Writer and Director: Vineeth Sreenivasan
Cast: Pranav Mohanlal, Dhyan Sreenivasan, Kalyani Priyadarshan, Nivin Pauly, Aju Varghese, Basil Joseph
Duration: 166 minutes
Available in: Theatres
Some moments cannot be described, but can only be experienced. As brilliantly cringey as this expression sounds, this phrase slowly wafts the mind while watching Vineeth Sreenivasan’s Varshangalkku Shesham. When Venu (Dhyan Sreenivasan) finally decides to leave for Madras to chase his screenwriting dreams, a beautiful rendition of ‘Sita Kalyanam’ plays, as if to gesture the beginning of a new marriage — a marriage between a man and his love for films. When Murali (Pranav Mohanlal) has his dreams shattered at the beach, his tote bag flutters, and you see his recorder move with the wind, signalling an important change. Varshangalkku Shesham is that kind of film in which moments don’t merely move the plot forward, but stop you mid-thought, squeeze your heartstrings and fill you up with a sort of fullness that you didn’t expect from scenes, as simple as they may be.
Venu and Murali’s fates are intertwined by destiny in a coastal town in Kerala. One wants to become a filmmaker and another, a music composer like Malayali virtuoso MS Baburaj. So like Baburaj and the dreamers who came before them, off they set to Madras to see if their tiny dream can make them a living. The film is driven by the biggest and tiniest butterfly effects that instantly bring a sheepish smile to your face. A paruppu vadai isn’t just a snack that consoles a heartbroken Venu, but a snack that changes his fate because it co-incidentally comes bundled in a newspaper that introduces him to his future best friend. A drink with a well-wisher turns out to be a wrench in the works for one, while a chance encounter with a producer (a hilarious Aju Varghese) alters a person’s fortunes. In any other film, these would just be coincidences, but Vineeth’s treatment of the moments make every small high and low in these friends’ lives an unforgettable event in the cosmos.
So what this does is make us, the viewers, an intrinsic part of their lives. Why else does our heart feel like it’s being held by an unsteady hand when Venu and Murali enter the leaky Swami Lodge in Kodambakkam? When Venu finally gets the chance to play the violin after an orchestra is down a person, why does your emotion leap? Vineeth also gets the smallest things about friendships right — be it the joy that takes over one’s face when a friend finally wins in life to the shared giddy joy of doing something stupid but exhilarating together. The writing in the film is strongest when the director brings his characteristic good-heartedness to an otherwise straightforward friendship drama.
This kind of uplifting treatment in pleasing soft focus lens and slow-mo also means that we forgive the few instances of underwriting in the first half. Deception comes out of nowhere and romances are left incomplete. But by the time we reach the interval, we realise that we’ve seen a first act worth its own film, and the intermission card acts as a timely refresher as to what the film’s title actually means…In very simple terms if one were to pigeonhole Varshangalkku Shesham, it could be by halving it into two — a tribute to friendship, and a flashier tribute to cinema. When one sort of ends, another begins. But this is also where the film stumbles. A complete mood shift is not something that we aren’t used to watching in films. But in Varshangalkku Shesham, this repositioning hits quite hard. The problem is not really with what it wants to tell. We get super interesting stretches of an underestimated superstar who is candid about a tormenting insecurity, and a perennially unwell producer who sponsors a film with the money saved for his insurance. Vineeth also handles subjects as heavy as the pain of becoming irrelevant with maturity in the second half. But as the film chases something bigger than the sepia-tinted lanes of Kodambakkam, there is this weird mood-mismatch that takes over, one that you can’t shake off. Newer characters are introduced — some for laughs and cameos — and newer stories are written, scratched and overwritten.
As the film trudges along, what keeps the film going relatively smooth are the performances. Dhyan and Pranav remind us of that one friendship that we’ve inevitably experienced — one that’s made up of a silent dreamer and an usher that pushes the other to dream openly. Composer Amrit Ramnath’s score is a fantastic marriage of the rush of youth and mesmerising simplicity of the past. The next time I hear his luminous carnatic ballad from the film, I’m going to be thinking of Venu and Murali grinning ear to ear outside Swami Lodge.