Chewing Gum

There is a scene in the movie chewing gum where the central character Dinu goes to a shop and buys a recharge card without mentioning the name of the mobile operator. The movie chewing gum is also somewhat like that; things happen in a vague way. The dullness of the narrative that just can’t pitch anything exciting and performances that lacks originality makes this dull love story a tedious experience even though the runtime is under two hours.

The story here has Dinu, a lower class welding worker and Violet, an upper class educated girl who works for an NGO who helps the workers from other states. Violet’s visit to Dinu’s place to explore the beauty and culture of his locale transforms into a relationship between them. The movie discusses the future of this relationship.

A love story’s minimum requirements are the chemistry between characters and a certain level of intensity in the relationship. Both these ingredients were terribly missing here and the backdrop created through the NGO thing was kind of left alone somewhere during the journey. The build up of an infatuation between the girl who helps lower class workers and a man who wasn’t offered chances to excel by faith was natural. But the script fails in molding this infatuation to that romance which becomes a hope factor for Dinu. The indigestible dialogues coming from actors who cant express perfectly just agitates the annoyance.

The direction is poor. Even the one who tries to create an intellectual layer for the sloppy story line would yawn a lot because of the “realistic” treatment. Screenplay fails to establish that deep relationship between the characters and as I mentioned earlier I couldn’t figure out why they included the other state worker’s labor issues into this plot as it wasn’t discussed. The dialogues were too dramatic and I couldn’t imagine modern generation’s characters speaking this kind of pure language. Cinematography and edits were poor. The BGM showed some standard and the music was a variety.

On screen Sunny Wayne struggles to emote. Most of the time he manages the character with his body language and when he got the chance to convey something through his expressions, the result was disappointing. Thinkal Bhal has theses expressive eyes which kind of suits this movie, but the acting part was bizarre. A few more actors are there in the movie who also found it difficult to render those dialogues.

Overall, it was a very disappointing experience for me. One of those rare moments where you cant really blame the audience for howling. I am giving the movie a very liberal 1.5/5. Its a confused creation.