Rio Raj and Vartika Jain play Raghuram and Leela. They are in love, but she has some quirks that make things difficult. The story has elements of fantasy reminiscent of older Hollywood mixed-match romances like ‘Splash’ (man falls for mermaid) and ‘Kate and Leopold’ (time-traveling aristocrat falls for modern-day woman), but there’s no romance, no comedy, and – more crucially – no charm. That’s the basic storyline and the quick review. A longer analysis follows, and it may contain spoilers.
The recently released Double Occupancy operated on the premise that a human was a man during the night and a woman during the day. Ramachandran Kannan’s Ram and Leela takes this idea and doubles it. What if the woman-by-day and man-by-night person was also… something else? The story opens with Raghuram, played by Rio Raj, who wants to get married but keeps getting rejected. Or else, he does the rejection. A random girl in a lift asks if Raghuram is free the next night, and invites him to her apartment. There, she asks if they can do it. Raghuram is a virgin. Still, he says no. What this bit of “virtue” adds to the character is anyone’s guess. On a train, Raghuram runs into Leela (Vartika Jain). She’s whiter than refined flour. Going by her iffy lip sync, she can’t seem to.speak Tamil. Naturally, like any self-respecting Tamil film hero, he falls for her at once.
After several days, Leela smiles and calls him by his name. Why did she take that long to speak to him if she already knew him? We don’t get an answer. She says she loves him. Why? We get this gem of a reason: “No solla kaaraname illa naa yes dhaane!” Raghuram’s expression suggests that he is as baffled as we are, but Leela is pretty and so he says yes. But Leela’s love comes with a condition. She won’t spend time with Raghuram after 6 p.m., by which time she has to be home. Later, when he ends up going to her home, he is asked to climb a coconut tree and later bathe a pomeranian. This makes Leela furious. She screams at Raghuram for doing whatever he was asked to do. I wanted to gently take her aside and ask her what she thought about the silent screams from the audience trapped in the theatre.
Ram and Leela wants to be a fantasy rom-com, but for that, you need leads with sparkling chemistry, and solid writing that links the magical elements with the realities of our existence. What we get here are scenes where a gangster goes in to rape a woman and discovers that she has turned into a man. We get a character named Alan Arockiaraj who wants to split up the lovers, and it turns out that his ponytail is a stick-on because he wants to hide his hairfall. Raghuram keeps calling himself a revolutionary, but for no apparent reason. It is too much to expect a film with this sensibility to explore the nuances of falling for a person versus falling for a gender – though Munishkanth plays someone who ends up being surprisingly fluid. The film does not even make a case for why Raghuram should fall for Leela, knowing all the complications that come with her, and why she should fall for him. Ram and Leela is one of those films that thinks that its idea is the screenplay. And that turns out to be the real fantasy!
