It begins as a campus love story, but moves into serious issues like prostitution racket and flesh trade, midway.
The debutant director has attempted to make a meaningful film in Yamuna, but his inexperience comes in the way of translating his ideas successfully on to the screen.
The director has resorted to clichés in the depiction of the campus scenario. It’s a college where students are everywhere except in their classrooms; where a professor unabashedly vies with his student for the attention and love of a girl, making a fool of himself in the bargain; where students slap a professor, who probably deserved it for his cheesy behaviour; where a male student tricked into entering a lady’s washroom walks out with a middle-aged cleaning woman, the duo coy and beaming.
Most of these incidents are in the name of comedy, but they barely evoke laughter. In such a scenario, Bhasker (Sathya) and Yamuna (Sriramya), who is seemingly from a wealthy family, fall in love with each other.
As the love story goes on smoothly, the director brings in a twist midway with the flesh trade concept.
He seems to have chosen his lead players more for their suitability for the roles, rather than looks. And debutants Sathya and Sriramya are fairly competent in essaying their roles.
Sathya, though, tends to go overboard in the emotional scenes and could have been guided better.
Laudable is the director’s etching of the character of Chandrika (Vinodini), the kingpin of the flesh trade.
She is not the usual loud, crude, overdressed, foul-mouthed woman depicted in our films. Under Vinodini’s finely-tuned performance, Chandrika is a cool, polite woman, who gently and cleverly weaves her web and traps her victims. The climax could have been better crafted. What goes against the film is its jerky narration. Also, with the way the two halves have been put together, it doesn’t look like they are part of the same film. Low-budgeted, with a cast that boasts of no big names, Yamuna is a promising effort by a debutant maker.