Padmini

Padmini (Netflix orig. Malayalam w/Eng. Subs.) is a cleverly made comedy with plenty of hilarious moments and (un)intentional digs at various social issues :-)

Rameshan (Kunchacko Boban) is a well liked teacher at the local school. He marries the crafty Smriti (Vincy Aloshius) who on their wedding night, promptly elopes with her lover in his Padmini car. Ramesh now becomes a laughing stock with his friends and colleagues who tease him as "Padmini" !!! Eventually Ramesh goes to a marriage broker for a second chance. He is sent to meet a prospective bride, Advocate Sreedevi (Aparna Balamurali)but the two do not gel. Sreedevi reluctantly gets engaged to a successful local businessman Jayan. A new and pretty teacher Padmini joins the school. Ramesh and Padmini bond well and decide to wed. However when the families meet, they discover that Ramesh has forgotten to divorce his first wife. Padmini's uncle is firm that unless Ramesh is legally divorced, the alliance can not proceed.

Laugh and smile your way through the subtle and in your face humour of this film to find out how the narration plays out!

Padmini (the film) is yet another well crafted Malayalam comedy. The acting is great, the sets, cinematography etc. All very good. I thoroughly enjoyed this film.

Highly recommended.

Waste of time. Kunjachacko has gone seriously wrong with this one.

Movie could have been so much better. Even the humour is lopsided, warped and trite. Clichéd situations, mysoginistic (what's new), talentless lead actress who is half the age of the middle aged lead actor (but perfect hair, sarees and bleached face of course, is in place - Acting is optional).

Story goes for a toss after 10 mins or so. Rudderless direction with silly dialogues.

I would not even this is a one time watch.

Given this is a Malayalam movie, I can only imagine that such ridicous movies are few and far between, as the industry has some excellent talents, way better than any other regional cinemas in India. Otherwise God help the Malayalam movie industry.

RATED 6/10 Language: Malayalam Source: Netflix

The beginning was ultimate and it was ROFL. But they failed miserably to carry that one till the end. The movie was too simple and waiting for some banging moment till the end. But ended with that simplicity in the end also.

There are some good funny and feel good moments in this movie. But that is not enough to carry the movie for 2 hours. Finally felt it was dragged.

The characters are bit interesting and the story also. There is a big lag in the middle portion. The movie starts to sparkle when Vincy starts appear in the end portion, but that also not satisfying.

This is one time decent watch.

Rameshan gets married to Smrithi. First Night: There's a power outage in the house, so they take a walk in the fields in the well moonlit-night, only to find out that Smrithi's lover pulled the fuse out. She apologizes for the whole thing and elopes with her boyfriend in a Premier Padmini (a car 90s kids in India would be familiar with) The townsfolk, in a mocking manner, rename Rameshan as Padmini Rameshan and he HATES it. All of this happens in the first 5 mins of the film.

I've not come across a 'quirky' story such as this before. Leave it to Mollywood to make a whole film out of a nothing-burger plot, and make it well! This film was very enjoyable in the first half. The acting and the choice of dialogues were well done, even had some LOL moments while commenting on a couple social issues here and there. Things quickly went downhill in the 2nd half, at least for me. I wish they'd thought it through. What should have been a fantastic film ended up being a okay-ish onetime watch.

Still enjoyable though, run it in the background if you have nothing else to watch and are looking for something relaxing.

I enjoyed this movie. And while it has its many laugh out moments, it certainly has some deeper aspects that it tries to shed light on. What I found surprising is that the characters were so well drawn out and each character will hit differently for different people.

It is must watch for you adults looking to settle down and considering long term life changing decisions like marriages or falling in / getting out of a relationship.

Life is complex. Everyone's got baggage. Everyone's a bit immature and everyone's got their quirks. Life can seem a bit random, but we yearn for a more grandiose outcome. But with time and age we make sense of the choices we make.