Stories have the power to transport us to worlds we may never meet. In Nitham Oru Vaanam, debut filmmaker Ra Karthik tells a simple yet relevant story through a protagonist who, at a young age, falls in love with this portable nature of stories. . He can't get any more meta, as Karthik's story feels like a fairy tale told on a cozy winter night.
The protagonist of Karthik is Arjun (Ashok Selvan), a twentysomething who has always liked to sit with his books and imagine himself as one of their characters. However, he is not so interested in opening up to the world outside of himself. To everyone around him, including his parents, he comes across as an irritable but shy man with compulsive perfectionism and germophobia.
Director: R. Karthik
Writer: R. Karthik
Stars: Ritu Varma, Aparna Balamurali, Ashok Selvan
The way we are introduced to Arjun's world is pretty straightforward, but for good reason. On the way to Kolkata, Arjun gets stranded at a bus stop in Bhubaneswar, where he meets Shubathra (Ritu Varma), a liberated soul on his own journey. They meet and Arjun begins to tell the story of him. They say the cuts run deep after your first fall off a bike and your first heartbreak. We learn that after one such heartbreak, Arjun's life stopped. His struggles with how the world around him changed after this is written quite sensitively.
Now, this is a pretty familiar setup, isn't it? It's a travelogue feature about a heartbroken man on a soul-searching journey. But the special thing about Nitham Oru Vaanam is that despite being just that in its essence, it grows to be bigger. It highlights how he goes from one point to another. Arjun's doctor friend, played by Abhirami, hands him two diaries that tell two short love stories about two couples. Arjun begins to imagine himself as the main male character in these stories, and in the first story, he is Veera, a typical "college boy" we see in Tamil cinema. The story follows Veera's against the odds romance with her college classmate Meenakshi (Shivathmika Rajashekar, who is impressive in her Tamil debut). Initially, this might seem like a rather uninventive short story that relies only on emotional beats, but the payoff clears all the clouds.
The second story follows Prabha, a heartbroken innocent man, and Mathi, played by an electric Aparna Balamurali in a dynamite role, a young woman who insists she will never marry the boy her father (Azhagam Perumal) chooses. . hers. The humor, the unusual nature of the story, and the brilliant exchanges between Mathi and her father make this the highlight of the film. Here comes the problem: Arjun is left with many unanswered questions after reading these stories, and Abhirami reveals that these are real-life stories based on people he knows and that if he wants, he can travel to Kolkata and Himachal Pradesh to get your answers Arjun's perfectionist mind now goes to war against his nature to be in a comfortable shell.
That's where the journey begins, and also the drawbacks. Arjun appears to be cut from the same cloth as the character Fahadh Faasil'c in the Malayalam film North 24 Kaatham, another travel film that had him dealing with OCD. There, we had moments that showed him the experiences that he was missing, and although there is an effort to develop them in Nitham..., they are lost in time. Additionally, the movie also seems to champion the extroverted ideal, which makes the arc of the protagonist seem a bit caricatured, as extroversion and introversion are known to operate on a spectrum. The main characters here, however, operate only on the extremes.
But give Karthik credit for making a good travel movie that gets the point, about the need to explore life and what traveling teaches you, realistically. Very often such films are criticized for being too elitist, but the journey in this film is simple and more of a catalyst for the journey Arjun undertakes within himself.
It's also wonderful to see how Karthik uses Arjun's ability to imagine stories for the benefit of the movie-watching experience. That is, we know that the characters Arjun reads about in the stories are what he imagined they would be and that these characters could be markedly different in real life. This caters for quite a few surprises.
Despite minor flaws in the character arc, Ashok really shines as Arjun, Veera, and Prabha. He has such an enjoyable screen presence, and the distinction he brings to all three roles ensures that we can't get enough of him despite the vast amount of screen time he gets.
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