Isn’t the season for special morning ‘pattimandrams’ on television usually Pongal or Deepavali? It looks like it has arrived in February this time, with Cheran’s Thirumanam , which is an archaic, pattimandram -style take on the goings-on behind modern weddings.
The subject is indeed topical, given the kind of money we see getting spent on making weddings look rich, but the treatment on the big screen is quite below par. As the title suggests, the film revolves around the issues leading up to the marriage of Mahesh (Umapathy Ramiah) and Aadhira (Kavya Suresh), and how the two families – consisting of people with varied tastes – warm up to each other.
- Genre: Drama
- Cast: Cheran, Sukanya, Thambi Ramiah, Umapathy, Kavya Suresh
- Storyline: A boy and girl in love want to get married, but there are many obstacles in their way
The love angle between Mahesh and Aadhira is so fleeting that we don’t get invested in it. A romantic sequence set inside a coffee shop is so generic that smileys have to be pasted in the bottom of the screen to guide us to its emotion. What’s interesting is the characterisation of Arivu (Cheran), the brother of the girl, calculates every penny he spends while Manonmani (Sukanya), the sister of the boy, is a spendthrift of sorts.
It’s the sort of conflict that could have made the film fun, but Thirumanam prefers to position itself as a commentary against modern-day weddings. So we get dialogue-heavy sequences on how weddings took place in olden times and how things have changed now. And two sub-plots about organic farming and an Income Tax officer (Jayaprakash, in a wasted role) and a few shoddily-shot songs that make us wish we never attended this wedding. The scenes involving the decision-making over the wedding dress and invitations ring true with reality, but it’s hard to believe that a young to-be-married couple (working in a radio channel) not having too much of a say about how they want their wedding to be. MS Bhaskar and Thambi Ramaiah throw in their experience and try elevating some scenes, but the rest of it falls flat.
Many scenes remind you of the way Doordarshan serials in the 90s were shot. When we see Cheran for the first time, he’s strutting in slow motion and the camera zooms in on his face. Closer to the climax, when he’s delivering one of the many paragraphs of dialogue that feel like WhatsApp forwards, the camera focusses on each member – one by one - assembled in that hall. The cinematography (Rajesh Yadav) is as archaic as the staging of the sequences.
So is the background score. There are a couple of decent songs (Siddharth Vipin) but even there, the staging is old-fashioned. It’s hard to believe that the filmmaker who gave us Autograph , a collection of memories put together well, has come up with Thirumanam which feels like watching a lengthy 'pattimandram' on the topic: Should weddings be grand or not?
Published - March 01, 2019 12:18 pm IST
