‘Monkey Pedal’ is about how the children celebrated their summer vacation in 1980, their living environment and the lifestyle of the people of that time in screen language.
Celebrating the summer holidays in many ways, children are eager to learn to ride a bicycle. Since they don’t have their own bicycle, they try to learn by renting a bicycle.
Kali Venkat, who does not know how to ride a bicycle, does not understand his son’s desire for a bicycle and refuses to pay. But has his son Master Santhosh Velmurugan, who is determined to learn to ride a bicycle somehow, learn to ride a bicycle? Isn’t it? Emotionally telling that is the rest of the film.
Actor Kali Venkat can bring the reality of any role he plays on screen beautifully. That’s how in this film too, he played a realistic role of a village man named Kandaswamy. Even though he takes it for granted that the townspeople tease him as a Nataraja service because he does not know how to ride a bicycle, Manushan gets applause from silence in the scenes where he expresses his pain from a sideline and in the scene where his son speaks pointing out his condition.
Master Santhosh Velmurugan, Master Raghavan, Master Gnanasekar, Master Sai Ganesh, Master Atish, who are playing the main roles, have played the role of village soil without changing their body language and speech pronunciation.
Prasanna Balachandran and Jensen Diwakar speak Kongu Tamil and make people laugh. Moreover, when the truth about Prasanna, who was known as a military man, came to be known, Jensen’s words to warm him were all laughable.
Dakshana who played the boy’s elder sister, Savithiri who played the mother, Chellappa who played the wathiyar, Kuberan who played the dhol bawai artist all lived as village people of Kongu district.
Cinematographer Sumi Bhaskaran has beautifully captured the heat of summer, the chill of village water levels and the dusty landscapes.
In Gibran’s music, Brahma’s lyrics set the songs to reveal village life and the minds of children. Composer Gibran’s excellent work brings the film to life, adding strength to the scenes with simple background music.
Kamalakannan and Prabhakar Shanmugam, who have written the screenplay based on writer and film director Rasi Alagappan’s short story ‘Bicycle’, have sensibly explored the life of village boys by keeping a bicycle and have evoked the old bicycle memories of the fans.
Director Kamalakannan has designed the scenes in such a way as to forget the fact that boys don’t live as boys in the current technological era, and the way he has displayed the competitive nature of the boys and the friendly and appreciative spirit that is easy to forget is beautiful.
Although the story is told through a bicycle, director Kamalakannan has beautifully and emotionally displayed the village life of that time through the love struggle between father and son, the father’s fear of bicycles, the boy who goes to the shed to watch a movie to eat murukku.
