First Take | Sita Ramam & the resonant vibes of eternal love

There is something to be said about eternal love, something so rare and nowadays, so extinct that any mention of it  draws sniggers from the audience. Miraculously,  Sita Ramam , the new Telugu hit which, in spite of the post-pandemic slackening in movie-theatre viewership, has the audience in Andhra Pradesh going for a second helping, succeeds in doing away with our scepticism about eternal love.

Partially inspired by Yash Chopra’s cross-border love story  Veer-Zaara , Sita Raman tells the epic saga of how love survives war, cross-border suspicion and the religious divide. As in all true love stories, from William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet to Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas, the couple in Sita Ramam do not come to a happy ending. They share a lot of blissful moments captured in a swooning vista.

While destiny’s quirky twists coalesce with the more practical responsibility of soldiering the country, the flag-waving sentiment is happily under scrutinized as Ram (Dulquer Salmaan) feverishly courts his Sita ( Mrunal Thakur , bad makeup, listless performance) in the past, while in the present, a spirited Pakistani girl Afreen ( Rashmika Mandanna ) flies back to her roots in Pakistan to meet her grandfather Tariq (Sachin Khedekar), who has passed away leaving Afreen with the task of finding Sita in India to hand-deliver a letter written by Ram, the deceased prison of war.

Hanu Raghavapudi’s direction is at its best when he is not looking anxiously over his shoulders to see whether the periodicity works. The director should have trusted his leading man a bit more. Whether it’s his ditzy walk or his  love for the mores and music of the 1960s, Dulquer Salman’s inherent old-world charm comes to the rescue whenever the film shows a tendency to get over-cute and archly sentimental.

A chorus of children accompanying the lovers as  they float in a world of their own, or a jarful of computer-generated  butterflies fluttering their aye-aye-lashes in giddy approval of the romance, is all a part of the love lexicon on screen  that is captured with graceful splendor.

Fatally, Sita Ramam tries too hard to be an ‘epic’ love story. The strokes of lover’s serenade are sometimes too broad. Also, Mrunal Thakur falls somewhat short in projecting the volume of beauty, grace and royalty her character  requires. Her false and wig are the two biggest villains in the film apart from the militants who show up intermittently on the Kashmir border to challenge our endearing hero’s unshakeable pacifism.

What works as a huge incentive for a theatre experience, is the film’s sincerity and the vast panoramic sweeping view of Kashmir’s landscape and Hyderabad’s royal edifices. P  S Vinod’s cinematography is beyond breathless: the  hypnotic visuals are the backbone of classicism in cinema, a target that this film misses by a wide margin but nevertheless manages to make the central arcadian romance on-target.

Dulquer Salmaan holds the plot together to its climax when, as a  prisoner of war, the actor  creates a tragic tension that is hard to ignore. Rashmika Mandanna, as the Pakistani girl trying to piece Ram and Sita’s love story together, is  certainly no Citizen Kane. This  is  no Orson Welles’ epic romance either. But it conveys a lot of heart and sincerity.

Another story of unconditional love, this one not as eternal as Sita Ramam, is Nobody Has To Know. This intense, deeply moving romance about two mature people who love each other till death does them apart, is so slender,  tender and tangential, I wondered how it ever got made. I mean, who wants to watch a film about two lost human beings in their sixties finding love together? Luckily for us, Belgian writer-director Bouli Lanners did not allow such morbid thought to cloud his compelling creative compulsions.

Lanners has carved out a miniature masterpiece, beautiful to look at and even more beautiful inside. Nobody Has  To Know is a rare and precious film which begins with Phil (Bouli Lanners) suffering a stroke that erases his memory. In this vacuum of existence, he encounters Millie (Michelle  Fairley), who claims she and Phil were a couple before his amnesia.

This part of the film reminded me of the vintage Hindi film Khilona, where Sanjeev Kumar couldn’t recall being with Mumtaz after he regained his sanity. That of course, was a very crude depiction of love as a fugitive idea. What Nobody Has To Know has to ask and say about love is far more profound: When two people feel for one another, do they need a history to their  relationship? Isn’t what exists NOW far more important than what was before or after?

Shot in an idyllic resplendence of the Scottish countryside by Dutch cinematographer Frank van Den Eeden, this is an intently beautiful film, sweeping in its panoramic landscape and just as epic in its emotions. The drama is mellow and minimalist.

Writer-director Buli Lanners (Do watch his other directorial triumph The First The Last, to know where he is coming from) never loses control over the narrative. In that, he is like his protagonists. They love, they care, they share  silences. They make no promises because there is no future, only the here and the now.

