We rarely see Road Movies, where real-time long distance travelling is shown unravelling a story with the characters placed in the confines of a moving vehicle.
This is what Viral Sebi directed by Vidhu Vincent is all about. Brilliantly written by Sajitha Madathil and my friend Anand Haridas (we both started our journalistic career at the same time more than two decades back), this film uses ‘a day in the life of a cabbie’ form of narration to tackle a subject that is very topical and pertinent to be discussed in depth.
Sudeep Koshy plays the title role of Sebi aka Sebastian, the cabbie or the taxi driver. Apart from being in a hectic profession, he is an avid vlogger (Sudeep is a vlogger in real life too, here it is) with a liking for Rafi songs and the narcissistic urge of modern human beings to share on social media, every incident happening to them or the experience they have (for example my friend Manu Remakant, I’m sure he can come out with a decent book every six months with the content he shares on FB).
First half of the film is dedicated to the mundane to extraordinary things that can happen in a driver’s life starting from a violent students’ protest, where he has to take a detour because a student is seriously injured and needs to be taken to hospital, which makes him late for the airport pickup. There are other passengers getting in and out of the car, some with idiosyncrasies and of peculiar nature. A corporate honcho with perpetual petulance, a film star, a couple from the academic background, who we soon realise are having an extra-marital affair etc. The think tank behind this movie uses these cameos to add layers to Sebi’s character. So, when we reach the crux of the story we are comfortable with him.
I didn’t know much about Sudeep before watching this
film; I thought he is an actor with theatre background and got Bhikhu Mhatre
(Manoj Bajpayee in Satya) kind of entry into the film industry. He was with an
unkempt beard and used street lingo peppered with cuss words. But, seeing his
YouTube channel left me in utter shock; here he is suave and urban talking
about luxury cars dropping automotive jargon at will.
I’d asked Anand if he was inducted in the team to get the street lingo and the cuss words right... I better keep his reply to myself.
Now coming back to the crux of the story; Sebi gets a trip to Bengaluru with a foreign lady as the passenger. She has to reach the destination at the earliest to catch a flight. At first their relationship is confrontational; she is very anxious and angry. As we move forward we get to know that she is a Palestinian refugee in Jordan Afra (Meera Hamed). She is here on scholarship pursuing her post graduation in English. She too gets embroiled in the agitation and one of her friends is arrested. She is on the run because if she is arrested she will be deported and will not be allowed to return and complete her education.
It is here that we begin to see how topically relevant and universal this film is. The first thing that came to mind was of the story of the Afghani students in North India, they weren’t sure if they were lucky or unlucky to be far away from their homeland when the US troops left it overnight in the hands of Taliban. The other thing that struck me is the fact that it is a warning for fence-sitters like Sebi (he considers the students protest as a nuisance as it disrupts his effort to earn his daily bread) that he may suffer the same fate in the near future by remaining passive when there is an upheaval around.
You can watch Viral Sebi here.
