With the pulsing popularity of the song " darshana," a single that gained a zero expenditure pre-release reach to the otherwise carefree promotional campaign employed by the team, the excitement surrounding vineeth Sreenivasan's latest directorial excursion Hridayam has been exaggerated beyond any sense. Hridayam was much anticipated, especially because it was the first meeting of the 2nd generation of the famous mohanlal – Sreenivasan duo, with their sons collaborating this time. As a result, the film had a standard to live up to, which it failed to do due to no fault within itself. The film is a beast unto itself, a continuous portrayal of a man's life constructed like vignettes from a past existence.
The plot is basically an excuse for vineeth to chart the life of Arun (Pranav Mohanalal), a teenager engineering graduate whose unexpected love affair with darshana (Darshana Rajendran) sends him on a journey to rediscover himself. This may appear to be a flimsy summary of the film's basic premise, but it is vineeth Sreenivasan's confident sense of placing recollections in relation to one's life's journey that yields the film's delayed but poignant payout at the conclusion.
Pranav mohanlal, who weaves on narrow terrain here with a complete nostalgia piece on his shoulders, owns the movie. Hridayam reserves very little depth to its protagonist for a picture about a person's quest, and the screenplay summons the shades of a guy out of connection with himself, not in command of his own actions, and Pranav's relative freshness as an actor adds an element of empathy to the hero's journey. The actor's apparently secluded attitude provides some subtext to the role, and hence the picture as a whole, as a guy looking for his position in the world.
Kalyani Priyadarsan has the tougher part, in a one-note role that is in many ways incidental to the major narrative relationship, but she manages to make it enjoyable in her own way. darshana Rajendran is cast as the story's muse, a direct reflection of the filmmaker's channelled memories, attempting to present something extremely personal to him, a sequence of observations on love and relationships.
Hridayam is a massive, complex jigsaw of a storey, confidently crafted around a certain point in a human's life that influences the type of individual you become in the future. The screenplay contains fifteen songs, yet the associating works since the storey is a character-driven remembrance piece rather than a plot-driven drama. The amount of enjoyment you get out of this film is entirely dependent on the type of person you are.
The plot is basically an excuse for vineeth to chart the life of Arun (Pranav Mohanalal), a teenager engineering graduate whose unexpected love affair with darshana (Darshana Rajendran) sends him on a journey to rediscover himself. This may appear to be a flimsy summary of the film's basic premise, but it is vineeth Sreenivasan's confident sense of placing recollections in relation to one's life's journey that yields the film's delayed but poignant payout at the conclusion.
Pranav mohanlal, who weaves on narrow terrain here with a complete nostalgia piece on his shoulders, owns the movie. Hridayam reserves very little depth to its protagonist for a picture about a person's quest, and the screenplay summons the shades of a guy out of connection with himself, not in command of his own actions, and Pranav's relative freshness as an actor adds an element of empathy to the hero's journey. The actor's apparently secluded attitude provides some subtext to the role, and hence the picture as a whole, as a guy looking for his position in the world.
Kalyani Priyadarsan has the tougher part, in a one-note role that is in many ways incidental to the major narrative relationship, but she manages to make it enjoyable in her own way. darshana Rajendran is cast as the story's muse, a direct reflection of the filmmaker's channelled memories, attempting to present something extremely personal to him, a sequence of observations on love and relationships.
Hridayam is a massive, complex jigsaw of a storey, confidently crafted around a certain point in a human's life that influences the type of individual you become in the future. The screenplay contains fifteen songs, yet the associating works since the storey is a character-driven remembrance piece rather than a plot-driven drama. The amount of enjoyment you get out of this film is entirely dependent on the type of person you are.
