Let’s start with the meet cute at a church wedding — it is a rom-com after all. They recognize each other from a brief glimpse at the railway station some days ago. They’re sitting on opposite sides of the aisle, so their initial few lines are whispered and mimed. He asks her for her phone number.
Notice how she hesitates for just a second before she goes ahead and mimes it to him by putting up nine fingers, then three and so on. Watch how their subsequent whispered conversation over the phone involves exchanging cynical statements about marriage — you sense that their relish comes at least in part from the fact that they’re having this conversation at a wedding.
Observe how PC Sreeram shoots the scene, focusing on one while blurring the other as they exchange witticisms, as if to indicate how, at this stage in their relationship, the focus is still singular, not plural. This is the first of many sequences in the film where the visual strategy plays a big part in how Mani tells the story, and the kind of conscious thought that seems to have gone into the picturization is one of the highlights of the film. A key conversation in the end happens in the midst of a downpour. Using the rains to provide percussion to the emotions unfolding on screen is nothing new, but rarely have I seen it done so skilfully.
Listen to how the characters speak and observe the conscious strategy there. The older characters speak in fuller, longer sentences while the younger ones seem to be having a spoken conversation that might as well have been on Twitter or Whatsapp.
There is much straight talking in evidence. When Adi’s sister-in-law confronts Tara with the evidence that they’re in a live-in relationship and asks “What’s happening here?”, she responds with “Blackmail, it looks like. Why are you having this conversation with me instead of with him?”
And yet, the plot is about how straight talking is not always the same as real honesty. There is a moment late in the film between an older couple (played wonderfully by Prakash Raj and Leela Samson), where she is told that she has Alzheimer’s and asks a simple, wrenching question. For the younger couple watching them through a crack in the door, that kind of emotional honesty is almost too much to bear even listening to.
It is only after they reach a certain level of physical exhaustion that they find that they no longer have the mental energy to expend in walling themselves off from each other or even themselves. The last half hour is a thing of beauty, in its construction as well as execution.
This is a film that does so much so gloriously right.
And yet I walked out of the movie theatre feeling a tad underwhelmed. I felt like a narrative of this size might have worked better with a shorter running time. All those repeated shots of the couple canoodling all over a gorgeously shot Mumbai felt a bit like a relentless Instagram feed from a cute couple who look good together, but need to ease off on the sharing. The abbreviated Mani Ratnam-speak between the lead pair got a bit tiring after a while. I found myself longing for adult conversation. I couldn’t wait for them to get home so that I could see more of Prakash Raj and Leela Samson.
I found myself imagining a film with roughly the same overall plot, but where the screen time given to the two couples was more or less reversed. More to the point, I found myself wanting to see that movie instead.
Maybe, like the Danny Glover character says in every Lethal Weapon movie, I’m getting too old for this shit.
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