There is a small problem of slightness in the script. Too little happens between Milli and Phil. There is too little time. There is no space for adventures. The two know they are loving on borrowed time.

There is a nice little subplot about Millie’s nephew (Andrew Still) who wants to adopt  Phil’s dog Nigel, who it seems,  doesn’t belong to Phil. But the film belongs to the two aging protagonist in this wintery romance. Both the actors,  Michelle Fairley, Bouli Lanners, are magnificent. But here, it is the thought that counts.

The vivid Ukrainian film Sniper: The White Raven, directed by Marian Bushan, also begins as a love story. It  describes events in Ukraine in 2014. But it could just as well be a film about what is happening today. A pacifist professor Mykola (Pavlo Aldoshyn) and his wife (Maryna Koshkina) live as Nature-driven hermits in the Ukrainian countryside, when suddenly there is a Russian invasion.

Sounds familiar? Sniper : The White Raven mimics with treasurable specificity the very disturbing happenings in Ukraine. While the world community sits mute as self interested spectators, the small country fights back. This  gutsy formulistic film pre-empts the current grim situation in the region. To that extent, the proceeds are  ominous, at times chilling.

However, the blend of the bleak and the brutal that defines the narrative is not very welcoming. In the beginning, we see Mykola and his wife as two hippy-like naturalists trying to portray a distinctly pre-civilisation existence, so that the war brutality that follows would grip us in a silent clasp of starkly contrasting emotions.

However, as Mykola realizes in no time at all, things don’t go as per plans. And we the audience, are left gasping for  breath as Mykola changes from a Forrest Gump into a human machine-gun. Training into warfare is done in great detail, as if to convince the audience that when an innocent peacenik is pushed to the wall, he becomes more dangerous than a ticking bomb. We hear you.

I suppose the detailed delineation of Mykola’s war initiation such as dismantling a gun and disembodying the enemy, would impress and inspire Ukrainians  greatly on how to take to the gun without losing empathy for country’s bleeding multitude.

Sniper: The White Raven is not lacking in empathy. What is abysmally absent is the personal touch. Seldom in the restless storytelling do we see Mykola slowing down to weigh the enormity of his personal losses. Once he becomes a soldier, he is no longer the grieving pacifist. He is Rambo and The Terminator combined.

And herein lies the problem with this well-shot heart-in-the-mouth finger-on-the-trigger tale of nationalistic vigour. Every move seems predictable, designed for sympathy and applause. Agreed, the film does no wrong in casting the Russians as the invasive villains. That’s what they are. But the conflicts that ensue lack subtlety.

In spite of two highly charismatic actors, Keerthy Suresh (who was beyond brilliant in her last film Saani Kaayidham) and Thomas Tovino (who is constantly laudable in all his recent films), their  coming together in the new Malayalam film Vaashi is a complete non-event. Vaashi is one of those well-meaning, socially relevant films, that lose their way in translation from script to screen. On paper, I am sure it must have felt like a great idea to pitch two beloved actors as adversaries in the courtroom. And that too, for a fight between consensual sex and rape.

When Anu (Gautam Ganesh) is put in the dock for befriending and bedding Anusha (Anagha Narayanan) without wedding, it is time to teach the boy a lesson. I am sure the makers of the film understand how complicated this issue  is. Or do they?

There are hundreds of young men languishing in jail because there was  no marriage after sex. To reduce this  societal malaise to a one-on-one in the courtroom just so that two popular stars can play a game of one-upmanship, is bit like trying to tame a ferocious jungle animal with paper arrows.

The very serious issue is lost in acres of humbug. The leads try hard to remain committed to the larger picture rather than their own star-sparring agenda. But since the ‘larger picture’ remains blurred and unclear, or rather too clear in its intention, the entire plot seems like a flimsy excuse for some swanky legalese.

The courtroom sequences, which ought to have been the film’s highlight, are bland and spiceless. And spineless.  This is the worst example of  the headless-chicken syndrome that a movie is capable of conjuring while aiming to make a meaningful film. It’s like someone forgot to add the salt to the menu. All we are left with  is a string of  awkward conversations in and out of the courtroom in a soul-dead film.

Adding to the flavourless mood are the dull, intermittent songs that show up like unwanted guests at a party that never got started. The performances are passably pleasant, though not persuasive enough to make us overlook the  dreadful mediocrity of the presentation. Thomas Tovino and Keerthy Suresh envelope their mutual screen timing in a kind of unspoken amusement, as if they know there is nothing to be taken seriously here.

Vaashi is a lifeless work. It tries to deal with a very serious social issue. But doesn’t know how to start up the discourse, let alone how to end it. It is the opposite of Sita Ramam, which knows exactly which way the wind blows and how it ends.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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