“Marriage for togetherness, Bangaram.” “Ok!”

(Published in The Hans India on April 20, 2015)

OK, so filmy love has either become too predictable or I am much too smart for it now. A few seconds into the film, OK bangaram, I was so sure it is going to be yet another of those love stories, where there is little love and hardly any story to boast of. Add to that, the first half hour is not only run of the mill but terribly silly - silly mannerisms, silly dialogues, and silly everything.  To think 20-somethings are not even capable of an intelligent conversation made me wonder if the director was really showing me the mirror or merely exaggerating for the sake of drama/cinema.

Try digesting this. The movie begins with the heroine (Nithya Menon) fending off one guy by threatening to commit suicide, only to fall in love with our hero(Dulquer Sulaiman) across railway platforms and trains moving in opposite directions (makes for a good physics problem, you think?). In a city as vast Mumbai, our boy and girl have common friends. Obviously. The girl, unhesitatingly, shares her phone number with this guy with whom she has only exchanged looks so far, no words. In no time, he is following her everywhere, but you such stalking is OK, I suppose. How did he show up at her office? In fact, a little later the audience is gently evidenced to the fact that this girl does not even know her guy's name until the time where they are checking into a lodge for a night in Ahmedabad. 

Notwithstanding all these shortcomings, it is her very genuine fears that tug at our hearts – of having to compromise on her career goals or of having to give up on her Paris dream were she to get married. And, why not? She built herself a personal and professional life, leaving behind a business-tycoon mother and royalty in Coimbatore. Doesn’t she have every reason to be concerned? To her credit, Nithya plays every part of her part convincingly -- from being a rebellious daughter, to a non-committal girl afraid of her being bogged down by melodramatic relationships, to being a doting girlfriend unsure of taking the next big leap. All of this makes her character truly endearing to us as the audience. 

Then, our young lovebirds are subtly pitted against an elderly couple, where, for a change, the husband is seen nursing the wife with advancing Alzheimer’s – indicating how the intoxicating speed and excitement would one day have to come to mean much more. At no point in the film does the director get preachy. Instead, he has loaded the movie with layers of meaning and left it to the audience to choose to simply scratch the surface if they wish, or delve deeper. Just like that, Mani Ratnam lets his brilliance shine through effortlessly. His ultimate masterstroke lies in how the hero, who is just as ambitious and sometimes borderline selfish, reassures the girl that marriage would change nothing but make a promise of togetherness for life. 

It is a refreshing and very neatly made film, if you can sit through the first half somehow. But, apparently, even in all that madness, there is some method!