The good shepherd: "Aadujeevitham/The Goat Life"

The current Malayalam hit Aadujeevitham/The Goat Life seems likely to finish among the more commercially successful titles in the recent run of migration movies. One likely reason for that is how it treats migration as an adventure: a trajectory with inherent risk and unavoidable uncertainty, but also a reward in the form of new horizons, and a guarantee of a good story or two at the end of the day - the sort of stories, indeed, that get so involvingly retold here. The hardy director known as Blessy has adopted a 2008 novel by the author Benyamin based in turn on the true-life experiences of some of the unluckier Indian worker ants who've set off overseas to seek their fortune. Here, we're travelling in the company of two unworldly country boys who touch down in Dubai with the promise of contracted work, but then contrive to miss their connection with their sponsor and instead wind up being appropriated by an irascible, less than scrupulous fixer who splits the pair up. Our hero Najeeb (local star Prithviraj Sukumaran) is driven deep into the desert, much against his will, and put to work as a goatherd alongside a grizzled oldtimer who's been trapped out this way for so long he's all but forgotten his own name, and who may now in fact have more in common with his fuzzy, smelly two-legged charges than he does with any two-legged co-worker. With none of these characters speaking the same language - Najeeb is Malayali, the goatherd Hindi, and their employers Arabs - the movie has to find other ways to communicate: these include expressive gestures, flashbacks to Najeeb's life at home in Kerala with his pregnant sweetheart (Amala Paul), and - most resonantly of all - an A.R. Rahman score that serves as an emotional guidetrack as our hero's experiences veer from the surreal and dreamy to the deeply, deeply grim. Rahman earned what was effectively joint authorial credit on Mani Ratnam's spectacular Ponniyin Selvan; his work proves even more integral here, in a story where the characters often don't have - and eventually cannot find - the words.

These carefully layered addenda might collectively be taken as a softening, were they not so urgently needed as grace notes. Aadujeevitham's first half is a sorry string of deprivations and humiliations, in which we witness Najeeb first kicked by a goat he's tried to milk from the wrong end, then headbutted by an angry ram. (Just when you think he's getting the hang of this nature lark, he blunders into a fight scene with CG vultures.) Najeeb is so profoundly useless at the tasks he's been pressganged into performing - it's like asking a software engineer to build a barn, or kiss a girl - that we might wonder why his ruthless employers don't just cut him loose: he can barely bring a jug of milk to table without spilling it, so he hasn't a hope of dodging hailstones the size of baseballs. Yet what Blessy shapes from his story is a secular parable of endurance: that of a hapless fellow who spends time enough in the desert to regain his bearings and achieve something between basic competence and enlightenment. His progress is aided by Blessy's ability to pick the most memorable images at each stage. A thin trickle of spilled water merges with a wide shot of a river. Fragments of a shattered mirror in the sand speak both to years of bad luck and an identity in the course of being atomised and reconstructed. A scrap of paper, on which a man's life may depend, is scattered to the desert winds. A shoe gets removed to reveal a foot that is now one big blister. Throughout, Sukumaran does compelling work as someone who isn't heroic in the conventional movie sense, rather a bumbler and a fumbler whose survival actually gives us only greater reason to cheer, because Najeeb's panic, indecision and ineptitude aren't so far from our own in unfamiliar surroundings. The whole constitutes one of those new and distinctive-feeling stories Malayalam cinema has been excelling at finding of late, not to mention a film that seems to fix all manner of problems with Western films that laboured through similar territory. (I'm thinking specifically of Herzog's Rescue Dawn, which did something roughly comparable with Christian Bale in the jungle, and Peter Weir's desert-set The Way Back.) Blessed as he is with the popular touch, Blessy gives us the discovery, wonder and action necessary to convert a taut and terse account of latter-day slavery into an epic that fully merits the term; his film is as if Lawrence of Arabia had focused not on a Great Man of History, but some bloke who took a wrong turn and stumbled into the back of shot, where he remained understandably petrified of the surrounding camels.

Aadujeevitham/The Goat Life is now playing in selected cinemas.