Have you ever been the cause of someone not doing something they love? And what if that someone is someone special to you? Can you live with that guilt? Can you live with that overwhelming sense of lost hope? Do you think you can go through your everyday life knowing at the depth of your heart that someone else’s desires are derailed because of your existence? Halitha Shameem’s latest film Minmini poses these tough questions, but gives us no exact solutions except asking us to trust in the power of time and nature to heal us all. Whenever something drastic and disturbing happens to us, we are often told, “Idhuvum kadandhu pogum (This too shall pass),” but what happens between the incident and the moving on phase is what Minmini is all about.
The film opens in a boarding school in Ooty where Pari Mukilan (a brilliant Gaurav Kaalai) is a sports champion, and the darling of everyone. He is also a garden variety bully who prefers being the top dog everywhere he goes. But then, boys hostels have a way of warming up people to each other, and despite a series of unsavoury incidents between Pari and the new entrant Sabari (an impressive Pravin Kishore), things seem to be getting better. But tragedy strikes, and Sabari is forced to come to terms with the vagaries of life. Soon enough, we are introduced to Praveena (a calm and composed Esther Anil), who is a beneficiary of a primary character’s large-heartedness. Cut to eight years later, a lonely and depressed Sabari and an earnest and philosophical Praveena find themselves riding their Royal Enfields on the Himalayas as they find answers to questions they had, and questions to thoughts they developed.
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Minmini deals with the concept of survivor’s guilt, and Halitha uses multiple angles to approach the same. Through Sabari, she talks about living a life riddled with guilt, and Praveena is someone who feels liberated about getting to live a life she never even dreamt of. Human emotions are never binary, right? They are complex. They are random. They are oscillating. They are fleeting. They are everything. And of course, they are nothing too. Halitha tries to encompass all this through a ride where the protagonists discover themselves. However, she too is burdened by the problem of excesses.
Despite dealing with a heavy subject, the school portions feel refreshing because it deals with kids being kids. Even when Pari is being a pain in the you-know-what of Sabari, they gradually warm up to each other when the former sees him as a friend and not an adversary. Now, it isn’t like Minmini is an endorsement of such behaviour, but these portions are actually dealt with a lot of sensitivity. That is the hallmark of Halitha’s films, and it shines bright in Minmini too. Many times, filmmakers and the audience understand sensitivity and sensibility on a very superficial level. Or we go for sudden subversion to put the audience’s own morality under the microscope. And then there is Halitha, who does it so effectively that even when the subversions make us question our ideas of right and wrong. It is never to make us guilty, but just to nudge us in the right direction. Take, for instance, the first time Sabari sees the rose tattoo on Praveena’s neck. They are grownups now, and they have a conversation as two self-respecting adults. In an earlier scene, when Praveena is forced to leave the comforts of a tent in the chilly mountain range due to the unwanted advances of a random stranger, she doesn’t resist help coming her way from another random stranger. It is almost like Halitha saying this world has all kinds of people, and we can’t let one bad experience stop us from expecting people to be good. Now, this can be seen as an utopian thought, but in the desolate ranges of the Himalayas, you have to place your trust in people and nature.
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But after a point, this ride in the Himalayas loses steam because the preachiness and philosophical exchanges become too overbearing. Sabari and Praveena almost turn into one of those Himalayan monks whenever they have any kind of conversation. Every time they talk to each other, it is to say something profound. These dialogues become too draining after a point because this is a film that needed a lot of silence. Why resort to spoon-feeding and driving home the central premise so many times? Khatija Rahman’s score and Manoj Paramahamsa’s visuals does an excellent job of showing the vast expanses of the Himalayan landscape, the nothingness in the protagonists’ hearts that need to be filled with unbridled love and attention. However, the film takes too many detours just to bring Sabari out of his self-imposed cocoon, and after a point, despite the music and visuals spoon-feeding emotions to us, there is a distinct sense of dissonance.
It is almost like Halitha, who loves allowing the audience to connect the emotional dots at their own speed and through their own experiences, seems to be nudging us to predetermined places. Minmini promised a free-flowing emotional ride, and in places, it delivers the same with the sensitivity of a morning dew on a freshly bloomed flower. Unfortunately, whenever this is replaced with a map-based point-to-point journey that is too calculative and feels too perfectly stitched together, Minmini takes a bumpy tumble now and then. But when the final view of the ride is the one that Halitha decides to end Minmini with, then those bumps and detours are par for the course.
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Minmini movie cast: Praveen Kishore, Gaurav Kaalai, Esther Anil
Minmini movie director: Halitha Shameem
Minmini movie rating: 3 stars
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