Moonwalk

Evoking a time period is a challenge of a lesser order as opposed to effectively transporting the audience to that period. A few carefully chosen props might be enough to pull off the former, while the latter involves the arduous task of authentically capturing the zeitgeist of that time and hitting all the right notes to make it believable for those who might have lived through those times. In Moonwalk, debutant filmmaker Vinod A.K. makes a bold attempt for the latter and lands stylishly on his toes, evoking the iconic dance move of the early 1990s. The world that he recreates is the early 1990s in the coastal and rural belts of Thiruvananthapuram or rather more specifically, the emergence of a breakdancing subculture among groups of youths during that period. Of course, there are the grainy VHS tape visuals, Walkman, STD booths, disco-inspired costumes, frizzy long hair, Michael Jackson fanhood and every other nostalgia-evoking material from those times, but all of these are woven organically into a straight-forward, simple plot that holds an emotional pull.

In an early sequence in Moonwalk, we see a group of seven friends assembling in front of a vintage Sony Trinitron television with a video tape of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The year is 1987, long before smart phones and YouTube, and this means that watching a glimpse of MJ has taken weeks of planning. Each one of them have their own theories on getting the video cassette player to work; finally when they manage to get it playing, all we see are waves of static, with unrecognisable bits of Thriller on screen. For a small budget Malayalam film releasing today, it’s not tough to imagine how impossibly out-of-reach it must have been to afford even a tiny 10-second clip of the iconic song. Yet even without showing us a single shot of MJ or his songs, the film manages to find its way to invoke his spirit. It’s a film set right at the peak of the break dance era and there couldn’t have been a more fitting way to begin the tribute. Yet the real beauty of Vinod AK’s film is how he’s able to hold on to this feeling until we arrive at a very satisfying payoff, much much later.