Lavender

In the beginning of the movie Lavender, the debutante director Altas T Ali has mentioned that this film is inspired from all his favorite movies. Well after watching Lavender I kind of feel that most of the director’s favorite movies were directed by Mohit Suri. Except for the beautiful heroine and some eye candy visuals that occasionally comes, there is nothing much attractive about this gangster love story.

The movie is presented as a story narrated by a director to his leading lady. The story is set in Bangkok and Isha is actually the central protagonist. She is a painter who draws portraits of people and earns money from that. Her life becomes interesting when she starts to get Lavender flowers as gifts from an unknown man. Who is this man? How this relationship goes? And how the identity of this man influences the life of everyone in the plot is what Lavender discussing about.

The film tries to have two tones at the same time. One is the gangster side where our leading man Rahman plays the role of a sharp shooter who does this contract killings for a gang named black tulips. And the other side is the romance of this man with this painter girl. The failure of the movie is basically because of its lack of depth. The gagster part is clichéd and with the cast they had, it never looked that deadly. Romance is something that demands either freshness or depth to have an impact. Both were missing in the case of Lavender. Some of those films made by Mohit Suri like Awarapan and even his latest works has this similar feeling. The frames will have this luxurious look, the characters and their behaviour will be excessively poetic and the twists will also have that predictability to keep things not so heartening.

Rahman doesn’t have much to do as this killer. Very rarely he gets to do something that kind of offers him to express something. The only positive in the acting part in my opinion was Elham Mirza. The beautiful actress who somewhat reminded me of Shraddha Kapoor was also quite nice with her performance. Govind Padmasurya’s character was slightly better than 32A 23V. Anoop Menon hasn’t done enough to make us believe that he is an Interpol officer. Nishan on the other hand is an unlucky actor who got a poorly written character. Actors like Aju Varghese and Kalpana are wasted in unnecessary roles. Thalaivasal Vijay was okay in his character.

As a maker, Altas Ali couldn’t give an individuality to Lavender. The melodramatic feel he gave to this movie wasn’t that deep enough to make us feel for the characters. The uneven mixing of the gangster tale and romance in the scripting was another failure. Building relationships between characters requires a charm in writing which apparently was not there. As I already said, the dialogues are too dramatic to be sensible. The cinematography was a positive as occasionally it gave some rich visuals that justified the poetic romance the maker wanted to have. Hummable good tunes from Deepak Dev. The background score and edits are just about okay.

On the whole Lavender is a shallow love story presented in a restricted canvas. If your eyes were wet seeing films like Hamari Adhuri Kahani, Ek Villain, Ashiqui 2 etc., this one may be a passable one for you. The rating is a generous 2/5.