Movie Review - Pirivom Sandhipom

Pirivom Sandhipom is different and watchable, with lush cinematography, sincere performances, a different storyline, and simple dialogues. The movie is especially bolstered by Sneha, Cheran, and Jayaram's impressive performances. The attention to Sneha's look in the movie is commendable. She starts out looking fresh faced and pretty, and as the movie progresses, her face reflects her inner state of mind more and more.

(SPOILER ALERT*** plot details and movie ending revealed below)

Story in short -

In the movie, Sneha being a people person thrives in her newly married status as the daughter in law of a massive joint family. Then, she accompanies her husband when his job takes him to a remote hill station. Incredibly lonely, she mopes around, spiraling further into depression. Her husband finally awakens to her plight, and following the doctor’s advice, takes her back home to his family and they live happily ever after.

And I did not agree with the movie....

Sneha’s troubles are not imagined. Depression caused by such isolation is a condition that millions of us are sadly all too familiar with. It is prevalent, not just with young women, but also with elderly empty-nesters. I can especially identify with this, living in America. Despite having a highly demanding full time career and an incredible supportive husband, even I am familiar with the void that isolation and protracted periods of silence creates in you – this is something which no number of phone calls, emails or nice paychecks can fill.

After the entire movie sincerely attempted to mirror reality, the climax, to me, was annoyingly simplistic. I totally agree with Jayaram’s take on the importance of relationships. But, how easy is it for people to just pack up and go back home? Upon first glance, it appears as though this movie does a great job at empathizing with women, and giving a voice to their broken hearts. But in reality – I see the movie as doing a greater disservice to such women. "Oh you are lonely? Oh well, just go back then!" seems to be the message.

In addition to oversimplifying an often intractable issue, the movie only reinforces two immensely troubling stereotypes -

1) A woman's life begins and ends with her family and relationships at home, there is no outside world, there are no social causes that she could dedicate some of her time to - Despite Sneha being portrayed as intelligent, well educated, enthusiastic, and friendly, she shows zero interest in developing herself as person after her marriage. Sure, when she lives with her in-laws, it makes sense that all her time is taken up caring for them. But, she does absolutely nothing when she is alone – except cooking, and recording sound clips. Agreed that it is a small town with few job opportunities. But how about teaching? Volunteering in the doc’s clinic? Nope. The script writers do not even make this effort.

2) A good wife is the one who keeps all her troubles to herself and puts everyone's happiness ahead of her own desires: This pathetic stereotype has been propagated from the early days of quasi-misogynistic Visu movies. In defense of this movie, there is a scene when all the elders sensibly tell Sneha that it is important for her to communicate her feelings. Sneha’s character blissfully ignores this, and the screenplay glorifies and justifies this attitude of hers. She continues to indulge in her self destructive behavior, with little regard to what her husband would do if something bad happened to her.
I am tired of such needless martyrdom. Taking care of your physical and emotional health is not a selfish thing to do – by me taking care of myself, my loved ones have one less thing to worry about.

This is just a movie - why are you getting so worked up you may ask? To me, it is not just a movie. It deals with a situation that is immensely personal. Almost every family has moms and daughters living continents away, and increasing career pressures keeps husbands and wives away from home for 13 -14 hours at a time, or even all week.

The movie would have been infinitely better if they had shown the couple eventually striking a happy medium – with Sneha spending more time with her family, and also dedicating her time, knowledge and intellectual capabilities to volunteering and/or educating herself. Sure, family is important, but can we all simply focus on cooking for our families and taking care of our kids, when there is an outside world that desperately needs us?

The movie could have been a great progressive source of inspiration - galvanizing such young, intelligent, loving, compassionate, and well educated women like Sneha to actually leverage their immense potential to change the world. When a movie is pure fantasy, sure, the writers can take a lot of artistic liberty. But when a movie attempts to deal with realism, it also then has some social obligations.

The movie sure does offer a lot of sympathy, which is not a bad thing. But it really should have also offered some socially conscious tough love. And that would have been so much better.