Kalyanam

The tagline of the movie Kalyanam which marks the debut of veteran actor Mukesh’s son Shravan Mukesh is “a cliche love story”. That tagline sounds more like an excuse from a director who knows that he has made an extremely tacky film. Kalyanam has terrible writing and poor execution. The lead actor is struggling to make the process look easy and even after being a film that is under two hours long, it’s not easy to sit through this Kalyanam.

Sharath is this jobless young guy who is in love with his childhood crush who is his neighbour. The guy has not expressed his love till now and by the time he could think of a way to express it, her marriage gets fixed. How he manages to face this difficult phase in life is what Kalyanam showing us.

Towards the climax of the film, there is an area where the parents of our lead pair is having a conversation in a closed room and we are kept guessing what might have happened inside that room. The movie was so dry till that point and I was hoping Rajesh Nair would give me some reason to cheer with that suspense. But when it got revealed, it didn’t change any of the mediocrity. The problem is that it has a story line that can be predicted or even created by anyone who has seen at least 4 or 5 mediocre love stories. It is almost like one of those Tamil films we have seen in recent past where jobless young protagonists falls in love immediately and acts as if they were in love forever.

Shravan Mukesh is struggling with his set of two and a half expressions. The guy makes the character look ridiculously naive. His body language would remind you of his father, but the acting won’t. Varsha Bollama is the female lead of the movie and all she has done in wearing various dresses and smiling like an innocent child. Hareesh Kanaran and Jacob Gregory are the quintessential hero’s earths. Mukesh, Sreenivasan, Mala Parvathy etc are the other main actors and I must say there were occasions where they lacked confidence in having conviction.

Rajesh Nair had his first appreciable success in Salt Mango Tree. There he had a story, agenda and actors who shined in their roles. Here all those things are missing. Story is wafer thin, the actors are amateurish and the making justifies the tagline by not providing anything that will look fresh. The lighting sticks out in certain frames. The only take away for me is the music. The love song and the song sung by Dulquer Salmaan had nice tunes to their credit (even though I wasn’t a big fan of the lyrics). The story is set in the pre mobile era and the art director has tried to make it look real but some evident flaws were there.

Kalyanam has justified its tagline and it is a tagline one won’t want a film to justify. It is almost a tribute to all clichés and I hope I won’t have to watch this cliché again.

Rating: 1.5/5 (One guy in the theater had a great time sleeping with almost everyone hearing him snore, and none of us wanted to wake him up)