Bharya Athra Pora

Director Akku Akbar’s Bharya Athra Pora is a watchable preaching on screen. The film mainly focuses on making people realize about their roles and responsibilities in family life. But the frequent exaggeration and the cliché dramatic style makes the movie an average one in terms of making.

The plot here revolves around the life of a 40 year old teacher Sathyanathan who has lost interest in his relationship with his wife Priya. Alcohol is Sathyanathan’s companion now and his addiction for it has shackled his life severely. On a particular situation he gets a chance to spend time with some youngsters and their attitude towards life influences him. The problems and changes that happen in Sathyanathan’s life after this and how it damages his family life is what Bharya Athra Pora all about.

The movie indeed has a message and some of the key elements in the script are quite relevant. But the issue I felt is the amount of drama in the script. Writer Gireesh Kumar teases the attitude of the “New Generation” in the first half with exaggerated humor and plays it safe in the second half by giving them the clean chit. There is a character in the movie created to target people like me who writes about films and I must say the peripheral research of the script writer did make me laugh.

On screen Jayaram was excellent in portraying Sathyanathan and it’s really him who holds the movie together. In comparison with Veruthe Oru Bharya, Gopika doesn’t have much to do here. The child actor was a disappointment as the character was too heavy. The kind of innocent dialog delivery and the level of maturity in dialogs were too extreme for the audience to digest and that has influenced the film as the boy plays a key role in the script. Aju Varghese is yet again impressive in his “New Generation” character. Rest of the cast including Siddiq, Moli, Sunil Sukhada, Balachandran Chullikkadu etc has done their part nicely.

In the backend, Akku Akbar has followed the same old conventional style in filming this drama. As I said earlier, the script kind of magnifies many things to make the atmosphere humorous. The way they have conveyed the life style of youth and the online friendship are too lame in my view. It would have been suitable for a no brainer; but for a film that tries to convey something serious, I am not so sure. Convincing cinematography and edits. The music isn’t that catchy when compared to Shyam Dharman’s previous works and the BGM is quite outdated.

Overall, Bharya Athra Pora is an average flick targeted for the family audience. The climax is slightly unconventional and I liked it for that reason. I am giving this film a 2.5/5 and thumbs up for the performance of Jayaram who is completing 25 years in the silver screen.