Beyond Bollywood: On ‘Thiruchitrambalam’ and The Mundanity of Love

On the face of it, Thiruchitrambalam (2022) looks like a conventional romantic comedy: underdog hero, broken family, quirky best friend, and a couple of dating misadventures. Dhanush plays this titular hero. The world revolves around him. A college dropout, Thiru works as a lowly food-delivery agent; he lives with a grumpy policeman father (Prakash Raj) whom he blames for the death of his mother and sister, and a beer-loving grandfather (Bharathiraja) who plays peacemaker in the house.

He shares a good rapport — and his name — with the old man, and spends his off-time hanging out with his childhood buddy a floor below. This buddy of his is a typical hero’s-best-friend trope: lazy, funny, protective, unpretentious. Their banter is infectious. A nice early scene shows the friend marching into Thiru’s flat with the muscle-memory of a family member and scolding his dad for slapping him again. But this friend is a girl, Shobana (Nithya Menen).

The reason the film works wonders is because it uses convention only as an entry point. It subverts the staging of staple themes like grief and love in middle-class society. For instance, the grief doesn’t look or behave like grief; the broken home with three generations of men is creaking under the weight of survivors’ guilt and misdirected masculinity. With the women gone, none of them are able to stick to their original identities anymore. The grandfather virtually plays the role of a homemaker and wife; the cop ends up playing the role of an ailing grandfather after getting paralysed from a stroke; the son has to play the role of a ‘father’ and breadwinner in time. At least two of them are mourning the death of a future they lost, by using rage as a refuge. Everything that Thiru throws away — his education, career, confidence — is a slow-burning trauma impulse. It’s almost as if their grief comes disguised as mundane dysfunctionality.

The main-character energy of his feelings turn Thiru into someone who believes that love is showy, cinematic and visible. He sees romance as a story: something that will fix him and give him the will to be happy. The two characters he falls for — an upscale former crush; a girl he sees at a family wedding — come across as protagonists of parallel movies. He is rejected by both, of course, because the film reveals a more grown-up language of love. It isn’t the one we’re conditioned to see in movies. We do know that the two sibling-like friends will end up together, further supplying the very Indian notion of how a boy and a girl can never remain friends. But the triumph of Thiruchitrambalam is that they do not fall in love, as it inevitably tends to happen. It is that they were already companions without quite knowing it.

Their long-term comfort and familiarity reframes romance as a habit: an antidote to newness rather than a reflection of it. Usually, such equations are questioned and reduced by stories that see love as a spectacle of passion and madness. But the ritualistic nature of love — where physical desire is only a temporary phase — comes to the fore here. There’s always the danger, in such cases, of the hero “settling” for a friend — like an arranged match — instead of seeking a soulmate. But Thiru and Shobana present a more lived-in and everyday portrait of partnership, where meet-cutes and chemistry and lofty gestures are outed as devices peddled by pop culture and movies. It’s a bit like Aamir Khan and Urmila Matondkar at the beginning of Rangeela as Munna and Mili. They’re meant to be, but only in ways that summon the stability of being known, not the thrill of discovery.

Sometimes that’s what love is: a peripheral presence, an unsaid promise, an unwitting commitment that doesn’t scream for attention. Shobana is around Thiru — shaping the background without receding into it — during all his challenging moments and crises. She’s just there, strolling in and out of his space like they’ve always shared it. There is no prospect of a heady honeymoon phase because it’s like they’ve directly jumped to the fifth stage: platonic but unconditional, sexless but sane. Even their arguments reek of intangible companionship and primal understanding.

The film stumbles when it refuses to go the whole hog by disclosing that Shobana was secretly in love with Thiru all along. That he was too caught up in himself to notice this. It would’ve been better if both of them were reminded by the elders that they’ve been a married couple without the labels for decades. One of the best moments appears in the end, when they’re walking out the colony gate bickering and heading to their respective jobs like they used to. Then he pauses, and reminds her that they’re married. An awkward kiss on the cheek follows. They’d probably come back home in the evening and troll each other for having bad days. She’d hang out with his dad effortlessly if there’s another father-son spat. Most romcoms end with a happily ever after, but Thiruchitrambalam humanises — and deglamorises — the meaning of one. Imagine being happy without knowing what happiness looks like.