Lover: Unnervingly Yours
Star Cast: Manikandan Kabali, Sri Gouri Priya, Kanna Ravi, Harish Kumar, Saravanan, Geetha Kailasam, Harini, and Nikhila Shankar
Music Composed by Sean Roldan
Cinematography by Shreyaas Krishna
Editing by Barath Vikraman
Directed by Prabhuram Vyas
Love is either undefinable or defined by what you perceive it to be, because emotions can never be defined. We only experience them and try to understand how they shape us. A couple can show any kind of love, but their origin and history do not matter when we see them at a park, a beach, a hotel, or a theatre. We only observe their “relationship” at that specific moment or moments. We do not care about their pain, anguish, acceptance, or “love” at that time. We only witness the moment they share in public. It could be a fight, a hug, a hand-holding, or a break-up. We only know what happens at that moment, not the story before or after. Based on that moment, we create a narrative in our mind and take a side. So, we can never know the truth as it is, only the perception of our belief. If I believe that the couple is faking happiness, I will find evidence to support it, but if I believe that they are a happy couple, I may confirm it or ignore some obvious red flags. The same is true in the previous scenario. Lover is about such perceptions of love, but not a love story with “love”.
Writer-director Prabhuram Vyas does not try to define love, but rather explores what makes love work and what does not. Why do I say that? Let me explain in a moment. Imagine you are with the love of your life on a beach. You and your partner are standing in front of a wavy sea and you want to watch the sun setting, while he/she wants a snack; wants a selfie pic; wants to talk about dress; and wants to walk. But you do not want to move and this makes them anxious, and your experience turns into a fight. What would you do? Would you compromise and walk, buy, click, and then stop, or would you let them do whatever they want while you stick to your own experience? If you only want to do what you wish, then why go to the beach as a couple? If you only want to do what they want, then why be a couple? Because a couple consists of two people and both need to be equally prioritized. So, what is the solution here? That is what you figure out as a couple: you share your ideal experience with each other and then try to do both without missing out on each other’s preferences. Ideally, while watching the sunset, you can walk with them and ask them to be quiet for that moment, which might last a few minutes, and capture that on a camera as a selfie with them and store it as a memory in your mind. The problem is the world does not work on ideals.
People often act based on their needs, desires, and aspirations, rather than their ideals, morals, and values. “If I don’t feel comfortable in that moment, I regret creating or visualizing that moment.” Many of us can relate to this feeling, and there is nothing wrong with it. But what does it mean for being a couple and being in love? Love is an emotional experience, and living together is a decision we make to adapt to the other person and become comfortable in their presence, not to “fine-tune” them or ourselves. There is a difference between being in love and choosing to live together. This choice can make some people nervous and others overprotective of their space. Male lions fight for the ownership of the pride, but the pride only stays together if the females also accept him. They can easily overthrow him and drive him away. But do they always do that? If not, why not? If yes, why? This might sound like a mix of a Discovery Channel report and a “Love Guru” existential analysis, right? That’s the movie – Lover. It is a report on love, an analysis of relationships, and an exploration of the reasons behind our choices.
Vinaithandi Varuvaaya or Ye Maaya Chesave [2010] is a classic film that has a cult following because it keeps the flow moving. You understand Jessie and even if you want to hate her or love her, you just get her. On the other hand, you travel with Karthik, and through him you see her and understand her from his perspective. This is a brilliant choice of storytelling. Commercial or not, a story needs a flow and it cannot feel like being stuck and circling in a dead swamp. Unfortunately, Lover gets stuck after a point, in trying to stay with one perspective. It would have been better to give us more insight into the core of the relationship from both points of view than just hints for us to make our own story. As we said earlier, making our assumption of the story can never be the complete truth. In life, we do not have a choice against it. You can only be in someone’s story at the moment they prefer, like at a party or at an occasion or at some point in time when they drop their guard in public. So, you have to assume to satisfy your curiosity. On the contrary, in a film, you can give a narrative to force us to stay neutral and just look at the truth to decide which side you actually fall on. This film, rather than making us a fly on the wall, it forces us to stay that outsider throughout, with some information being dropped here and there for us to be able to make up our own story by stitching the incidents.
When a film is about breaking up and finding yourself, you might feel that only one person gets the right advice while the other doesn’t. This is because the story is mostly told from one perspective and expects us to infer the other’s point of view from the clues given. Why does he call her Pondatti/wife/pellam? How can he promise her a home when his own is broken? Why doesn’t he try to fix his home first instead of clinging to the only good thing in his life? And why doesn’t he realize that he is the one who is smothering it? It’s easy to say that it’s his character, but how can he change with just one simple sentence or one metaphorical link to the person he despises? I understand that he recognizes his faults, but only when someone confronts him with the worst comparison he can imagine. But does the film show it in the same way? That’s the issue.
I feel that the story is biased towards Divya, who is well-acted by Sri Gouri Priya, even though she has her own flaws. She only learns about her mistakes when others point them out to her, instead of realizing them through her actions. The story seems to turn a perfect fairytale romance of a girl meeting a boy into a nightmare. Of course, a filmmaker or a narrator can choose any perspective to tell a story and try to balance it. But to me, it felt like the conflict was dragged on too long, because the other side of the story was more interesting than this one. We are supposed to know Divya by her preference for hanging out with her friends or her conversational skills, but not through her introspective capabilities. She seems like a surfer who has to ride a wave alone, but always needs someone else to motivate her. The contrast between her life of partying with friends and his, Arun’s life, as about surfing against the tides, makes it more uneven than a class difference. In a couple, one partner could be well-off and the other could be in hardship. But when you look at Arun and Divya, you can easily say that Divya never really supported Arun when he needed her.
The truth is that they never fully understood each other. For example, she tolerates every demon that she unleashes, but she doesn’t try to comprehend why he has such demons in his head. Vyas doesn’t think it is important to point out her lack of empathy. He shows it, but he doesn’t emphasize it as much as he does about Arun. Arun is not meant to be likable because of the kind of person he has become after repeated failures, or maybe he was always like that. You have to assume that he was always like that and she loved him anyway. Month of Madhu [2023] movie is clear on this aspect: the person is flawed, but the other one loves him regardless. At some point, that feels inadequate, and it takes time for the other one to realize that. Lover is also a similar story that deals with similar issues in the narrative, but it is more focused on the main plot than artificially trying to blend it with another one that doesn’t add to the story. Lover should have analyzed the problem and evolved into the solution, but it portrays the problem in such detail and then keeps repeating it so much that you feel like you are on the moon, which orbits the Earth but spins on its axis so slowly that it is almost imperceptible and we can never see the far side, which astronomers call a tidal lock. The performances of Manikandan and Sri Gouri Priya are good, but sometimes Mani is too exaggerated. The technical values are excellent, but the writing is lacking in creating a world that is stuck. We are left on Venus, which looks like Earth but is too toxic to survive.
Theatrical Trailer:
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