The story is about a man who gets a heart transplant and visits the family of the donor. Almost everything clicks in this movie, with overlength being the only major issue. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
In Sathyan Anthikad’s Hridayapoorvam, Mohanlal plays Sandeep Balakrishnan, a single man in middle-age. He just has his sister and a brother-in-law who’s after his money. Siddique plays this old-style schemer with old-style exaggeration, and the plotting in these portions goes back to an older time of cinema. So does a fiancé character whose entire arc, involving spy software, is too out-there and handled too casually and leads to an utterly needless action stretch. And the film does go on too long. That’s about it. I wanted to get done with the few negatives so that the rest of this review can celebrate this rare movie in today’s hectic times. It feels like hanging out very leisurely with a very nice bunch of people. Even a woman who ditched a man and married someone else comes off like a nice person. She is scheming in her own way, but there’s also a dash of desperation, and every time she appears, she makes you laugh.
Hridayapoorvam behaves like its protagonist. After getting a heart transplant, Sandeep cannot get too angry, too emotional, and so on. And the film, similarly, downplays all its emotions beautifully. The narrative has many plot points that could have been taken into a high-drama zone. There’s that woman who ditched a man. There’s the heart donor’s wife (Sangita), who has unresolved issues with her dead husband. Why does she seem so unemotional? In contrast, there’s the dead man’s daughter, Haritha (Malavika Mohanan). She is hyper-emotional. She is someone who is clinging on to every memory of her father and sees Sandeep as some kind of reincarnation. She is an architect who restores old buildings. In a way, she “restores” this older man. When they first meet, Sandeep dismisses the heart as a mere organ, an instrument that keeps him going. Haritha corrects him gently. She reminds him that this heart is what makes him a human capable of doing the things that Sandeep Balakrishnan does.
There are parts where Sandeep resolves conflicts between Haritha and her mother, as though he were really the man whose heart he now has. We get three aspiring filmmakers who are deluded enough to believe that their chance lies just around the corner. And the very funny interval point could have resulted in a taboo zone, a borderline incest angle. Hridayapoorvam could have turned into a very dark comedy. But the tone of the writing and the making is so easy and even that everything flows smoothly. Every single one of these potentially melodramatic plot points is diverted into extremely organic humour, delivered in a casual tone. Mohanlal is in good form, and he gets a good comic sidekick in Sangeeth Prathap, who plays his nurse. I wish the latter had been given more to do, but he does keep up admirably with his legendary co-actor.
Justin Prabhakaran’s lovely songs and minimal background score really add to the film’s flavour, and of the rest of the cast, Malavika Mohanan stands out. This is possibly her best outing on screen. She looks as relaxed as the film feels. Walking out of Hridayapoorvam, you realise that movies don’t have to break the mould or do great cinematic inventions all the time. This is the director’s template, and it’s been brought to the modern day with class. So many films these days are so hectic, so filled with events, so scared that the attention-deficit audience will look away, that they begin to feel like entertainment machines made on an assembly line. Like the title suggests, Hridayapoorvam feels like it came from someone’s heart. It feels hand-crafted. It feels like a relaxed holiday with some quirky and funny and all-too-human people. By the end, Sandeep Balakrishnan finds a family, and – it appears – so do we.
