Varane Avashyamund – My Flash Review!

At the outset, Varane Avashyamund (Match wanted) is a slice of life, easy going and a time pass film. The film is produced by Dulquer Salman and written/ directed by Anoop Sathyan who makes a debut as a director. Both of them being sons of ace actor and director respectively, decide to make this as a nostalgic tribute to the 90’s Malayalam cinema, watching which they grew up, I guess. The film is full of references to cinema of that era, starting from the cast.

The cast includes Dulquer himself and the very promising Kalyani Priyadarsan ( again offspring of 90’s hit Director Priyadarshan & actress Lisy) but, it is the veterans like Shobana, Suresh Gopi and Urvashi who make presence their felt throughout the film. Shobana is stunning and every time she’s on screen, “yamunai aarum, eera katrum” kept wafting in the surroundings. She is timeless and age it seems, cannot wither her. Kalyani just plays the part so perfectly that you forget that she is emoting even in slightly heavy scenes.

As the title suggests, the story is about a girl who is looking for an arranged match. This gets woven in 4 different tracks happening in a pious apartment complex in Chennai which one will mistake for Utopia. Because, only nice and sweet things happen here. As it happens in these kind of stories, the principal characters of Shobana, Suresh Gopi, Dulquer and Kalyani all are battling their inner demons and finally all’s well that ends well. In between all this, the film is peppered with cute moments that put a smile in your face.

The pace is easy going and slow. The script provides much more scope for humour which unfortunately is not leveraged enough. There are far too many characters in the film and you wonder why some (Lalu Alex for example) are present at all.

The camera work is soothing to the eye and colourful. The songs and background score by Alphons Joseph leans heavily on Carnatic style and are pleasing to the ears but you get the feeling that you have heard similar tunes before in Tamil and Malayalam films.

Anoop Sathyan makes a promising debut by taking a very risky and not so formulaic script and gives a good account of himself. But, I have a problem with young directors falling in this “ 90’s tribute” trap (remember Petta) which sort of consumes the script in the end.

Having said that, Varane… is a delectably sweet film which you can watch with family. And above all, Shobana kaga once paakalaam.