Billu barber revisited

After a fairly hectic day, was back home by 1700h and as usual, decided to watch the evening movie on the Asianet channel. I was delighted to find that it was ‘Katha Parayumbol’ (literally translated, it means ‘while telling the story’) starring the superstar, Mammooty and a host of other actors, which was a superhit on release.
It has a simple storyline that talks of a friendship from school, where one of them happens to be from a home that’s more economically well off than the other who does not even have the wherewithal to have a square meal a day. After school, they part and while the former is a barber in a village, the latter goes on to become a successful film star and he has fetched up in that very same village, as a member of a film unit, on location shooting. The barber is hesitant to meet his friend, despite coaxing and taunts from every quarter, as he’s unsure as to whether his friend would even recognize him, in his present state of affluence and fame! How he’s proved wrong in his perception is the climax of the film.
I have seen the Tamil remake starring Rajnikant and of course, 'Billu barber' starring Shahrukh Khan, both of which were miserable flops at the box office. Why did that happen? Dispassionately speaking and not because of being a ‘mallu’, I thought both the remakes strayed away from the simple storyline and gave too much of screen space/importance to the movie star by weaving the story around him! Was it to justify the star value of Rajnikant or Shahrukh Khan I wonder, but it definitely did not work with the masses.
Malayalam movies had ventured into ‘parallel/art cinema’ in the seventies, through stalwarts like Adoor Gopalakrishnan and therefore, treated like a holy cow in movie appreciations, the world over and only Bengali films have matched, if not scored over them, in pure class, finesse and quality.
But ‘Katha Parayumbol’ is an out and out commercial film. And that’s what makes me happy. Here’s wishing that there are many more such films from the Malayalam moviemakers in the years to come.