Hridayam = Average

Doing a movie review after a seriously long time so yeah, there'll be some spoilers below. 

It's always best to go into a movie with as little expectation as possible. Expectations are what leads to to a feeling of "Wait, is this it?" later on. 

So I saw Hridayam the other day, which is also known as the "the greatest love story in the history of the universe" apparently. 8.9 on IMDb and 94% on book my show got me curious enough to actually pay to see this. 

There were a lot of parallels between this film and another hit movies from years ago, Premam. Both focussed on college days and failed love sagas which appealed to the masses with a nostalgia trip. And both are pretty overrated once you remove the nostalgia. 

An Unconvincing Lead

The film's protagonist, Arun (played by Pranav Mohanlal), is a fresher at an engineering college in Chennai. He falls heads over heels with Darshana. Everything goes splendidly until he decides to cheat on her the first time another pretty girl showed the faintest interest in him. The relationship promptly ends when Darshana finds out which causes Arun to turn into a shitty human being. 

Complex character arcs are tricky. If you want to know how one can be done really well, watch Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass series. The protagonist in that series is introduced in the most unlikeable way possible - he accidentally kills a girl while driving drunk. And then slowly over the next few episodes, we see his character evolve and win us over. Looking for a recent example closer to home, Tovino in Maradona did a decent job of winning us over with his charm despite doing some despicable things at the start of that movie. 

Arun in this film on the other hand does little to win us over. He punches the shit out of a junior with pancreatitis (because he's a senior in a bad mood I guess) and causes him to collapse. If you're going to write a character like this, he needs to redeem himself. This supposed "redemption" later in the film is simply the junior and another girl Arun treated like shit getting together and being happy. So Arun feels relieved of his guilt thanks to the divine intervention of the writers instead of actually trying to make it up to the people he hurt. His main positive traits seem to be that he has long hair and plays the guitar apparently. 

(NOTE - My friend & senior Dr Aravind Sreekumar also plays the guitar and can sing as well. Presently working in the AIIMS New Delhi ED, he has way more charisma than the lead in this film and is a super nice human being. He's single too, just saying). 

Support Characters Shine

Aswath Lal plays Arun's goofball sidekick in this film, Antony Thadikkaran. Despite being basically given garbage to work with, he steals almost every scene he's given. The movie would have been a lot less watchable without him. 

Aju Varghese's usual antics work well as second fiddle in the second half of the film. These small roles were important because Pranav isn't ready to start carrying films by himself (and is frankly miscast in this one more than anything). 

The support characters are deliberately held back a touch so as to not take gloss away from the lead. From example, one of Arun's classmates, Selva, is allround great guy who teaches underprivileged kids in his spare time and also helps Arun clear his papers. So of course, this character was fridged pretty fast. If you want to know what fridging is, watch this video. 


Credit where it's due

The real star of this movie though is clearly the character of Darshana (played by Darshana Rajendran). She portrays a wide range of emotions throughout the near 3 hour course of the film. It's not everyday that you see a character portray both strength and vulnerability at different points in a film and maintain a sense of believability. 

Breakups are hard, even if they are done for the right reasons. They always leave a lingering sense of doubt of what might've been. The pain of watching the other person move on faster than you is a real one even if you were the one to leave. There is no justice in a failed romance and Darshana plays the entire cycle of pain, anger, sadness, regret and acceptance perfectly. 

It's not often you see movies that portray the emotional turmoil the female lead can go through. Definitely, this is not something you'd have seen in movies even 5 years ago so it is a most welcome step forward. But let's be honest, not being sexist by itself does not necessarily make a movie great on its own. 

Conclusions

This was not a great movie. It is popular understandably but such movies do tend to get popular because of relatibility rather than actual quality (hello 500 Days of Summer 👀). 

It doesn't help when the intermission for the film actually felt like the ending. The second half seemed more like a weird sequel (where everyone gets rich randomly) than a continuation. The story could have been much more with some tweaking (maybe make the lead character less of an asshole or just turn him full on villain as the story goes on). 

While this is a more matured love story than we're used to seeing in Malayalam cinema, it will hopefully inspire movies that are actually better structured in the future. 

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