Lal Jose, the number one director in Malayalam is once again proving that he can handle any genre of film making with equal ease. Having created such huge hits like Meesa Madhavan, Classmates and Chandhu Pottu, he is now into a socially relevant satire which needs much guts to realize.
It is natural for people, especially Malayalees to leave their homeland in search of a better life and a bright future for their children. In Arabikatha, the director tackles the subject of an intense communist party member of the state living on the fringes of an alien society which does not recognize his existence. The film has Sreenivasan playing Cuba Mukundan, who is an ardent fan of Fidel Castro and loves his party than anything. He and his father 'Society' Raghavan who run a tea shop, are the torch bearers of the party at Chammanur in Kannur district. Being the local secretary of communist party, he criticizes and resists everything that is forbidden by the party texts. And so he is against cola, bourgouisie, bribery, computers and even don't believe in gods as communists originally don't. As Marx somewhere suggested that he rethought many times about his decision to enter into marriage, Mukundan also don't like to enter into matrimony. But all in the party were not like Mukundan. People like Karunan, a party leader wants to take over the party in the village from Mukundan, for his own selfish reasons.
The film opens with the lathy charge on `Cuba' Mukundan and his party men, who are making an agitation against the leather factory in the village, set up by Kunjunni (Jagathy Sreekumar) a rich NRI. The party resists the factory due to environmental reasons and the industrial pollution that it creates. But Karunan has a secret deal with Kunjunni, to somehow avoid the agitation. But soon the court rules to close down the leather factory. Kunjunni now agitated, plans with Karunan to frame Mukundan's father Society Ragahvan on a scandal related with society's expenditure. They succeed in that, when Raghavan is at hospital with a fatal stroke. 'Cuba' Mukundan believes the cooked up scandal story and suspends his father from the party for the involvement, but soon the old man passes away. Now Mukundan decides to repay the 'misappropriate' amount involved and take leave from the party. The district committee suggests Mukundan to go to gulf so that he can make the big amount of 20 lakh to repay, within a short time.
Mukundan, who has no gulf dreams says,"I would rather go to Cuba or China than Dubai, to learn the working class movement". Finally Mukundan abides by the party line, and lands up in gulf. The scorch of the sun in his life starts here, as he is put on the job to do menial work by Karunan's nephew Siddharthan, who arranged his visa and helped him to find a job. Mukundan who realizes that he cannot do any menial labor finds it hard to survive and very soon realizes that he has been working in the company of Kunjauunni, who reminds him that the leadership of a party of the working class, are not used to doing hard labor, nor do they know how to operate a laptop and he is too useless with little knowledge of anything other than communism. Finding the old dogmas of communism dead, Dubai for Mukundan becomes the beginning of a new world, He also meets every type of Malayalees who are working there for a number of reasons and a Chinese girl Shu Min (Zhang Shu Min) whom he starts admiring as because she is from China, a great Communist country. Very soon, the Chinese girl too takes advantage of the Mukundan's silly beliefs. Arabikatha is a ungenerous indictment of how the ruling communist parties in Kerala, has moved away from the ordinary people and its ideals, to become a party controlled by a corrupt leadership and business tycoons devoid of social commitment. The film showcases the ordinary lif
