‘Valavaara’ Movie Review: When A Missing Cow Leads to An Emotional Discovery

Two young boys and their sweet little pregnant cow lead Sutan Gowda’s latest Kannada drama, Valavaara. This is one way to summarise the film, which packs in so much weight, drama, emotion and narrative heft in its unassuming simplicity. 

Kundesi (Master Vedik Kaushal) and Kosudi (Master Shayan) are brothers under 12, living under the same wobbly roof in their village in Sakleshpur with their parents. But they don’t have the same parents — not in the biological sense, but in a more “no two siblings have the same parents” sort of way. This is depicted deftly through a slew of slow but simmering vignettes. A brother who gets his own bat, and a brother who perennially bowls. A brother who gets a better shirt and a brother who is stuck with ones with nicks. A brother who is readily placated when he’s hurt, and the other who is pulled up because he needed to know better. No points for guessing which sibling is younger.

Kundesi might be a young kid, but living with a disapproving father makes him grow up far too quickly. His mother, played beautifully by Harshitha Gowda, takes on the role of his best friend and, much less, the role of a mother to fix the glaring gap in the equation created by her husband. This leads to some terrific emotional drama on screen when Kundesi loses their very pregnant cow while their farmer-dad is away on errands. 

In many ways, Valavaara is about lost innocence. You see it in Kundesi’s feverish anxiety when he loses the cow. The unsettling feeling in his gut isn’t just provoked by their poverty, but more so by a deep fear of his dad.

But in many other ways, Valavaara is also about the cluelessness of being a kid. Kundesi’s anxiety — which we feel deeply alongside him — mirrors how easily children misread the world around them. Yadu (Abhay), the beaming loafer of the village, reminds Kundesi of this predicament that most people struggle to navigate. “You need to live shamelessly,” he tells Kundesi, as he talks this young child off the ledge. The unlikely friendship that binds Yadu and Kundesi together is a highlight in the movie.

Valavaara could’ve been much tighter and done without a few syrupy scenes along the way, but the writing still keeps us occupied. The film largely resists the genre’s saccharine tendencies and sticks to simple human-led stories. So, along with Kundesi’s search for his cow, we learn of a penniless mother’s ache to buy her son a cake frosted with his name, and a father’s inability to show love for his son. These stories are tucked in tightly with this family’s fierce love for animals. Accompanying Kundesi and Yadu’s adventures are Jadeja, a rooster, and Gowra, the gentle cow who is going to bear a child at any moment. A reading of the film can associate the cow — chained and placed under strict vigilance by the father — with Kundesi.  When Gowra is set free, Kundesi panics because that’s a future he doesn’t imagine for himself.

There are no villains in Valavaara, and neither are there saints. Situations lead people to make decisions — these end up becoming narrative conflicts. A torn trouser pocket, a ₹250 birthday cake and the lack of a UPI account; these become momentary offenders in a film, which brings them all to a close quite meaningfully in the end.