I know an audience segment that finds movies like Su Su Sudhi Vathmeekam and Vijay Superum Pournamiyum motivational and inspiring. Even though I haven’t disliked these movies, there was no major moving element for me in those films. Meri Awas Suno, Prajesh Sen’s third outing as a director along with Jayasurya somewhere, falls in a similar space. With a largely predictable screenplay depending on the actors’ conviction to pull off the characters, Meri Awas Suno is enjoyable in parts.
Spoiler Alert! A major twist in the tale is hidden from the movie’s trailer, and reviewing this film without revealing that is a bit difficult. RJ Shankar, who hosts the show “Meri Awas Suno,” is our hero. His program is the only hit program on the station. His wife, Meryl, is a journalist, and the couple has a son. One day while receiving a prestigious award, Shankar lost his sound for a short while, and soon he realized that it wasn’t a one-time thing. How Shankar handles this critical situation in his life is what Meri Awas Suno depicts.
Just like his last two films, Prajesh Sen has written some really good dramatic moments in the movie. The interval block of the film where the RJ had to listen to his own words in a totally different context was one such situation. But the problem with the screenplay was that it was sometimes overdoing some stuff to create melodrama. The speech therapist Dr. Reshmi played by Manju Warrier, at one point asks Meryl to agitate Shankar to make him make an effort, and the agitation strategy almost feels a bit inhuman. Then it slips into excessive melodrama, and after that, it uses Reshmi to bounce back to the uber-cool zone. This zig-zag shift in the drama quotient affects the consistency of the film.
In terms of becoming an RJ character, this might be a new experience for Jayasurya. But the traumatic phase is something we have seen him do in many films. And to be frank, I can’t really see another actor who can pull off this character the way Jayasurya does. A vibrant and “Aami from Summer in Bethlehem” cool Manju Warrier is always a pleasing sight, and Dr. Reshmi works in that aspect. Sshivada as the concerned and insecure wife was really good, and I have to say that in almost all his films, Prajesh Sen had managed to bring out the best of the actors who played the “wife” characters.
In Meri Awas Suno, Prajesh Sen is trying to move away from the dramatic tone of his other two movies, and there is an effort to make it more of a feel-good drama. But the template nature of the movie is evidently visible at many points. The whole insecure wife subplot, which leads to further drama in the story, felt a bit unnecessary, considering the story’s focus, which was really different from that. I enjoyed some of the dialogues in the movie, and there is a good possibility that the film will discretely connect with you through those dialogues. The music by M Jayachandran with that traditional style works in favor of the movie.
Meri Awas Suno is indeed a compelling drama on paper, and the movie gets a lot of support from its actors in giving life to that drama on screen. But the “life coach” nature of the film needed a lot more fine-tuning on a writing level to move you emotionally.
The "life coach" nature of the film needed a lot more fine-tuning on a writing level to move you emotionally.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
