Vimanam(Telugu, Zee5)
Rating: ***
Do you remember Mehmood’s Kunwara Baap? In this highly melodramatic film Mehmood played a rickshaw puller who will do anything for his polio-afflicted son.
In Vimanam it is the father who is physically disabled. Samuthirakani is a fine actor. He brings to the role of the father a modicum of gravitas that the film perhaps doesn’t earn for itself. His Veerayya is heaped with so much misfortune it begins to feel like poverty porn. But Samuthirakani never feels sorry for himself; although the screenplay often insists that he must feel the burden of his impoverished existence the actor somehow succeeds in rising above the stilted script.
Writer-director Shiva Prasad wants to construct a mountain of maudlinism .In that endeavor he tilts so far backward into the slush of tears we fear the film would drown in the puddle. Providentially Vimanam escapes the wages of schmaltz to emerge as a moving story of a resilient father and his little son who dreams of flying.
A lot of the narrative rightly focuses on the father’s fight to find flight and fulfil his son’s dying wish.Veraiyya’s naïve optimism will break your heart. The impoverished father needs only ten thousand rupees to make his son’s dream come true.It feels like ten crores for him.
The climax with a lovely Meera Jasmine playing a kind airhostess had be bawling like a baby. This is the most heartbreaking tearjerker I have seen in a long time. Writer-director is on the dot. If little Raju(Master Dhruvan) aspires to fly in a plane, this writer-director’s life’s ambition is to make the audience cry.
In that endeavour Vimanam flies higher than you would expect. What clips its wings are the incidental characters, a foul-mouthed prostitute with a heart of gold(Anusuya Bhardwaj), an autodriver and a shoe repairer…they all pitch in to tell us how wonderful poor people are. If only the poor didn’t have to suffer the pangs of poverty!
Calming in spite of its shrill hysterical tone, Vimanam would have been so much more effective had it chosen understatement over screaming emotions.The central performance uplifts the film far higher than it aspires to. If only Samuthirakani didn’t have to pluck such low-hanging fruits.
This film wants the audiences’ tears. It gets it.
