Aadujeevitham - The Goat Life (Telugu) Review

Adapted from writer Benyamin's Malayalam novel "Goat Days", Aadujeevitham tells the traumatic tale of Najeed Muhammed (Prithviraj Sukumaran), a Keralaite who emigrates to Dubai for work only to be trapped into a life of slavery. Najeeb and his companion, Hakim, disembark their flight and wait around the airport expecting to be picked up by a company van. Instead, a burly Arab grabs their passports and hurries them into his beat-up pickup truck. Not able to speak a word of Arabic, and overwhelmed by the Arab's rushed orders, the two men sheepishly climb in. Red flags are raised when they are tossed into the back of his messy van and driven for hours until there is nothing but desert all around them. Before they can realize what is happening, Najeeb is separated from Hakim and carted off to an encampment to become a goatherd-slave, with the Arab now his owner.

Najeeb spends the first few days in a state of utter disorientation. Having no means of communicating with the derisive Arabs, he learns from the kicks and whippings he receives, and from the detached warnings of an old goat-herd (another long-lost Indian), that this is to be his new fate. To milk goats, guard them, sleep amongst them, and live out his life in this alienating dune scape. Najeeb's old life, and the pretty pregnant wife (Amala Paul) he left behind in Kerala, come to him in dream-like visions.

Some of the most mesmerising shots of the film are the ones that capture the scale of Najeeb's predicament - the infinite desert with sand dunes as far as the eye can see, the cathedral-like atmosphere of its buttes, and the lonely silhouettes of three parched men - Najeeb, Hakim and Ibrahim, an African worker - braving the arid winds as they attempt their escape.

Yet, Aadujeevitham doesn't speak to us as a survival drama alone - it is too flawed when viewed through that lens. The escapees stumble along blindly day and night without a plan, or having packed any food or water to tide them in their perilous journey. When Najeeb's feet swell up in a cluster of blisters, Hakim improvises a covering with rags, but the question of why Najeeb embarks on this trip barefoot looms large. The resourcefulness and grit showcased in survivor stories is frustratingly lacking here. Instead the men live on a prayer, and on Ibrahim's directive: "Don't stop walk till die". The scenes are cloying at times. And there is a sense that their tribulations are greatly exaggerated for sentimental effect. Najeeb's disheveled, almost loony appearance adds to those mawkish scenes.

But what it lacks in story, Aadujeevitham makes up for in its imagery. Director Blessy crafts striking visual metaphors to carry his narrative. The most memorable of such scenes flips between the parched state of Najeeb's goatherding life and the watery paradise of Kerala from his past. He is a fish in a desert. The subtext is clear - what Najeeb aches for in this foreboding foreign land, he already had plenty of back home.

Prithviraj's big challenge in Aadujeevitham is to convey Najeeb's meekness. It is no small feat considering the actor's build and natural poise, which may be why some of the early scenes fall short. One big blow from Najeeb might have felled his captor - so why doesn't he fight back? But as months turn into years and Najeeb turns into a pile of bones and a mass of hair under captivity, Prithviraj inhabits the role so thoroughly as to become totally unrecognizable. (As all Telugu dubbings go, this one is a rather poor interpreter of the original film, and Prithviraj is barely intelligible as he snivels and shivers through his lines weepily.)

Rahman's music might have done wonders to elevate crucial moments if only the scenes had held back on the sentimentality. "Ya Musafir"'s incantatory beats, sung as the travellers' sojourn through an unending desert, are like a prayer and a plea. But these emotions are already writ so large on the men's desperate weeping faces that those minutes feels oversaturated.

Aadujeevitham is best perceived as a rather monotonous commentary on the dark side of the Dubai-Kerala migration corridor. Like Raju Hirani's Dunki, it is a counterpoint to the rosy picture of emigration as a shortcut out of middle-class life. And ultimately like Dunki, it is not a very hopeful tale. It gives us only a glimpse of the brazenly open systems of enslavement in place in the Middle East. And ultimately it is a simplistic, if graphic, warning tale that references Najeeb's plight only to say "...and this could happen to you too".