Sancharram

I saw this film as Part of London Gay And lesbian Film Festival. I had very few expectations, but was pleasantly surprised and very pleased by the unpretentious story telling.The atmosphere of rural kerala was captured in its beauty without any attempt to overstate it.The actors also played their parts with restraint.The characters were not developed fully and this means we do not get the complexity of their motivation and depth of their lives.The characters appear as one dimensional and only one actor,KPAC Lalitha( as Deliah's Mother)desperately tries to put some flesh into the character.

But then this approach (or it limitation?) gives the film a simplicity and directness which you would not get from a complex approach.

The ending was poor. Like the previous commentator, I believe it should have ended with the butterfly flying away. Unfortunately it ends with the kakkathi's ( fortune teller) irritating laughter.In fact The Kakkathi was the only person who was miscast.And to end the film with her shot was a poor choice.

I do not know anything about the director, but would like to congratulate her on delivering an unpretentious first film which was beautiful.It really should have come in the main stream rather than the current lesbian label.

From the description, we feared this might be just another gay/lesbian melodrama: two people discover a love in themselves & each other, which the people around them then try to destroy, with varying degrees of success. This is indeed the case, and yet we were not bored.

The best review of any film is that it works, and this one does. The romance is convincing & engaging, as are the characters. The visuals are beautiful, the dialog realistic without being trite.

It's all the subtleties that really pay off: the attention to village life, the hints of other background stories, and the fact that our two principals are not outshone by the talents of their more veteran support.

It probably also helps that the running time is under two hours, and hews much closer to Western dramatic unity than the masala ethic. No comedy, no sudden music stabs, and no one explaining the plot for us. The concerns are real, and the drama is presented, not pushed. Definitely recommended.

I saw this movie at Febio Fest, Prague in the category 'Another Shore' - which seemed to be a euphemism for 'gay interest'. Indeed Screen 4 was prominently labelled 'Gay and Lesbian'. Maybe this was some kind of health-warning - watch out for your neighbour or put newspaper on the seats - so as to pander to sleazy Czech President Klaus's well-known prejudices? But the other implication, that some movies should be judged by special 'gay' criteria, seems equally silly, however. So, as a 60-something grandfather I'm judging it simply as a movie in its own right.

In a word - terrific! If one has to find a fault some of the earlier scenes are a bit slow and we have to wait for the two principals until the story really pulls us in, but once they arrive the wait has been well worth it.

A very simple, chronological coming-of-age story combined with romance, it doesn't try to do anything artsy and clever: a bit of scenic camera work to make the most of the Kerala locations and that's it. Otherwise the director relies on a well-structured script (her own) and lets the cast carry the weight. And how well they succeed! The secondary characters are excellent - especially Delilah's mother - and there isn't even a minor part that isn't well-done. Which makes it all the more remarkable how the two principals - Suhasini V Nair as Kiran and Shrruiti Menon as Delilah - so dominate every group scene. The scenes between just the two lovers are better still - some will stand comparison with any of the romantic classics. The personal chemistry is perfect, the scenes beautifully understated and marvellously played. One doesn't particularly register, much less care, that this is a love between two women - it is simply a love that overwhelms both them and us.

This film's own qualities are so outstanding that it doesn't need any special allowances implicit in promoting it as a 'gay-interest' movie. Just get it on to DVD and into as many cinemas as possible.