Emakku Thozhil Romance begins with a sequence where Ashok Selvan’s character Uma Shankar delivers an Oscar acceptance speech, and he takes in applause from Brad Pitt, Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, and more. But soon, we learn that Uma is just dreaming.
Almost two hours later, you wonder what is up with this ambitious young man who wants to be an Academy Award-winning filmmaker one day. He could have been any other type of youngster seeking romance in this mostly harmless yet cheesy rom-com from director Balaji Kesavan. Making him an assistant director serves little purpose except for mining some puerile situational humour.
Depth in writing has never been a strong suit for mainstream rom-com cinema, and Emakku Thozhil Romance is no exception to the rule. But then again, even if you take the film for what it tries to be—an innocuous entertainer—its utter lack of ambition is baffling.
The comedy stems from the misunderstandings between the two lead characters, but oddly, it gets repetitive too soon. Leo’s friend sees Uma consulting a gynaecologist at a hospital with another girl named Saranya, who happens to be his friend.
All the characters know that she is Uma’s friend, but Leo starts to suspect the integrity of Uma’s love for her. The conflict solves itself by the time the film reaches its intermission, and the rest of the film is just a baffling extension of similar conflicts.
The writing fails to establish why Leo has trust issues with Uma, despite the latter coming across as a reasonable individual. The repetition makes the film bland after a point that you wonder whether it would have been a better choice to make Uma a casanova or turn the film into a coming-of-age story.
Why? Because the characters have hardly any arc in Emakku Thozhil Romance, and somewhere deep beneath the surface of the film is the story of an ambitious filmmaker who finds direction and purpose in life after falling in love at first sight.
The saving grace of the film, then, comes from some of the performances and the slapstick comedy. Bagavathi Perumal is a hoot in a couple of scenes, especially one where he pretends to be an NRI that has an equally hilarious payoff. Urvashi has a role that she has played numerous times in cinema before, but she still brings freshness to her role of a doting mother who admonishes her ‘rascal’ son.
Admirably, Urvashi plays all of her over-the-top comedy sequences with a great deal of sincerity and enthusiasm, although the role has hardly anything meaty for an actor of her calibre. It is hard to buy Avantika Mishra as a Tamil-speaking nurse, but the way she lip-syncs her dialogues is faultless and she maintains a decent rapport with Ashok Selvan.
There is a song featuring the couple on a beach, which is pleasurable to the eyes and the ears. Ashok Selvan hams it up and thankfully never takes his character too seriously, just like the film itself. For the quality on display, it helps that the film breezes through with its 100-minute runtime.
There is one scene early on in the film where Saranya’s boyfriend tells Uma that ‘cinema people’ like him are giving a bad name to the idea of love and romance.
He tells Uma that romance is like a flower and people like him are destroying it petal by petal. It is not like the scene serves as an acknowledgement of its own limitations. Moreover, the film does a disservice to the job of assistant directors, not to mention its genre.
Directors: Balaji Kesavan
Cast: Ashok Selvan, Avantika Mishra, Urvashi, Bagavathi Perumal