Ninnu Kori – An Engaging Film With An Unconvincing Climax That Provides Us With Some Food For Thought

Ninnu Kori was….not disappointing exactly, but a bit of a downer. And that’s unfortunate because it held so much promise! Good acting, interesting plot, believable and relatable characters, catchy music – it had everything. But still, somewhere, at some level, it doesn’t come together.

Pallavi (Nivetha Thomas) is a college student who wants to make a dance video of herself to show it to her future husband and kids. But her pathetic dancing skills pushes her back, until she meets Uma Maheswar (Nani), a Ph.D. student in statistics. After spotting him dance one night, she convinces him to become her dance master. And soon, they fall in love.

But as always, all is not rosy for long. Pallavi’s father begins looking for a groom for her, and she tells Uma to elope with her. However, an incident with Pallavi’s father and a neighbor makes Uma realize that he needs to become more well-settled in order to keep Pallavi happy, and leaves to pursue his Ph.D in Delhi after asking her to wait for him. But things spin out of control and Pallavi ends up marrying soft-spoken Arun (Aadhi), leaving Uma shattered.

Years later, a happily-married Pallavi finds out that Uma is on the path of self-destruction and believes that she is suffering with her husband. Feeling responsible, she invites him to spend ten days with them so that he can see her happiness for himself. What happens next is what Ninnu Kori is all about.

It’s clear that debutant director Shiva Nirvana is here to stay. Instead of taking the beaten path, he chose to tell a story that’s unusual in Telugu, and while it’s not entirely satisfying, there are so many things to like about this movie. Firstly, the performances. In the first half, Nani plays what he’s known for – the charming, relatable boy-next-door. However, the second half requires him to play a character that is not entirely likeable – and it is here that he shines. He makes us empathize with Uma when another actor might have made us hate him. This is both the boon and the bane of the film (I’ll get to why in a bit). Nivetha Thomas is wonderful too, and shares great chemistry with Nani. The supporting cast is good, especially Murali Sharma as Pallavi’s father. However, Aadhi is somewhat bland.

The songs by Gopi Sundar are catchy, though I felt there were a few too many of them. Adiga Adiga and Once Upon A Time Lo would be my picks. The direction is good, the frames look colourful and alive.

Now my problem with Ninnu Kori – the climax. I got what Nirvana was trying to say, that love doesn’t happen just once. It is possible to fall in love after marriage. But while I got it, the film didn’t manage to convince me. By the end of the film, though Uma realizes that Pallavi and Arun are happy, I’m still stuck at the same spot Uma used to be in – with the belief that the happy marriage is just a façade. Pallavi’s life post marriage seems so dull and unexciting compared to the brightness and cheerfulness of her romance with Uma.

With Uma, it felt that Pallavi was more in control of the proceedings. Otherwise the timid, shy daddy’s girl, Uma’s love gives her courage. From the starting, she is the one who takes the lead. From convincing him to teach her dance, to letting him hold her waist to control her movements. Opening up to him about to him about a senior ragging her, unabashedly confessing her love, craftily making her father take him in as a tenant, to finally demanding him to elope with her – she’s the one who decides her life.
However, with Arun, she seems like a mere shadow of her pre-marriage self. From the starting, theirs feel like an unequal relationship. Unlike with Uma, here all the decisions in her life are taken by the men in her life. Her father and Arun decides to get her married to him, never considering her opinion. Her marital life with him is all about him – cooking for home, going for treks with his friends, staying at home when he’s working etc. While with Uma she used to relish her favorite cashew upma, Arun wasn’t even aware that she liked it. She cooks healthy meals for him because he likes it, and gives a lame justification for this, something along the lines of, “I cook what he likes because I like doing it.” The statement by itself feels ok. But as we get to see the initial freedom she had with Uma, it feels jarring.

That is actually the problem with this film. None of the above make for a bad marriage. Arun is shown as nice, supporting husband, and it’s entirely possible she is happy with him. I would have bought it too, had they under-old the first love story. But they didn’t, and ended up under-selling Arun and Pallavi’s story instead. And the irony is that the makers seem to realize it too! Each of the instances I pointed out is also highlighted in the movie, as Uma tries to make Pallavi see reason. In fact, Ninnu Kori feels like a conflict between what the makers want to show and what is the socially acceptable view of marriage. We get three different scenarios of similar marriages. One about Pallavi’s father’s friend’s daughter – who commits suicide after being forced to marry another man when she was on love with another. One about Arun’s friend and his wife, who decide mutually to divorce due to incompatibility. We even get the response to the old ‘have kids’ argument – that it’s better to separate in an understanding than prolonging it by having kids, having screaming matches and then culminating in a messy divorce, with the kid being the most affected. There’s a third story too, of two couples who fall in love with each other’s spouses, and are now quite happy. But the liberty that the women is given in these stories is not extended to our heroine. Instead, we get a contrived back-story for Arun, which is supposed to make us (and Uma) feel like his love is much more greater than Uma’s. While Uma buys it, I don’t.

Despite all this, it might have still worked had we been shown, as Margaret mentions in her review in Don’tCallItBollywood, that Pallavi chooses to stay with her husband, like Aishwarya got a scene where she, not any of the men, chooses to stay with Ajay in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. Here too, we get a semblance of a choice, where even Pallavi’s father feels that she’s better off with Uma. But even here, she makes the choice in a situation contrived by Uma to make it appear as though he is not as good as compared to Arun. Which is why, though Pallavi makes a choice, it never felt like she had one in the first place.