The Great Indian Kitchen, the Suraj Venjaramoodu-Nimisha Sajayan starrer that has created quite a stir on social media, is currently streaming on the new OTT platform Neestream. Read The Great Indian Kitchen movie review here.
Jan 21, 2021 By Sreejith Mullappilly
After watching Jeo Baby s film entitled The Great Indian Kitchen , I failed to recall the names of the characters in it. So, I instantly checked the information on Wikipedia, only to find Nimisha Sajayan s character being described there as the wife , and Suraj Venjaramoodu s as the husband . They are newlyweds. For the bulk of the film, the wife describes the husband as etta , and the latter calls the former edi .
Most Indian families probably function like the household in Baby s film. A household where the head of the family always looks at the daughter-in-law with a male gaze. The old man cannot even walk a few steps to take his toothbrush, so he tells the daughter-in-law to get it for him. It makes her wonder what am I supposed to do here other than doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, and running the kitchen.
Actors Nimisha Sajayan and Suraj Venjaramoodu are excellent in this hard-hitting take on the sheer drudgery of everyday life, that many women go through
Express News Service
Last year, I saw Gamak Ghar, a Marathi film that told the story of a home and several generations that lived in it entirely through images, human behaviour, mundane day-to-day activities, and minimal dialogues. It got me thinking why nobody attempted something similar in Malayalam cinema recently. Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen, streaming on NeeStream, is the answer to that. It’s the real deal. It’s a masterclass on how to present a stark portrait of reality without any gimmicks whatsoever. It goes back to the very basics of filmmaking relying purely on image and sound to bombard us with one uncomfortable truth after another. Here’s a film that addresses the politics of gender, kitchen, and bedroom while managing to be incredibly subtle.