This is gonna be weird. I wrote a Premam review very early on. And then I came back and reviewed it a second time. And now I am going to put these two reviews together into one awkward review.

I really liked this movie, just as a cute little romance, but about half-way through I started to notice that there is more going on than just the surface “coming of age in 3 parts” idea.

See, the title is “Love”, right?  And on the surface it looks like, we get to know our hero and watch him grow up through the 3 big love stories of his life.  But, by about half way through, I started to notice that there was all of this ambient dialogue, from characters without even names, just in the background, like Dolly the dance teacher or the cafe regular customer, who are all dealing with their own little love stories.  And all of them are men.

It’s not just a movie about this particular young man coming of age through his love stories, it’s about all men everywhere and how they act and how they are when they are in love.  In other hands, this could have turned into some sort of misogynistic tragedy, how women everywhere are controlling and destroying men.  Or, it could have been a sort of raunchy comedy, look at all the silly men who are falling in love.  But instead, it started to feel like some kind of deeper statement on masculinity and male bonding and behavior, but in a healthy and loving way.

According to this film, falling in love really is an act of growing up, part of being human and, more specifically, male.  It makes them vulnerable and delicate and ultimately stronger and better people.  This is also a message I have seen in other hands.  In fact, on paper, the structure of this film is remarkably similar to Raj Kapoor’s magnum opus, Mere Naam Joker, even down to the relationship with a teacher.  However, Raj Kapoor’s lessons on love tend more towards the nobility of unrequited love, how it is almost spiritual to fall in love and suffer.But Premam takes that message and twists it just slightly, to instead honor requited love.

When our hero is a boy, he follows the local girl around, along with all the other boys, and makes a fool of himself.  This isn’t manly, this is a fake show of manliness, playing with love but not really experiencing it.  And it is so terrifying for them, that there is a constant need for support from other boys.  Our hero calls his friends for advice, they all gather together and follow her together.  He doesn’t even know how to really talk to her without his friends with him for support.

It is only in the second section, with the full beard and the manly walk, that he confidently moves onto real love.  His pursuit of the teacher is contrasted with multiple other romances.  His house is filled with young men whispering sweet nothings into cell phones, we see longing glances and giggling conversations through out the dining hall and classrooms, and of course there is his romantic rival, the teacher.  Through out this section, it comes out that our college student hero is in fact more mature than his adult male rival.  Because of how fearless he is in love.  He actually talks to the teacher, tells her how he feels, confidently calls and walks and talks with her.  And she responds.  In contrast, his teacher asks for others to speak on his behalf, constantly needs his fellow teacher with him for moral support, has not fully matured and therefore cannot fully complete his love story.  Or is it that he has not completed his love story and therefore cannot be mature?

Is this movie saying that part of growing up and becoming a fully mature man is falling in and out of love?  Is having that initial cowardly crush, the first passionate romance, and finally the comfortable marriage the essential markers of male maturity?  This would go against the established film policies I outlined above, unlike the action films where the love story is just a distraction on the way to the resolution, or the comedies where falling in love makes a man a figure of fun, and most dissimilar, the misogynistic version of this story where falling in love is making them weaker.

I think this is why we have his friends moving in and out of his life constantly, a parade of other young men.  Which really confused me!  I have to admit, I have no idea who most of them were.  But I did grasp that our hero was always surrounded by a group of 2 or 3 close friends.  And that these friends continued from sequence to sequence, not all of them, but at least one of them.  And while we watched our hero’s story unfold, the implication was that each of these boys was going through their own saga.  We heard bits and pieces about a college girlfriend, see a jealous glance, and hear an invitation to a marriage, and so on.  In the first segment, they are all longing for the same unattainable goal, more interested in just watching a girl from a distance than actually interacting with her.  The second, they have various relationships, varieties of passionate love affairs, each with their own individual goals.  Our hero’s romance at this point, because we see it in such detail, feels like something real, like something lasting.  And maybe it could have been.  They truly seemed to care for each other, to like each other, to understand each other.  But his only plans for the future are some sort of vague idea of getting a job far away and coming home after his parents have come around to her.  She didn’t seem any more concerned with settling down and making their relationship official.  Possibly if circumstances hadn’t separated them, it would have naturally grown into a deeper commitment, they would have planned a future together, everything would have worked out.  But they weren’t quite there yet.

Which is where the third segment is so important.  While watching the film, at first it felt like a bit of an anti-climax.  Why did we leave they super fun and complicated and interesting and exciting world of the college campus for this sort of formal and quiet and peaceful life of the cafe?  But that’s the point, that’s what adulthood is like, it is peaceful and quiet.  And that’s what an adult relationship is like, not the crazy passion of young, but a straightforward acceptance of what you want and why you want it.  And again, we see that in the little we hear of his friends.  They have mostly married, not necessarily to their college girlfriends, but to women they respect and care for, and still love. Our hero and his one unmarried friend, Jojo, are actively looking for marriage now.  Or rather, for a love that will lead to marriage.  There is no more playing around or pretense.

