'Paranthu Po' Movie Review: Director Ram's Dramedy Suffers From An Oversaturation of Sweetness

If there is a border that exists between soft, delicate kindness and hard, forceful kindness, Paranthu Po dances so far in the lands of the latter, it cannot even see that such borders exist—that such a border is even necessary. It is team mysore pak—thegattal, or an oversaturation of sweetness, cloying, where one bite is always half a bite too much. Its very form is its foundational flaw.

Similarly, with cute and grating—a border exists between these two and anyone who has been around kids would attest to this. But Paranthu Po pretends it doesn’t, legs firmly planted in the latter, pulled along by an eight-year-old kid whose irritating, over-smart, undercooked antics work as great birth control. No kids, please and thank you.

Paranthu Po is about a family trying to make ends meet in Chennai. The mother, Glory (Grace Antony), selling saris, is in Coimbatore at a trade expo. The child Anbu (Mitul Ryan) is left in the care of the father, Gokul (Shiva), who locks the child at home and goes about his day. Anbu is given online summer classes to keep him busy, which he loathes, but flirts with his little lady friend on chat.

Mitul Ryan in a still from 'Paranthu Po'

When chased by a loan shark for not repaying on time, Gokul takes Anbu on his bike with him, on a road-trip, first to his parents', then to his childhood crush’s house (now married, this is not that kind of film), then to the holiday home of Anbu’s crush, then onwards, and forwards—and upwards, on trees and mountains, Anbu climbs, not knowing how to get down. He is never anxious, only because he has his father by his side. He knows he shall find his feet back home. The one moment he is truly afraid is when he thinks a massage chair is going to jettison him to outer space—and knowing fully well his father is not going to be there, he panics. The film’s camera opens up, moving from the claustrophobic framing of the house to the wide open spaces—mountains, ponds, trees. Top shots, wide angles, flat light—there is too much of the world to swallow in too little of an image.

Glory keeps calling to check in on her husband and son, but also on the film, so it doesn’t forget her track exists. A laboured side-plot involving her sister, who had cut off all ties with her after she married Gokul, is sketched thinly into the film. Scene one, she speaks of her sister and their estrangement. Scene two, sister shows up. Scene three, sister forgotten. Glory has an assistant to whom she is kind, and who is kind to her, in turn. These bodies walk around the film with halos.

Gokul is a father’s father—a paragon of love and patience. He slaps his son the first time they interact because he thinks Anbu is lying to him and being arrogant about it. It is a light slap, and the film does not play it up. From thereon, Gokul becomes a champion of Anbu’s life, prodding him forward, nudging his hopes into reality, this “jetty potta Jedi warrior” who loves his pizza, his burger (for breakfast, that, too), his Vijay songs, and his Ajith biker jacket. (No better example of the demanding tantrum of this child, that he cannot even hold onto one of the two warring fandoms—call it innocence or call it greed.)

Shiva and Mitul Ryan in a still from 'Paranthu Po'

“Niceness” in this film begins as an ethic, but soon reveals itself to be a narrative contrivance, a lubricant to push the film along—Gokul’s childhood crush is nice, her husband is nice, their son is nice; Anbu’s crush is nice, her father is nice, her mother is nice. Both crushes extend across two ends of the economic spectrum—one living among nature, and the one rich enough to build a holiday home with bikes inside nature, as an escape. No moral weight comes with being more or less moneyed—they are all nice, all the time.

This is where the film trips up. The way forced coincidence in stories can feel like a top-down vision of a world that wants to unfurl at its own pace, this film is sped along by one exposition of niceness after another. “Sweet” “Light”—all these words camouflage how niceness has become a way to emphasise a film’s inability to say something more complicated, heavier. It loosely flutters. The writing, too, leaves scenes that are complete, yet feel ajar. Wit is needed to close a moment, where kindness is given as a punchline.

Besides, this kindness becomes this overarching character trait that subsumes under it everything—you do not need to know more about these people. It is so central to their lives, it is all they are.

Anbu turns into a creature who keeps demanding from Gokul his attention, his patience, his peace—and from us, our attention, our patience, our peace. When his son climbs a tree but does not know how to climb down, he tells him he is proud of him for being able to climb up; ditto for a moment when the child is finally able to climb down a mountain. The son pushes his father to quit smoking. Relationships have become a garb for reform. Imagine being with someone where the predominant fixation is to make each other better people?  

Perhaps, the film would have landed on firmer ground and not quicksand, had the music been less a chorus of kindergarten emphasis—“Where is Anbu? Anbu kanavilay” or “Anbodu seruppu kaanom!” among the many interludes where music becomes not an extension of dialogue, nor an abstraction of it, as it usually is with cinema, but a repetition of it, in rhyme. These are the kind of songs that would need a world of lip-synced quirk, where characters break into song, but when the background score does the work of a body, it feels like someone in a room who is constantly narrating what is happening in the room, to the people in it.

Paranthu Po is a new voice in director Ram’s filmography, one that aches elsewhere. This turn towards something softer has, ironically, made it feel rocky, impermeable, and ultimately, opaque, a film whose characters feel stolen from myth, forced into a realism whose reality itself is upended. Cinema is an illusion of life. Illusions need to be sustained. If you want a kind world, you cannot will it with words—will it through a cinema that can hold the weight of being human alongside the demands of being kind, nice, joyful, and ultimately, free. Paranthu Po feels like a stick of god being struck on our heads. A cinema of kindness, perhaps, needs kinder cinema.