Oru Adaar Love movie review: Oru Adaar Love has no plot as such except for a predictable romantic triangle that plays out between Priya Prakash Varrier, Roshan Abdul Rahoof and Noorin Shereef.
Oru Adaar Love movie cast: Priya Prakash Varrier, Roshan Abdul Rahoof
Oru Adaar Love movie director: Omar Lulu
Oru Adaar Love rating: 2 stars
Oru Adaar Love opens with a cultural fest accompanied by a pleasant song scored by Shaan Rahman. It is a montage song filled with beautiful faces, capturing candid moments of random individuals at the fest. These people we see contribute nothing to the narration that follows. They were just there to lighten the mood before director Omar Lulu could re-burden our mind with the senselessness of the human race.
Omar Lulu has used the montage song as an excuse to celebrate cultural diversity. It feels like the director’s way of showing a finger to ethnocentric groups that attack the idea of different cultures coexisting in the same place.
Cut to next scene, we see a boy cat-calling a girl student, who is a fresher. We see a close-up shot of her eyes before we could see her full face. You know who she is. She is Priya Varrier who shot to fame with just a wink. Omar understands the popularity of Priya and plays to the gallery. The boy who cat-called her is Roshan (by the way the director has retained the real names of these actors in the film). He wants to indulge in some unharmful ragging, but his bluff is called out by a very short fella, who happens to be his senior. The size doesn’t always matter as long as you have extra years behind you.
That scene makes way for Manikya Malaraya Poovi song, which as a teacher puts it, is meant to spark chemistry between all the new students. The auditorium doubles up as a hunting ground for all singles looking for a partner. A couple of minutes into the song, the most-awaited moment of the film arrives. Priya winks at her school crush, Roshan. After all, she didn’t take long to make her feelings known. What surprised me is, even after repeatedly viewing her world-famous wink over the last few months, the moment still got me.
Surprising, right? Even the film becomes auto-conscious later in a scene when a character addresses the emotion that made many girls yelp in pain: I can wink better than Priya.
But, the fact is that apart from Priya’s wink nothing about this film gets to us. It has a series of feel-good moments that doesn’t have any effect due to their familiarity. You laugh, smile, empathize and move on. But, it doesn’t stick with you for long.
Oru Adaar Love wants members of the audience to identify with the characters. And it did make me recollect some old memories, but it was not the first film to accomplish it or won’t be the last. The major drawback here is that the scenes in the film feel so random as opposed to moving the narration from one point to the next.
Omar and his screenwriters Sarang Jayaprakash and Lijo Panada also sneak in a few messages for the society through a couple of celebrity cameos. The filmmakers have taken a heavy-handed approach while doing so.
Oru Adaar Love has no plot as such except for a predictable romantic triangle that plays out between Priya Prakash Varrier, Roshan Abdul Rahoof and Noorin Shereef. The point the film tries to make hasn’t been fleshed out fully to last a two-hour long narration. The entire movie feels like one big set up to achieve a moment that’s fashioned to make the audience sob.