Kalyanam movie review - It will test your patience

Kalyanam marks the debut of Shravan, son of actor Mukesh. The tagline of the movie is “a cliché love story” and I am almost confident that it was an excuse from the director after seeing the rough cut of this movie. Backed by lackluster writing and clueless execution, Kalyanam is pretty much a struggle for its viewer too.

Sharath is a young guy who doesn’t have much clarity and idea about what he wants to be in life. He is in love with his childhood crush come, neighbor. She doesn’t know that because of our hero is afraid of losing her. So by the time he had the courage, her marriage got fixed and the movie talks about that difficult phase in Sharath’s life.

The movie has got a climax act with a suspense that happens before the climax and gets revealed after the climax. When you have been watching a pretty ordinary film till that point, you do tend to expect something will happen to make the movie a better one. But sadly this suspense from Rajesh Nair was equally disappointing as the rest of the film. The predictability of the story is so evident that a filmgoer might think he can also write a script easily. Such level of laziness is something that I have seen in Tamil films in recent past.

Shravan Mukesh has a very limited set of emotions and he is juggling all that to get the expressing part correctly. But sadly nothing makes his performance authentic. He is ridiculously innocent and that makes the character not worthy of sympathizing. Heroine Varsha is just a prop here who wears a wide range of dresses and just smiles whenever she is there in the frame. Hareesh Kanaran and Jacob Gregory are the assigned comedians. Senior actors like Mukesh, Sreenivasan and Maala Paravathy are given roles of no substance in this movie.

This is Rajesh Nair’s fourth directorial and he seems to have gone to the zone of his first movie Annum Innum Ennum. In his last fairly successful outing Salt Mango Tree, he had the backing of a credible story and well-etched performances. Here such qualities are completely missing. It stays true to its tagline in terms of story and making. Even though the lyrics weren’t good, the music sort of impressed me. The lighting is poor and the cuts aren’t that smooth. Even the art direction of a story set in the pre-mobile era is weak.

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Kalyanam will be watchable if you haven’t seen a love story in the last twenty years. This tribute to all the clichés in the world is a patience tester on most occasions. Sitting through this movie is a challenge.