On Prabhuram Vyas's Lover

A seemingly nothing shot in Prabhuram Vyas’s Lover concedes everything about Arun (Manikandan), the obsessive, self-unaware, emotionally stunted, lovelorn man with several failings. His girlfriend Divya (Sri Gouri Priya) reluctantly invites him to her birthday party. He reluctantly decides to attend. She feels the six-year relationship has run its course while he is here to salvage a broken bond. He arrives at her place in his modest scooter with no rear-view mirrors, so he turns to the two-wheeler parked next to it and uses its mirror to check his face and do his hair. It might be unintentional, but somehow appropriate that Arun’s scooter has no mirrors (maybe his mother who’s learning to drive has broken it). He fails to reflect on his past actions, unwilling to turn around and check his behavior. Arun travels in life with blinkers on, a vapid desire to be the main character in every situation but without the cojones to summon the energy. He is stationary even in motion, ignoring people in its wake and propelled by a relentless self-pitying soul.

Prabhuram Vyas structures Lover in a self-fulfilling form, the same events recur to the same results as Divya’s love for Arun is stretched like an elastic until it gives away. It is messy but not stormy. The film airdrops us into a world where Divya and Arun had a familiar meet-cute followed by a steady, healthy relationship for long, and we know very little of those years. We meet them when they are at a crossroads while our sympathies have the right of way. Divya holds a good job, a vibrant social life and is happier when Arun is not around. He, on the other hand, is possessive, suspicious, malicious and emotionally abusive towards her at a time when at least one of them is not the person they used to be. It is a world populated by a tormented Divya and persistent Arun. It is a real world where people’s external dispositions manifest inward as well. For instance, Divya’s outspoken colleague Aishu (Harini) is more skeptical of Arun and Divya’s relationship while the timid Ramya (Nikhila Sankar) is less forthright and uninvolved in her friend and roommate’s spiraling dynamic. Harish’s Suhail is the kind who’d switch to the stride of the person he is with, someone who will bookend his strong advice and comments with a twinkle in his eye and tongue firmly in cheek. Kanna Ravi’s Madan is the quintessential nice man, but not without his rough edges. Only they were someone else’s problem in the past.

Evolution wraps itself like a blanket around the film suffocating creation, a mythical concept that seemingly fuels Arun. Six years is a long time in a relationship and in the context of Lover they run from the beginning of 20s to beyond 25, some of the formative years for an individual. Not only relationships but any experience, a work of art, a brush with a character, a death or a bad workplace, all leave indelible tattoos on the skin of the being. They may leak and sting in the beginning but fade with time, but such is the power those years wield that their memories glisten long after they are gone. It is the nebulous period of indecision, anxiety and the sweet spot to punt with endless possibilities for growth that could shape decades worth of future. It is probably why the film keeps returning to the ocean and the horizon it weaves afar, especially in the context of Divya. Things might look blue, but they are mutating inside and outside her to give way to a fully formed person. And that is everything that is not happening with Arun. At one point she tells him, “I think this is me” when he tries to revive a version of her that has long disappeared.

Lover is intent on showing us Arun’s familial life while with Divya, we only get her intersecting workplace and friends’ circle. This is not without cause, there seems to be a conscious post-college independent Divya who has chosen to keep that part of her life out of the picture. It harks back to the beginning of Kadhalum Kadandhu Pogum (Nalan Kumaraswamy, 2016), when Yazhini and her friends, job in hand, enjoy newfound freedom in the song aptly titled Paravai Parandhuchu. Arun yells that Divya hides her drinking from her family, unable to understand her now, a much more mature individual ready to handle things if at all they find out. With Arun, we see him holding on to scraps and clinging to a Divya who is only in his head. He neither has the luxury nor the wherewithal to form a distance from his family, a dependent on his mother and his friends. It’s not for nothing that we see his mother’s name printed across the door of his house while Divya leads a more independent life in her apartment with a roommate. Vyas employs cuts to black in some of these transitions to show us how different Arun and Divya are in the way they live, despite holding on to a residue of a relationship.

It is easy to look at Lover as another inter-class romance which is usual fodder for this industry to give us both the best and the worst. There are many cases for the latter but the best films that handled the subject and its characters with care are Kadhalum Kadandhu Pogum and Meyaadha Maan (Rathna Kumar, 2017). Lover does not fall into this genre despite throwing enough markers to fall into that trap. “Moving on” is a phrase that comes up often and Arun cannot wrap his head around the concept. He has a blatant disregard for mobility, to go from one step to another, to move from one level to another or to grow from one person to another. We’d be justified in assuming that Divya and Arun began at a similar base point, and she climbed ladders that Arun unfortunately didn’t in the beginning and rejected later. Friends he looked down upon or were seemingly inferior to him in college are doing great now. They are entirely different people. Vyas’s film is a call for such change and growth, be it in Madan’s past actions still haunting him or Harish’s delicate balance of a man’s man equation with Arun but with a distance giving him the vocabulary that others lack to critique him. Nile Rodgers sang “your love is cancelled” leading to the practice of “cancelling” someone long after the song’s debut and Divya says as much to Arun. But Lover calls for change and acknowledgement, lighting the spark at that age that would change someone for the better. Their relationship might end and their love could die but a better man walks the ground in place of someone like Arun. We don’t always see the possibilities, like we see one version of Madan within the timeline of Lover, an impressive transformed one the characters in the film are lucky to meet. That is the broad multitude of potential the film wants us to see. In an artistic culture where every negative action demands an active indictment within the piece of art, this is probably Vyas’s boldest gamble with Lover. With a terrific actor like Manikandan and a superb Sri Gouri Priya, and tender treatment of even the supporting cast, it pays off.