This is also why the humorous character from the first segment returns here, the boy who was unafraid to approach the girl as a teenager, but has not progressed past that since.  He is flirting with every woman, not interested in settling down or in finding an appeal beyond the surface.  While he may have been ahead of our hero when first we saw him, now he has fallen behind.  True maturity is not the ability to flirt and attract, but the ability to commit.

This is the final stage of love, not the immature cowardice of boyhood, or the wild disorganized euphoria of young manhood, but the confidence of knowing what you want and how to get it.  And that is why this is the love story that succeeds.  Because there is no more doubt or confusion or fear.  He goes from a first meeting to a proposal with no time to spare, and his final ramshackle group of friends all support him, having made the same journey themselves.

So, that’s the big thematic thoughts.  Let’s see, what else do I have to say?  I was really interested in how the songs happened.  There were a lot of them, and they were more notable than I am used to with the very very minimal Malayalam films I have seen.  With a Hindi film, usually, everything sort of stops for the song to underline the current emotion.  But with the (again, very few) Malayalam films I have seen, often there will be only one song that feels like a Song in the way I am used to.  Instead, the melodies will weave in and out of scenes, the songs will deepen our understanding of characters, enhance the mood of the moment, and be so perfectly pitched to fit within the film that I honestly don’t even notice when they start or end.  However, in this one, they were just a hair more outstanding.  And I can only assume that is on purpose, to show how love creates a sort of surreal effect, heightening experiences so that they feel more “real”, time and space contracts, and everything sort of becomes of a piece with that mood.  More over, the song sequences stand out as ways to show the differences between our hero’s personality in different sections and, more importantly, how he is interacting with the different love stories.

First, there is the love where even in fantasy, he doesn’t imagine interacting with her, the most he wants is to be alone with her and able to stare at her:

Then there is the second love story, where his fantasy is to spend all of his time with her, in a perfect bubble outside of the world:

But the final girl doesn’t even get a song.  There is no time any more for fantasy or dreaming, it is time to grasp the reality.  In fact, the only song for her is one after the love story has ended, that is when he needs to escape to fantasy.

What else?  Oh!  The female characters!  Always interesting.  In such a male oriented movie, it would be easy to make them either too passive or too aggressive.  But Premam threaded the needle beautifully.  They were living their lives and happened to intersect with our hero, but they didn’t stop being their own people just because of that.  Mary, the first girl, wasn’t over-awed by all the male attention, she just quietly enjoyed it.  But she was interested in her own thing and what she wanted, not in any of these random boys who followed her around.

Malar, the second girl, picked our hero more than he picked her.  She walked up to him at first, made sure he had her phone number, and generally made her interest known.  And in the end, she married the man who was better for her.  Okay, at first, I was completely devastated by how that love story ended, because they were so cute together!  But on the other hand, no matter how happy and in love they were, when things got hard, he walked away.  And it was the right thing to do too, because he needed to grow up.  He couldn’t handle it, he had to walk out.  But Malar’s husband stayed, he took care of her, he helped her.  That’s the kind of husband that Malar needed and deserved.  Again, our hero could have grown into that, if he’d had time.  But he didn’t have time, so it was best for her to move on.

And then we have the final girl, who I loved!  She saw what she wanted, and she went after it!  Over and over again.  And, she knew that what she wanted was a kind and mature and quiet man.  Although, and I think this is the final point, part of “Premam” for men is always going to have just a little touch of that madness, which is why he had to bring it back up again just one more time before he was able to be married.

My very first reaction the first time I saw Premam was “eh”.  It was okay, I guessed, enjoyable enough, fine.  But then I couldn’t stop thinking about it over the next few days, and I ended up buying it on DVD, and writing  whole review about it.

And then a couple of days ago I watched it again, straight through, with my sister.  And it was like a whole new movie!  Partly because I was watching it with someone else, partly because I was watching it after having seen soooooooooooooo many other Malayalam films, and partly because I was just paying a little more attention this time!

That sounds bad.  Okay, I was paying attention the first time, I just didn’t know which bits would end up being important, so I wasn’t paying AS MUCH attention.  But this time I was!  And here’s what I picked up.

First, our hero is supposed to be kind of an idiot, right?  Not just young and foolish, but straight up foolish.  He goes after Mary really hard in the first half, and yet never quite manages to talk to her.  All the other boys either don’t care as much, or are better able to handle it by, like, actually talking to her.  Our hero is the only one with the perfect combination of really really caring, and being really really dumb about it.

And then in college, sure, he is cool and the leader of a gang and all that.  But he is also steadily failing his way through school, and he has to stop talking and check with his friends before he can answer a question as simple as “what did you have for dinner?”  It’s kind of a miracle she is even interested in him.

