'Mindiyum Paranjum' Movie Review: Aparna Balamurali and Unni Mukundan's Long-Distance Relationship Drama is a Thing of Joy

Rain isn’t just a character in Mindiyum Paranjum as much as it is this film’s entire ensemble cast. It has moods and meanings, faults, and feelings, all of which keep drifting in based on how Leena (Aparna Balamurali) or Sanal (Unni Mukundan) perceive it. For Sanal, rain is a happy sight for tired eyes. He lives in Dubai where it rains once a year. In the song that plays in the background, Sanal associates the rain with the imagery of being able to see Leena again, his wife who lives in Kerala. During their conversations, Sanal asks Leena if it’s raining and if it’s cold; more than worry, these questions come with a bit of mischief, that of a husband who has forgotten what it felt like to touch his wife.

But for Leena, rain isn’t all about the romance. Unlike Sanal who lives in the desert now and who grew up in the plains, Leena was raised on the hills. For her, the rain brings with it a bout of melancholy. It was a particularly rainy evening that swept away her mother, after a landslide that her village is always prone to. It is the same rain that intervenes when it’s finally time for Leena and Sanal to spend a night together in their home, after what feels like years of waiting. When the raindrops leak through their ceiling to fall onto their bed, the symbolism here isn’t too hard to read. 

Writers Arun Bose and Mridul George uses the rain like the binding force to structure their screenplay. As the film slowly builds up towards Sanal, finally coming home to Leena after several years away, the narrative keeps cutting back to events that brought them here. This could be the evening Leena’s mother passed away, or the day when her father finally found out about Sanal (he's a newly converted Christian). Like how rain becomes a stand-in for the force of nature, trying to keep the two apart, these tiny flashbacks cut to a period in which a hundred external factors become obstacles for Sanal to be with Leena. And when Leena is forced to join a ladies’ hostel, even after they’ve decided to elope, there are metal window frames even here to keep them separate. 

These visual touches are woven delicately into a film that could easily have felt too verbose. Unlike similar films of this mould in Malayalam, the aspiration here is to not underscore the beauty or the depth of their relationship. Instead, what Mindiyum Paranjum tries to achieve is an intimate reflection of what appears to be a far more complex emotion…that of longing. 

For this, there are ideas of romance that seldom reach our films. In a moment, when Sanal stops his car to video call Leena from what appears to be a beautiful spot along his way, Leena knows Sanal well enough to understand that he must have stopped there, only so he can take a smoke break. Later, when an old song begins to play on the radio, we cut back to the first time they discovered the song and that stage in their lives when there was still time for music. 

It’s this lived-in familiarity that gives their romance a new dimension and, for us, the feeling of eavesdropping into one of their most private conversations. It’s almost ironic, then, when Leena needs to go a photo studio after she finds a picture of Sanal. It’s when we listen to Leena’s instructions to combine two passport photos of them that we realise that this married couple, probably do not even have a single picture of them as a couple.  

What keeps the film moving along joyously is the easy chemistry between Aparna and Unni. Apart from all the help they derive from the script, they make us buy into their love story and the ownership Leena and Sanal have over each other. At least when it comes to Leena, we sense that this introvert has perhaps only ever opened up to Sanal, a man who feels far more outgoing in comparison. Legendary cinematographer Madhu Ambat does his bit to give the film an unfussy timelessness, adding to the feeling that Leena and Sanal’s story is that of ours as well.

What we’re left with is a film that redefines the phrase long-distance relationships for the Gulf-stricken Malayali. Instead of the miles of ocean and land that separates them, Mindiyum Paranjum thrives when it details the tiny distances that come along the way, when love is as good as a matter of fact.