‘Nitham Oru Vaanam’ movie review: Ashok Selvan shines in a gentle, breezy travel film

Tales have the ability to move us to worlds that we could by no means discover ourselves in. In Nitham Oru Vaanam, debutant filmmaker Ra Karthik tells a easy however related story by a protagonist who, at a younger age, will get passionate about this transportable nature of tales. It can not get extra meta, for Karthik’s story itself appears like a fairytale informed on a comfortable winter evening.

Karthik’s protagonist is Arjun (Ashok Selvan), a 20-something man who has at all times liked to only sit along with his books and picture himself to be a personality from them. Nonetheless, he isn’t as eager on opening as much as the world outdoors of himself. To everybody round him, together with his dad and mom, he comes throughout as an irritable however timid man with compulsive perfectionism and germophobia.

The way in which we’re launched to Arjun’s world is relatively simple, however for good causes. On his strategy to Kolkata, Arjun will get stranded at a bus stand in Bhubaneswar, the place he meets Shubathra (Ritu Varma), a liberated soul on her personal journey. They meet, and Arjun begins to inform his story. They are saying that the cuts are deep after your first fall from a bicycle and your first heartbreak. We be taught that after one such heartbreak, Arjun’s life had hit a pause. His struggles with how the world round him modified submit this are written fairly sensitively.

Now, that is fairly a well-recognized setup, isn’t it? It’s a travelogue function a few heartbroken man on a soul-searching journey. However what’s particular about Nitham Oru Vaanam is that regardless of it being simply that at its barebones, it grows to be larger. The way it goes from one level to a different stands out. A health care provider good friend of Arjun, performed by Abhirami, provides him two diaries that inform two quick love tales about two {couples}. Arjun begins to think about himself because the main males character in these tales, and within the first story, he’s Veera, a typical ‘school don’ we see in Tamil cinema. The story follows Veera’s against-all-odds romance along with his junior collegemate Meenakshi (Shivathmika Rajashekar, who’s spectacular in her Tamil debut). Initially, this would possibly come throughout as a relatively uninventive quick story that rides solely on emotional beats, however the payoff clears all of the clouds.

The second story follows Prabha, an harmless heartbroken man, and Mathi — performed by an electrical Aparna Balamurali in a dynamite of a job — a younger lady who’s adamant that she’s going to by no means get married to the boy her father (Azhagam Perumal) chooses for her. The humour, the weird nature of the story, and the good exchanges between Mathi and her father make this the stand-out portion of the movie. Right here comes the catch: Arjun is left with many unanswered questions after studying these tales, and Abhirami reveals that these are real-life tales based mostly on individuals she is aware of and that if he desires, he can journey to Kolkata and to Himachal Pradesh to get his solutions. Arjun’s perfectionist thoughts is now thrown to conflict in opposition to his nature to be in a cushty shell.

There begins the journey, and so do the snags. Arjun appears to be lower from the identical fabric as Fahadh Faasil’c character from the Malayalam film North 24 Kaatham, one other journey film that had him cope with OCD. There, we obtained moments that confirmed him the experiences he was lacking out on, and although there may be an effort to flesh these out in Nitham…, they’re misplaced in time. Additional, the movie additionally appears to uphold the extrovert preferrred, which makes the arc of the protagonist appear a bit caricaturish as extraversion and introversion are identified to function on a spectrum. The lead characters right here, nevertheless, function solely on the extremes.

However credit score to Karthik for making journey film that will get the purpose — about the necessity to discover life, and what travelling teaches one — throughout realistically. Very often, such films come below criticism for being too elitist, however the journey on this movie is straightforward, and extra of a catalyst for the journey that Arjun takes inside himself.

It is usually great to see how Karthik makes use of Arjun’s skill to think about the tales to the benefit of the film-watching expertise. That’s, we all know that the characters Arjun reads the tales are what he imagined them to be and that these characters is likely to be starkly completely different in actual life. This caters to fairly a number of surprises.

Regardless of minor flaws within the character arc, Ashok really shines as Arjun, Veera, and Prabha. He has such a likeable presence on display screen, and the distinctness he brings to the three roles ensures we are able to’t get sufficient of him regardless of the lion’s share of display screen time he will get. Ritu Varma can be great to look at as Shuba, a personality that refuses to be only a narration software.

Nitham Oru Vaanam appears like a contemporary dose of hope. Be it Vidhu Ayyanna’s easy however elegant frames or Gopi Sundar’s music that doesn’t distract one from the stream of the movie, rather a lot comes collectively properly to make sure the movie is as light as a breeze and but as deep because the ocean. Above every little thing else, Nitham Oru Vaanam is a tribute to the children inside us who noticed towels as capes, and never many movies handle to try this as elegantly as this one.

Nitham Oru Vaanam is at the moment working in theatres