In my last review, I talked about how maybe it was a happy ending that she ended up with someone else, because he wasn’t really ready for marriage.  Watching it this time, oh man was he ever not ready for marriage!!!  Ready for a serious relationship, sure.  Ready to date and fall in love and be romantic, absolutely!  Ready to actually plan more than 2 days ahead and think through the consequences of his actions?  Nooooooooooooo!  The boy is an idiot!

When I watched Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa, I talked about the particular agony of being ready and mature and in love and wanting to be married, and being forced to wait because of circumstances.  The hero and heroine were in love, they were committed, they were at the right time in their life and the right age.  But he was working crazy hours and living with his parents or on the road, and her family would never approve, and despite their maturity and independence, they would be literally homeless if they ran off together.  The same agony was a minor plot point in Kireedam and even in Kammatipaadam.

That is not the agony here.  Nivin is a loooooooooooong way from being ready to be married.  It’s not just that he is still in school, it’s that he can’t come up with a viable plan for their future life together, or even come up with a viable plan for the school talent show.  Malar, though, she is ready.  Maybe she is enjoying their little love story at school, but she is also confident and in control, with a job, living away from home, and, I strongly suspect, NOT having her first serious relationship.  She is doing most of the directing of the relationship, and maybe she would have directed it towards marriage eventually, but it didn’t feel like anything she was in a rush for.

And then we have the third story, where Nivin is still kind of an idiot.  Sweet, but dumb.  Yes, he has his own cafe now.  Yes, it seems fairly successful and he manages it well.  But, when he sees a pretty girl, he falls in love just as fast as before.  And he bellyflops just like before.

In my last review, I talked about how the first romance was a total fantasy, he couldn’t even imagine talking to her in reality, he just wanted to gaze on her.  And then the second romance was reciprocated, it was about the two of them together in their little bubble.  But the third romance was an adult romance, no more time for fantasy and dreaming, straight to the engagement.

But he still doesn’t think it through.  Yes, it was a good instinct to ask her first before approaching her parents.  But he could have taken just a little bit longer, asked around town, and found out she was engaged already before he talked to her.  He could also have stayed and talked with her a bit after finding out instead of just impulsively storming off.

On the first watch, it felt like the reason he was still unmarried years later, even after all his friends had already made matches, was because he had that heartbreak in his past and hadn’t quite gotten over it.  On a later watch, now it just kind of feels like he was too dumb to pull it off in the intervening time.

I should clarify, when I say “dumb”, I don’t mean, like, unintelligent.  I just mean he tends to get caught up in the fantasy and not really think things through.  I also don’t think he was really meant for school, definitely seems to lack the focus and patience necessary.  But I find it believable that he is running a successful business and is a great baker.  And he is probably a pretty good friend as well.  We don’t see it, but I assume in the 6 years between Malar and Celine, he helped everyone else he knew get married and settled and was wonderfully warm and supportive.  But then a pretty girl smiles at him, and all his brains leak out his ears and his instincts fail, and it all goes wrong again.

At the very very end, there is a tossed off line by one of his friends that he knew Celine was the girl for Nivin, because the note she left for him was just as poorly written and confusing as the love notes he used to write.  The first time, I just heard it as a kind of funny line from a friend, but this time it hit me a different way.  What if Celine had the same kind of unlucky/dumb in love fate as Nivin?  What if this is a miracle for both of them?

I think it kind of works!  Go all the way back to tag at the very end, when you see Celine as a little girl chatting with Nivin, and talking about how if he doesn’t find anyone better, when she grows up, she will marry him.  What if that is Celine’s movie?  That she had a crush on the guy who liked her cousin when she was a little girl.  And years later she let her parents convince her to get married, and then bumped into the guy right when it was too late.  What if she had her own group of friends telling her to stop going for the guy she’s been dreaming about for years because she is engaged and it is stupid?  Or maybe her friends were the ones telling her to go after Nivin even harder, not just leave it all half-explained and open-ended?

I mean, look at what Celine does!  She falls in love with stupid teenage Nivin when she is a little girl.  She kind of flirts with him a little, maybe without even realizing what she is doing, even though she is engaged to someone else.  She calls him at the absolute last minute before the engagement, instead of talking to him sooner and more calmly.  And at the same time, she isn’t brave enough and quick enough to say why she is really calling, that she would rather be with him.  Even after her engagement is broken, why wait until Christmas to come by the bakery?  Why not run over immediately and tell him, and ask if he is still interested?  They really are 2 of a kind, both quick to fall in love and slow to figure out what to do about it.  That’s why she is the one he ends up with, even though she doesn’t enter the film until the very end.  Because she is the one who is most like him, the one whose life and romantic abilities are just as messed up as his.