The latest Fahadh Faasil starrer, ‘Haram’, painstakingly follow the life of a young urban couple who get married after falling in love and how ‘ego’ plays spoilsport in their married life. The theme of the film is as old as hills. And the only thing mattered was the director’s take on the same.
‘Haram’ boasts of a non-linear narrative. The sequences shuttle between the before and after-marriage life of Balu (Fahadh) and Isha (Radhika Apte) as they go through the motions of divorce.
FTII alumni Vinod Sukumaran, who donned the hat of director, scriptwriter and the editor for ‘Haram’, has an impressive track record as an editor for acclaimed directors like Shayamaprasad. And it seems he wanted ‘Haram’ to be in the same league of movies he used to edit. But the director has failed to portray the relationship in a convincing fashion.
Balu loves Isha but fails to make out what went wrong with them. The film touches on many themes- ennui of city life, the tradition versus modernity debate, the freedom of being single- but doesn’t quite go deep into any of them and the treatment has been shallow.
The dialogues could have been sharpened. In one instance a character threatens the hero saying ‘is this a fish market’ which evoked a flurry of laughter in the audience. There could have been more drama and of course there could have been more love. The film offers some interesting experiments. The use of brown color for instance. But the chromatic exercises lose its charm in the face of remarkably dull dialogues.
There is also an attempt to give a mix of both worlds, the rich and the poor, by including a sub-plot on the life of a couple who lives in the fringes of a big city. Rajshri Deshpande and Sreekumar excelled in their roles, infusing some life into the movie.
Every now and then Balu invokes Marquez or O V Vijayan, but it sticks out as labarious name dropping than philosophical nuggets. Then there is the usual ritual of ascribing a communist past to the hero. If the director really intended to show how an American corporate employee came to touch with the perils of working class, it just didn’t work out.
Songs by Thaikkudam appears staged and is out of sync with the film. There is a song at the end as a small group of young people rally with posters to end crime against woman, and you wonder why a love story end on such a preachy note. Or was it a satire on the purposelessness of the whole affair ?
‘Haram’ had a promising plot. But, as the movie itself says, promises are fun to make and hell to deliver.
