‘The Goat Life’: Look No Further Than Director Blessy’s ‘Life Of Pi’-Like Epic For Proof That Indian Cinema Is So Much More Than Bollywood
Welcome to Global Breakouts, Deadline’s fortnightly strand in which we shine a spotlight on the TV shows and films making noise in their local territories. The industry is as globalized as it’s ever been, but breakout hits are appearing in pockets of the world all the time and it can be hard to keep track. So we’re going to do the hard work for you.
For this edition, we’re looking at India – but no, not Bollywood. India’s regional film industries are thriving, especially those in its Southern region. Today’s pick, The Goat Life (Aadujeevitham), is currently the third highest-grossing Malayalam language film of all time and one of the highest-grossing Indian films of the year. A gritty survival drama, The Goat Life has been banned in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman for its visceral portrayal of the immigrant experience.
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Name: The Goat Life (Aadujeevitham)
Country: India
Producer: Visual Romance Image Makers, Jet Media Productions, Alta Global Media
International sales: Indywood Distribution Network
For fans of: Life of Pi
For millions of people around the world, leaving a home country is the only way they can envisage affording a better life for themselves and their families. In the Southern Indian state of Kerala, the goal destination is most often the gulf nations in the Middle East. According to a 2014 survey, about 90% of Kerala’s diaspora reside in the Middle East, which is the setting for director Blessy’s survival epic The Goat Life (Aadujeevitham). Based on Benyamin’s book of the same name, The Goat Life is the true story of migrant Najeeb Muhammed, who goes to Saudi Arabia for work but through a series of unfortunate circumstances finds himself trapped in the country as a goatherd, with no prospect of returning home. Over the course of three hours, Najeeb experiences years of suffering and very nearly loses his sense of self.
The Goat Life director Blessy Ipe Thomas (known more commonly as the mononymous Blessy) is best known internationally for 100 Years of Chrysostom, which still holds the Guinness World Record for longest ever documentary. Blessy signed on to The Goat Life well over a decade ago after reading the original novel two years prior. At the time, he was one of the most in-demand directors in cinema in the Malayalam language — widely spoken in Kerala — having won national awards for his movie Thanmathra, which portrayed the heartbreaking effects of Alzheimer’s disease on an ordinary government employee and his family. The Goat Life became his dream project, and he set aside all other offers to focus on developing the film.
Actor Prithviraj Sukumaran was 25 when Blessy first approached him to star in the project. Prithviraj is now 41 and the film release is the culmination of a long and tiring journey for both him and Blessy. “Even in 2009 when he came to me, Blessy’s vision for the film was quite big,” Prithviraj tells Deadline. “The story is very much about solitude and is a deep character study of one man, but Blessy saw it as something like [Ang Lee’s quadruple Oscar winner] Life of Pi, where the narrative goes from one big event to the other.”
“This was even before [Telugu epic] Bahubali: The Beginning, and the term ‘pan-Indian’ was not even a thing,” Prithviraj remembers. “Sitting in the Malayalam industry, we had no idea how to pull something off at this scale and it had taken almost 10 years before we finally started shooting in 2018.”
The rewards have been reaped, with The Goat Life taking around $20 million at the Box Office so far, double its budget, which Prithviraj says was very high for a Malayalam movie.
Opening cinematic borders
During those early years, the Indian film industry faced the advent of streaming, and the opening up of regional and international collaboration opportunities. Blessy found co-producers in Haitian-French producer Jimmy Jean Louis (who also acted in the film) and Steven Adams (who produced Netflix’s Rodney King among others). “As cinema becomes more cosmopolitan and the film viewing demographic becomes more identity neutral, there will be more migration happening across the world,” says Prithviraj, recalling a recent meeting with Money Heist director Alex Rodrigo. “Filmmakers worldwide have now started thinking that stories need to be told from different parts of the world.”
The Goat Life – which adapts only about 40 pages of the original novel – is stylistic in several of its methods. Only around 25% of the film features any sort of spoken dialogue. The gaps are filled with purposeful cinematography and a sweeping score by Academy Award-winning composer A.R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire). In places where characters speak to the protagonist Najeeb in Arabic, Blessy decided against adding subtitles in order to mirror the confusion that Najeeb himself felt in the moment.
In order to authentically portray the full transformation that Najeeb goes through over the years, Prithviraj had to swing between weight extremes, undertaking a Christian Bale-esque transformation that saw his body weight shoot up to 98kg before he subsequently lost almost one third of that weight. “I always joke about how the fattest me and the slimmest me ever are in the same movie,” says Prithviraj.
What the production team did not count on was the pandemic, which struck slap bang in the middle of Prithviraj’s slimmest phase and meant they had to regroup a year and a half later. Since it was unhealthy for him to maintain such a dangerously low body weight for that long, the delay meant that Prithviraj had to lose the weight twice. What is more, since one of the transformation scenes was shot nude, the team had to tussle with the Central Board of Film Certification to keep a U/A certificate instead of an A, which would have considerably restricted viewing.
Thankfully, the reactions of the audience made the process worth it. “There’s a scene where you see Najeeb after three years, and there’s no explanation of what he has gone through during that time except a shot of his emaciated body,” says Prithviraj. “Some people told me that they hadn’t cried until then, but cried in that moment.”
Bumping into ‘Dune 2’
Much of the film was shot in the desert, where, intriguingly, The Goat Life team ran into crew from Denis Villenueve’s Dune 2, who were scouting for locations in Jordan’s Wadi Rum. “We didn’t pry too much, but of course we knew who they were,” laughs Prithviraj.
The levity soon disappears as he recounts the difficulty in dissociating from a character he carried with him for more than a decade. “I’d just be facing the open desert with just sheep and camels in front of me, and Blessy would say ‘action!’ and for the two-three seconds before I start, I would think, ‘Oh my God, imagine being alone here with absolutely no hope of ever going back, and nobody around you.’”
“To continuously associate yourself with that imaginary reality was very draining, but at the end of the day, I got to go home. To imagine that Najeeb survived here for so long without hope is incredible.”
The real Najeeb on whom the book and film were based was invited to an early screening of the film. After watching the rough footage, he kept repeating: “It’s all coming back to me, it’s all rushing back.”
Now that the film has finally made it to screens, Prithviraj feels like an era has ended. “When I said yes to this film, I wasn’t married, was obviously not a father, hadn’t turned director or producer or distributor [on other projects], and I am all of these things today,” he says wistfully. “The one constant through my life has been that I’ve always been engaged with making this film, and it’s been a privilege.”
Moving forward, he has taken on projects across Indian film industries, with upcoming films in Hindi and Telugu. When asked about whether he would want to do a Hollywood film in the future, he furrows his brow. “The gaze on the West is not aspirational anymore,” he says. “The aspiration is more for doing cinema that connects with more people around the world, and that could be a Parasite, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or No Man’s Land... And we are aware that the West is also now looking at us.”
With Indian cinema beyond Bollywood making a global impression, the likes of Prithviraj sure have things to look forward to. It has been well worth the wait.
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