Contrary to what we are led to believe while watching this blithe-at-the-top, airy movie, there is no happy ending in Chithram. Wikipedia, in all its wisdom, describes Chithram as a “screwball comedy.” That it is not, sorry.
True, 70 percent of the storytelling is supposedly funny. Not all of what Mohanlal as Vishnu does with his PC Jonasesque co-star Kalyani (Ranjini) is as amusing now as it was 37 years ago when the collaboration between Priyadarshan and Mohanlal started with Chithram. Vishnu is cheeky and cocky, not always with reason.
Mohanlal plays a vagabond Vishnu (there is no other way to describe his role) who is picked up by an heiress Kalyani (Ranjini) as a sham husband to hoodwink her NRI father who suddenly decides to pay her a visit after the man she was to marry flees minutes before the wedding.
Instead of sitting down with her dad to explain the situation, Kalyani, with her uncle’s help, stages this dumb charade which goes exactly the way it is expected to. Very soon Vishnu and Kalyani’s father are bum chums, and Kalyani develops a soft corner for Vishnu. Ho hum to that.
Then it happens. Like a roti being flipped on a hot tava, Priyadarshan does a narrative flipflop from fun to a yarn about a man who killed his wife (Lissy, who later married Priyadarshan) in the mistaken notion that she was cheating on him.
The death-row ending is really the death of a film that begins with some promise of fun and keeps sinking deeper and deeper into a melodramatic morass from where escape becomes impossible, just like Vishnu and his dis with destiny.
Chithram has not aged well. Priyadarshan perhaps wanted to give Mohanlal a chance to dance in varied moods. Mohanlal is agreeable as the well-meaning imposter who has a way with words. There is a clear Hrishikesh Mukherjee influence in the first half, with Mohanlal doing what Rajesh Khanna did in Anand and Bawarchi and Rekha in Khubsoorat: spread a smile in sullen times.
Mohanlal is reasonably confident in the lighter moments. But the theatrical finale feels like it belongs to another planet.
Normally, we had comic intervention in the Hindi and South Indian films of the past. Here, there is tragic intervention pulling the narration down.
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