more-in Of all the million jokes and supposed-to-be-jokes shared daily on social media and WhatsApp, the special category of ‘nagging wife jokes’ stand out for their lack of novelty, sensitivity and, most importantly, humour. A common strain that runs through all of them is the assumption that the female life partner is a burden, while the males are helpless victims. Though Soumya Sadanandan’s debut directorial Mangalyam Thanthunanena has at its core the story of an irresponsible husband who is butter-fingered in handling money, one gets to see visual representations of these non-jokes on the ‘nagging wife’ sprinkled all through the film. In fact, the wedding, which opens the film begins with the soon-to-be-husband looking straight at an image of Christ carrying the cross, accompanied with background music hints, as they exchange wedding vows. Mangalyam Thanthunanena Roy (Kunchakko Boban) loses his job in the Middle East soon after his marriage to Clara (Nimisha Sajayan). Though Clara is from a rich family which runs a private bank, he is too egoistic to take up a job offered by the father-in-law. He prefers instead to pledge or sell his wife’s jewellery to repay the huge loans that he has availed, while making hardly any attempt to find a job by himself. Problems crop up between them when she refuses to provide any more jewellery to be pledged. The entire film plays out like an endless repetition of a few scenes — of Roy asking her for jewellery, she refusing it, them fighting, Roy approaching his friend Shamsu (Hareesh Kanaran) who provides him with an idea which is destined to fail and back to asking for jewellery. Quite a few scenes happen at a bridge where Roy and his friends meet. Whenever he gets out of the house, his mother asks him, as if reading the mind of the audience, “Must be heading to the bridge, right?” The script, written by Tony Madathil, is too thin to sustain interest for two hours. There is a clear attempt to maintain a lighter mood throughout, the jokes are all stale, hardly evoking any laughter. Though the film partly redeems itself in the message that it conveys in the end, the film till then has a patriarchal male tone to it. This is especially disappointing, as the film is helmed by a young woman filmmaker, who had won accolades for her documentary work.

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