Hridayam movie review: An overlong Premam meets shades of Arjun Reddy meets underwritten women -Entertainment News , Firstpost

Language: Malayalam with English, Tamil and some Hindi

Whatever else it is or is not, Hridayam (Heart) is certainly pretty. DoP Viswajith Odukkathil is tasked with capturing everything from spectacular natural scenery to messy student dwellings, and he does it all with flair. None of his frames appear too studied or arranged, and the extended scenes of the hero communing with nature are just splendid. 

The prettiness is complemented by Hesham Abdul Wahab’s sublime music and by purported progressiveness in the story. When a father says his daughter’s beau is not financially stable enough to “take care of her”, she tells Dad she is capable of taking care of herself and a man; a new parent in the story gives his child both his own name and the mother’s name – unusual for commercial Malayalam cinema (or even Indian cinema at large), hence worth noting. 

These overt declarations of liberalism are suspiciously akin to posturing, though, when viewed against the larger picture presented here.

Beyond the gloss – very appealing gloss, I must add – Vineeth Sreenivasan’s Hridayam is yet another film about a man and under-written women. The writer-director reveals a conservative core off and on in the narrative, making it a patchwork quilt of the appearance it aspires to achieve plus what it may even sincerely want to be plus what it actually is, all jammed into an exhausting running time of nearly three hours.

Long becomes overlong only when content is not working, and the truth is that Hridayam’s attractive packaging is no match for the lack of originality in its story and storytelling, both in comparison with Indian cinema as a whole and Vineeth’s own filmography. 

Take the framework of Alphonse Puthren’s Premam (2015, Malayalam) in the man-child-comes-of-age genre. Weave into it the meditative tone and musicality of Gautham Vasudev Menon’s Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa (2010, Tamil) and its ilk. Toss in a stretch where the hero spirals downwards into territory borrowed from Arjun Reddy (2017, Telugu). Throw in skeletally characterised women viewed through a narrow male gaze. The result is Hridayam. 

It kicks off with Arun Neelakandan (Pranav Mohanlal) boarding a train for Chennai where he has enrolled in an engineering college. Between settling down in his new environs and rebelling against ragging, he falls in love with his college-mate Darshana (Darshana Rajendran) at first glance – because she smiles a fulsome, teeth-baring smile that travels up to her eyes and her hair flutters in the breeze while music plays in the background in the specific way women’s hair flutters in the breeze only in films.

This is not a flippant description, it’s literal. This really is just about as much as we get to know of why Arun develops feelings for Darshana. Her reciprocation seems to arise entirely from the fact that he approached her. Hridayam establishes their relationship through a device that mainstream men-centric Indian cinema routinely uses when it hasn’t written the woman with much depth: largely through a lovely song (Darshana) laid over eye-catching visuals of the couple hanging out together. When a teenaged crush is treated in this manner, it can be sweet, but it does call for a more convincing set-up when we are expected to believe these two share a love so deep that it lasts through great bitterness, physical distance and years. 

The Arun-Darshana bond hits a roadblock very early. Two subsequent segments – Arun’s despicable Arjun Reddy a.k.a. Kabir Singh phase and an encounter with a socially conscious fellow student (Kalesh Ramanand) – feel like separate films. There is no natural progression towards anything in Hridayam. One day Arun is a layabout mistreating women and living in muck, then suddenly he is disgusted with his way of living. 

Premam’s failing was that although it was supposedly about George maturing from teenage to adulthood, he did not in fact mature at all, as was evident from his relationships with women: each one came across as a crush rather than a profound love. Part of the problem lay in the limited writing of two out of the three significant women in his life. Ditto in Hridayam. Nithya (Kalyani Priyadarshan), for one, is barely outlined and a cliché. He first sees this nice-looking woman running across a courtyard in flowing garments swirling about her feet while her hair flies in the breeze (again!) as a song wafts around (again!) and he is instantly smitten (again!). 

Each time Hridayam looks set to do something different, it pulls back.

(Spoilers ahead) For instance, when Arun beats up Darshana’s womanising ex to protect her from him, and she tells him he is no better than that man, Hridayam seems headed towards an examination of men’s proprietorial attitude towards women, but that point goes nowhere. 

(Spoilers in this paragraph) Hridayam is also careful not to outrightly condemn Arun for his horrendous behaviour during his downturn or to identify which aspects of that behaviour were condemnable. For instance, he sexually harasses a woman in the guise of ragging and she, far from resenting him, falls for him as women in hero-led commercial Indian cinema tend to do. His only expression of contrition comes when he tells someone she deserved better – but better than what? Better than a jerk, or – as implied by a conversation he earlier had with her – better than a man who was still in love with another woman? 

Meanwhile, Darshana is shown eternally regretting her decision to break up with him. This, although she witnessed some of his misconduct with the other woman.

Even as the second half of Hridayam paints Arun as a stand-up guy, it caricatures women as nags that good men are forced to manipulate – the grouchy, dissatisfied, suspicious wife, the interfering mother, the termagant of a mother-in-law… (Spoiler alerts end)

Malayalam cinema is sometimes guilty of othering north Indians and Tamilians, but Hridayam heads off in another direction. The ethnic profiling of Malayali students is treated as perfectly normal and okay in the narrative. 

The film gets other things right though: such as the mix of languages in its particular setting, and a hilarious observation about the Malayali attitude to English. Having said that, it’s funny to see Hridayam trying to pass off very obviously southern sounding actors as northerners. 

That apart, the cast is one of Hridayam’s better aspects. Among the supporting actors, Johny Antony and Vijayaraghavan are excellent in well-written roles as Nithya and Arun’s fathers respectively. 

Pranav does not have a smack-you-in-the-face, sock-you-in-the-stomach screen presence, but he does have a likeable personality that Vineeth taps effectively for Hridayam. 

Darshana gets only a fraction of the screen time accorded to the hero, and steals every scene in which she is present. The pandemic has been a well-deserved breakthrough period for this talented youngster, starting with her role in Mahesh Narayanan’s pathbreaking C U Soon. 

It feels unfair to assess Kalyani’s acting based on her poorly-sketched-out role, but this much can be said: she has a striking personality.  It is telling that Darshana’s name comes third in the opening credits after the two star children though she has a far more substantial role than Kalyani.

At a crucial point in Hridayam, Arun has a momentary lapse of integrity and utters a white lie with life-altering consequences. Years later, he briefly lapses again, but confesses within seconds. This link between the two ends of the film is pulled off neatly, establishing once and for all that he is a changed person. That he has evolved is beyond question, what the film does not examine is the how and why of it. Hridayam is either incapable of or disinterested in complexity in addition to often being mindless. There is no other explanation for why, in Arun’s last scene, he makes a request to a woman that harks back not only to an earlier moment of affection with one woman but also his toxic aggression towards another. The closing is meant to be romantic and nostalgic, but serves instead as a reminder of how lightly Hridayam views Arun’s loathsome avatar and the superficiality of its progressiveness. 

Rating: 2 (out of 5 stars) 

Hridayam was released in theatres in January 2022. It is now streaming on Disney+Hotstar

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial 

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