The story is about the close bond between a man and his young nephew, but there is a big logical loophole that makes it difficult to empathise with anything or anyone. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
Maaman is the latest entrant in the sub-genre we know as “family drama set in southern Tamil Nadu”. Soori plays Inba, who is very attached to his elder sister Girija (Swasika). The woman is childless for a long time, and when she finally becomes pregnant, Inba is delighted. He accompanies Girija to her first scan, he is the first one to listen to the baby’s heartbeat, he is the first one to talk to the foetus when they find out it has developed ears – it’s as though the father (Baba Bhaskar) is irrelevant. And in turn, the nephew, nicknamed Laddu (Prageeth Sivan), returns the favour. When Inba is marrying a doctor named Rekha (Aishwarya Lekshmi), Laddu sits between the couple. Laddu is used to sleeping with his uncle, so he accompanies the man to his wedding night. Laddu cannot bear to be apart from Inba, so there’s no honeymoon.
This bizarre premise might have worked if Laddu had been shown to be on the autism spectrum, or with a psychological or medical condition that explained his glue-like attachment to his uncle. Rekha even suggests as much, that the boy be taken to a doctor. But nothing comes of it, and we are left watching a child throw endless tantrums without ever being disciplined. Inba, then, comes off like a bigger child. Instead of wanting to lead a life with his wife, all he can think about is his nephew. We are meant to buy these severely dysfunctional relationships as “paasam”, or the affection that comes from familial bonds. The film quickly goes off the rails. Rajkiran and Viji Chandrasekhar play a childless older couple that exist in the screenplay for no apparent reason other than to milk more tears from the audience.
Maaman wants to be a throwback to the mighty family melodramas from an older time, but the scenes are so contrived that I didn’t buy them for a minute. People make strange decisions without consulting one another, and you wonder what the point of a large family is if even close relatives do not discuss the issues at hand. Women are slapped at random (in the “how dare you interfere?” sense), a thaali is pulled off at random, Inba falls at Rekha’s feet, we are left searching for Inba’s so-called closeness with his sister… Just about nothing works, and the only character we feel about is Rekha. At one point, she screams that she cannot deal with Inba and his stupid family, and I was nodding and rooting for her to find her way into a more sensible movie. When I gave a similar movie a similar review a while ago, a “rooted director” accused me of being an urban guy with no idea of how families worked down South. Maybe it’s that. Or maybe you just want a plot to make sense on its own terms.
