraj Venjaramood, Kalabhavan Shajon, Siddique
Director: Anil Gopinath
Rating: One and a half stars

Kochi: Genetically, has the male of the human species been programmed to be impregnated? Further, is modern society ready to accept this role reversal? Garbha Sreeman (Mister Pregnant) forcefully addresses these sane questions.

Someone (Suraj Venjaramood) is in urgent need of 20 lac rupees; literally, overnight. His best friend (Kalabhavan Shajon) suggests that he sell his kidney; but that is worth only a fourth of the required amount. While running for their life, they stumble upon a doctor (Siddique), who readily pays the former the full amount in exchange for being a human guinea pig.

The story is an impotent concoction, including such incredulous coincidences. The premise is both bold and in line with the prevailing ‘pregnancy’ fad of the Malayalam film industry. This time it involves a man. The issue of whether nature approves of being surgically/artificially tampered with overnight is not touched upon.

The writer seems to have fancy ideas about a lot of things; medical ethics being one. Such experiments on non-transgender males will happen in real life, yes, and in the very near future. But they would be performed with the utmost caution, and on ideal candidates. And not on a random stranger, and a reluctant one at that.

Attempting to lessen the viewers’ boredom, the main characters oscillate between humorous and humorless moods, occasionally break into vulgar song-and-dance, and get thrown into unnecessary scraps. When the fighting gets intense, even the doctor enters the fray, and starts kicking.

Prim and proper in a suit, Siddique wears a grave, haggard expression, as though the future of the human race depends on the outcome of his character’s experimentation. The dialogues that were written for him appear to be deliberately dull and dragging. Suraj and Shajon are humble, somber figures in his presence. Left by themselves, though, they do what they are best at: they clown around.

In his own joking way, Suraj convincingly portrays the embarrassment of a man unwittingly compelled by circumstances to fix the dangerous physical gap between the genders: by becoming pregnant.

Trifling with the serious subject of a biological system that has been in place for zillions of centuries, Anil Gopinath feebly inserts comic action to offer the audience some relief. He fails. But correctly opines that the mind of man has necessarily been conditioned in line with his physical attributes and the course that nature has determined for him.