It’s a Boy-meets-Girl story, but with a difference. The Boy thinks love is like what they show in the movies. The Girl is more practical, perhaps too much so. But surprise, surprise, this is not just their love story. It is also about the other kinds of love that exist around them. Even within its playful tone, this is a romance that is refreshingly close to reality. That’s the short take. A longer review follows, and it may contain spoilers.
Aaromaley is a light, breezy film that walks and talks like a rom-com, but the tropes and beats aren’t exactly that of a rom-com. For example, there’s no meet-cute. There’s no misunderstanding. And for the longest time, the hero and the heroine aren’t even in love. They are not in a relationship or a situationship or whatever. They work at the same office, so I guess it’s a… colleague-ship? If we define a rom-com as a movie in which the comedy stems from the romance, then Aaromaley kinda-sorta qualifies – but only because our hero and heroine work in a matrimonial agency that engineers the romance of other people. Why am I talking about the genre of this movie? Because it’s hard to pin down, and that itself is a success for the writers and for director Sarang Thiagu. They have made a fresh, fun film about love that is also a film around love. And the romance between the hero and heroine is almost an afterthought!
The opening stretch is cheerfully deceptive, and it makes us think we are in for a bunch of romantic clichés. Like the title, the scenes, too, are an homage to Gautham Menon’s classics of the genre. Kishen Das plays Ajith. In a flashback, his friends go to watch the playboy-ish, chauvinistic Theeradha Vilayattu Pillai, while he watches Vinnai Thaandi Varuvaaya. After the film, Ajith falls in love with the idea of falling in love. His attempts at getting a girlfriend in school and college are amusingly done, but things get serious at home and he has to get a job. He ends up working at that matrimonial agency, which specialises in finding the perfect match for each client, whose details are recorded in files with a scientific level of thoroughness. Some of this may have to do with Anjali, played by Shivathmika Rajashekar. She is one of the most successful matchmakers in the company, and her methods involve a scientific level of thoroughness. For Ajith, it is about meeting your soulmate. For Anjali, it is about meeting the company’s quota. For Ajith, it is a matter of the heart. For Anjali, it is a matter of cold logistics.
We think Ajith and Anjali will become a classic case of “opposites attract”, but the film has other ideas, and these unconventional scenarios keep giving us surprises. One of these involves a girl who loves someone but whose father disapproves. The situation is utter cliché, but the film un-clichés it by using it to show the difference between Ajith and Anjali – and also to show who’s boss. Instead of getting all cute and cuddly, the story gets into a bed of thorns. Another situation involves VTV Ganesh, who is in good form as someone who’s there for laughs as well as emotional drama. Gowtham Rajendran’s lovely cinematography and Siddhu Kumar’s bouncy score keep the film at an easy-breezy eye-candy level even when the events turn prickly. Harshath Khan’s well-timed comedy also helps a lot in keeping the mood light even when the happenings turn heavy. A special shout-out to whoever named the tea shop “Chai GPT.” It gladdened my ‘dad joke’-loving heart.
The writing is super-organic, and there is not one wasted scene. There are only a few things that bothered me. One is a sad song that puts a small speedbreak in the flow. One is the old-style messagey voiceover at the end, which is an eyeroll moment in a story with this kind of tone. And then there’s the ending itself, which feels a bit rushed. You want your heart to explode with all the love on screen, and that doesn’t happen. But this is also very consistent with the tonality of the screenplay. Sarang Thiagu wants to be as real as possible, and this ending is as real as it can get. It’s what we want, but it’s also how these people would behave at that point. In other words, the emphasis is always on the world of the film and its characters and not on the audience. It’s not about being dramatic for the sake of a high moment. Everything feels earned. Everything feels as close to reality as a very pleasant romantic movie can take you. Even the minimal makeup on Shivathmika feels exactly what an office-goer would wear and not what a “heroine” would wear.
She is fantastic in a tricky role, making us feel a “strong and stubborn” woman (as her grandfather calls her) without alienating this character from us. Even her anger is controlled with a scientific level of thoroughness. Kishen Das is the perfect foil, and he is perfect as a wide-eyed young man who wears his heart on his sleeve and needs a reality check that life doesn’t work like the movies. Thulasi and Raja Rani Pandian play Ajith’s parents. They are fantastic. They make us see that love is more than remembering a wedding anniversary. It’s a beautiful writing choice that Ajith’s mother gets a backstory, while Anjali doesn’t. We don’t have to understand Anjali. We have to feel her, and we have to feel for her. And that really happens. At a time our screens are filled with blood, it’s lovely to watch something like Aaromaley. But that’s not why it works so well. It speaks in a fresh voice, it speaks a fresh filmmaking language. If it were a Whatsapp message, you’d instantly put a red-heart emoji on it.
