Sita Ramam

Cast: Dulquer Salmaan, Subhankar Bagchi, Rashmika Mandanna

Writer/Director: Hanu Raghavapudi

Plot:

Sita Ramam Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Dulquer Salmaan, Mrunal Thakur, Rashmika Mandanna, Prakash Raj & ensemble.

Director: Hanu Raghavapudi.

What’s Good: It is a love story lived and doomed. The storytelling makes it poetic and the actors add the charm. The beauty is all around.

What’s Bad: The effort that is clearly visible to make it more poetic and the predictable turns.

Loo Break: When the turns are predictable, that’s your cue. The second half gets better though.

Watch or Not?: Watch it for a cinematic experience that is poetic and heart-breaking.

Language: Malayalam (with subtitles).

Available on: Amazon Prime Video.

Runtime: 157 Minutes.

User Rating:

A young Pakistani woman Afreen (Rashmika) is forced to deliver a letter to Sita (Mrunal) in India by her dead grandfather because he is in debt of the writer Ram (Dulquer). Lesser does Afreen know that she is setting out to explore a love story and also see a transformation in herself.

Sita Ramam Movie Review: Script Analysis

Unrequited love, bonds that know no border, and the charm that resembles the world where love was in letters, these might look like elements from the cinema of the past. But time and again when storytellers of our generation crack it right, it only makes me immensely happy. Welcome, Sita Ramam, a musical saga that blends love and tragedy with its tune so well that you kind of ignores the flaws. But I can’t.

Story by Hanu Raghavapudi, Sita Ramam in a way is packed like the amazing Mahanati. A youngster is forced to get into a story to reach a goal and they discover not just the tragedy but themselves. But that is not where you cancel the Dulquer starrer for, because the content inside is entirely different. Divided into two time zones, the 1960s and the 80s, the film constantly keeps juggling between the two. While the present seems to be a bit shaky, it is the flashback where all the power lies.

Shaping it like a fairy tale, Hanu sets his story in the immaculate whites of the snow, and the lush greens of the forest and between this are his Star crossed lovers who were never meant to be together. There is a mystery for everyone to solve and that’s how Raghavapudi keeps us invested. There is an orphan who has no one, and a queen who is lonely even with a family. They come together to become one and that is a very beautiful thought.

The emotion of Sita Ramam stays at the right place at every moment and that is what sails the boat for this movie that does get too predictable and branched out at a point. But the redemption is that the makers don’t just focus at the love story but everything around it too. In Afreen, they shape each of that young mind that thinks the other country and their religion is bad while theirs is the supreme. The ‘they & us’ phenomenon gets addressed.

But there are also moments that kind of question logic. The sudden unity in the Kashmir valley without questioning, or how does no one in her state not know that the woman roaming around without a cover is their princess and why don’t they tell this to Ram?

Sita Ramam Movie Review: Star Performance

Dulquer Salmaan and his innocence only gets better. There are a very few actor with their innocence intact and can bring it out effortlessly. He is one of them. There is conviction in both love and war.

Mrunal Thakur enters the movie like another character that might turn out to a catalyst to the hero’s journey, but she with the makers proves everyone wrong. It is here around whom the story actually shapes up. In her calculated dramatic performance Thakur proves she can do this too. Do I need to tell you how beautiful she looks?

Rashmika has to be the one who goes through visible transformation and the actor in the limited part does it too. I hope she was given more than what she gets.