Dijo Jose Antony’s ‘Queen’ is a flamboyant celebration of the campus, with all the colours, vigour and liveliness intact. However, beneath all this panache and flair lurks a theme that constantly shifts tone, that is imbalanced in tenor, and which carries a faint sense of familiarity all through.
Dijo Jose Antony’s ‘Queen’ is a flamboyant celebration of the campus, with all the colours, vigour and liveliness intact. However, beneath all this panache and flair lurks a theme that constantly shifts tone, that is imbalanced in tenor, and which carries a faint sense of familiarity all through.
Another engineering college, and if the initial scenes of ‘Queen’ reminds you of a film as ‘Chunkz’ you only have the all-male mechanical engineering batch to blame. When Chinnu (Saniya Iyyappan) flounces in, the boys are all aghast, annoyed, amused and finally charmed.
A very fair appraisal of ‘Queen’ would grant it the status of a campus film that is surprisingly unsoiled, given especially the recent flurry of college capers steeped in obscenities. The campus in ‘Queen’ is much more grounded and has less of the ogling, drooling, saliva dripping freaks disguised as students that you have recently seen elsewhere.
The former half of the film in particular zooms ahead at a brilliant pace and even if there is zilch about it that strikes you as new, there is also little about it that you would find tedious or repugnant. It’s here that Dijo leaves a mark of his own and makes you believe in the potential that he very obviously has.
However, post-interval, ‘Queen’ takes a detour or a dip rather and never really recuperates from the terrible plummet that it has. The campus scene retreats to the rear seat and the film decides that it gravely needs to make a statement or two on contemporary social issues to be taken seriously.
There is nothing wrong with that of course, but these statements that the film makes appear all over the place. The court room drama that soon ensues, is again reminiscent of a few other very impressive films that we have got to watch in recent times, but ‘Queen’ neither reaches their stature nor leaves us asking for more.
Sharis Mohammed and Jebin Joseph Antony try their very best to bring in some vivacity to the script, even as the latter half, replete with logical inconsistencies, struggle to keep its head high above water. At one hundred and sixty minutes, ‘Queen’ is a long film without doubt, which has a few splendid frames by Suresh Gopi and a peppy musical score by Jake Bijoy.
‘Queen’ also has a group of youngsters who are full of beans, and leading the pack is Saniya Iyyappan, who establishes that she’s much more than a pretty face. There is a whole group of young men to lend her support, and there is also Salim Kumar in a sparkling cameo, along with other actors as Vijayaraghavan, Sethulekshmi and Nandu.
‘Queen’ could very easily add itself to the endless list of campus movies, but is unlikely to be acutely discussed on the pertinence of its theme, as it must have hoped for. Beyond the initial jubilations that are bound to arise out of the campus mood that it spills all over, ‘Queen’ would probably be remembered more as the debut of a film maker who holds a lot of promise, and yet who only manages to leave a middling mark with his first film.
Verdict: Average