Premalu: A Love Tale of Fairy
Star Cast: Mamitha Baiju, Naslen K Gafoor, Sangeeth Prathap, Akhila Bhargavan, Shyam Mohan M, Meenakshi Raveendran, and Mathew Thomas.
Cinematography by Ajmal Sabu
Music Composed by Vishnu Vijay
Edited by Akash Joseph Varghese
Directed by Girish A.D.
Many fairy tales show how love can transform a person’s destiny. For example, in Beauty and The Beast [2017], a woman enters the life of a lonely Beast, who is cursed and isolated in a mansion. She changes him and his lifestyle, breaks the curse, and discovers that the Beast is actually a handsome prince. Similarly, in Snow White and Cinderella, Snow White’s kiss breaks the curse, while Cinderella’s love fulfills her dream despite tremendous hardships. Premalu is a modern-day fairy tale romance of a different kind. The film does not take itself too seriously, and that is the charm of this laid-back story of youthful exuberance. Yes, I understand how exuberance and laid-back don’t work in the same sentence, but this one film can be described at best as laid-back in approaching the situations. And exuberant in achieving the final goal and executing the same situations without melodrama.
Hridayam [2022] talks about first love and moving on in life to a better place with romance as the central pivot. You cannot pivot a perilous turn without invaluable support. It is not just about a man’s moving on but a woman’s too, who clings to her failed romance as the guilt more than the love makes her feel miserable. When you lose a loved one, even though you did everything you could, you always end up feeling guilty as you could not go that extra mile to save them. That guilt starts defining you and unknowingly, we impose the same guilt on people who are close to us as well. Rather than trying to understand their issues and problems, we just toss them around like they are easily disposable. When a fairy walks into the life of such a person, everything changes. Hridhayam talks about growing out of such fairy romances, while Premalu asks us to still hope for such fairy tales as people need love and it hits you when you are sleep-awake and leaves you when you are awake-asleep.
I’m not trying to imitate RGV’s style of wordplay. Let’s just reflect on our romantic experiences. Most of us might have experienced love at least once in our lives. And if you think about it, we fall for someone when we almost lose hope of finding anyone. I’m not talking about crushes that we never confess, but only serious relationships. That’s why we live our lives sleep-awake. It’s almost like we are zombies to the world until then, and the romance makes us think about our time, our food habits, our goals, and our life as a whole. Whether we succeed or fail, we just start dreaming, daydreaming, hoping, and enjoying the possibilities of a happy future. And it leaves us when we are awake-asleep. While we are in this state, we might become possessive, creepy, grumpy, clingy people who stop being in love and start forcing ourselves to stay together for the sake of those early butterflies. But remember, butterflies always fly away.
So, relationships are a constant work of being sleep-awake at the same time. Premalu says this in a light-hearted manner. Explicitly, the awake-asleep person in this story is “JK” Aadhi. No, I’m not “kidding” here. He falls for a girl who wants to be free-flowing and fun, while he is exactly the opposite – authoritative and irritating. He starts as a charmer and ends up as a joke, himself. In a way, not all people showcase what they really are at the outset, and they grow into a misogynistic (for men & women) control freak that becomes a burden in a relationship. You can neither enter into one with them nor stay in it for long. Now, the sleep-awake person is Reenu. She wants to just live life and not be ambitious. We never see her talking about conquering the world, but she talks about having a very settled and uninterrupted life that gives her everything. But she falls for a carefree underachiever, Sachin, who aims big and is ambitious but doesn’t have the wisdom to achieve them all. He can be tamed and pushed in the right direction, but who has that much patience and love to guide him in that direction?
Hence, She becomes the fairy in his tale. She gives him the care he deserves and does everything he wishes for in his life, yet she is scared to accept his love or fall in love. So, she is the one who is sleep-awake. Before she turns into a nightmare, she understands the reality of her emotions and continues the work that needs to be done to make it a success. I really liked the climax where Tholiprema’s [1998] melodramatic punch was delivered in a light-hearted manner. We can call this film a lightweight Tholiprema and an unambiguous OK Kanmani [2015]. Also, the names of the characters are a really fun play on Sachin – the over-achiever in real life becomes an underachiever’s name. Aadhi, a strong masculine name, is given to a cowardly, childish, “just kidding” selfish joke of a man. But Reenu is aptly named for the character that is amiable and cooperative. She tries to be friends with both Sachin and Aadhi. Both want more from her and, like in real life, Sachin ends up with all the “accolades”. I loved the way our everyday Hyderabad was shown with a visitor’s glamorous eye rather than a lived-in fatigued eye. Sometimes, it takes an outsider to show the beauty that our place beholds. Exactly, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. A special shout-out to cinematographer Ajmal Sabu for being that beholder. Music by Vishnu Vijay while it doesn’t completely stand out, it gels well with the film. The performances of the ensemble – Mamitha Baiju, Naslen Gafoor – stand out, and the writing of Girish A.D, Kiran Josey makes the movie a believable fairytale romance. After all, love has the quality to make the person who walks into our life appear as a fairy. It all depends on how we treat the fairy, do we lock them in a prison or let them fly with their wings to figure out this small intimate universe of ours within the big obvious one.
While the writing is good at creating characters and a universe around them, that is their own, some characters have been portrayed a bit too caricatured. “Just Kidding” Aadhi in an in-form M. Rajesh’s film would have been a one joke wonder and in a Mani Ratnam film would have been fleshed out as a character with selfish motives. The character needed to be a character rather than a caricature, in the end. We always see Sachin falling for Reenu but never really feel like Reenu is falling for Sachin. A balanced approach would have delivered both sides of the spectrum like we saw in Love Story [2021] and Bangalore Days [2014] – mainly, in the latter film, we don’t feel like Ajju is falling for a cripple out of pity but he seriously loves the character that RJ Sarah is, behind that “cripple exterior”. Even in Tholiprema or OK Kanmani, we don’t see only one side of the coin. We know that Keerthi Reddy’s character Anu, has unknowingly fallen in love with Balu. We can feel that and in OK Kanmani, it is explicit. With all said and done, this Universe of Premalu has a very generic story but the fairy-tale treatment and simplicity, the realism behind the scene construction makes it more easy on the eye. When you’re on a hilltop you wish for the breeze to be simple and give you a delicate touch while you enjoy the scenery. This is such a film.
Theatrical Tailer:
RGV’s style of wordplay got me