Remember the time when you were 18 and full of glee and zest? When every one of those slam-book lines sounded true and profound? Debutant director Ganesh Raj’s Aanandam (happiness) sympathises with that phase of life. It is wide-eyed, hopelessly romantic and unapologetically dreamy.
The film is anchored by a bunch of first year engineering students who are on their first class trip. The youngsters party, play truth-or-dare and treasure hunt, roam around exotic Hampi and Goa, dance in the bus and click photos together. And time and again, they pause to do some ‘soul searching’. While watching the sunrise on a Goan cliff, a girl thinks aloud that half the problems in the world would be solved if people took some time off to watch beautiful things as this. In a scene reminiscent of another popular coming-of-age film, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, one of the boys overcomes his vertigo and does a bungee jump to impress his crush (in ZNMD, he skydives). In Hampi, they sneak out from the watch of the teachers to visit an exotic shack run by foreign hippies and ponder over the purpose of life.
*****
The characters are likeable, yet constructed strictly within the conventional folds. The girls are pretty, spunky and talented. Boys are funny and confused. There is an average joe who is head over heels in love with a sunshine girl, and would do anything to hold her hands and make her laugh. There is a recluse who makes beautiful portraits of her friends in a pretty little sketchbook. The guy who is entrusted with the responsibility of organising and leading the trip is a soft-spoken geek. The teaching staff accompanying the students are caricatures that might remind one of the inimitable duo in Premam. At the end of the trip, everyone is happy and cheerful, as they were in the beginning.
The movie never attempts to go beyond the peripheries of the characters. Instead, it lets them loose on the screen to wallow in beautiful lights and a lot of cliche-ridden friendship-nostalgia moments. Ganesh, a former assistant of actor-director Vineeth Sreenivasan, has meticulously followed the latter’s rulebook to create a sugar-coated hangout movie with a cast and crew that comprises mostly of newcomers.
Recommended
The ‘happiness’ in the film’s title translates to a monochromatic emotion that excludes no one in the group. Even the driver of the bus gets to mouth some lines on the importance of having fun. In one of the ‘special’ scenes in the film, a cameo character talks about his regrets of not partying enough as a teenager for he had to chase his academic dreams. This fixation might come across as a put off for an audience that has outgrown high school nostalgia.
*****
The newcomers display great chemistry on screen. To the most part, they bring the warmth and joy of youth alive, although they falter slightly in the crucial ‘breaking-down’ scene. Anand C Chandran’s cinematography is a delight to the eyes. The lights and colours are mellow, rendering the film a dream-like quality.
The movie lacks the appeal of iconic college films in Malayalam like Sarvakalashala or Sughamo Devi. This is not because the craft is flawed (Ganesh Raj’s direction skills are sturdy and on point), but because the film is pulled down by its complacency in reveling in a middling content rather than look for greater depth and substance.
*****
The Aanandam review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the movie. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have any commercial relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.