“Neru”, expected more!

The long offering lacks finesse

After stellar offerings like “Drishyam 1” and “Drishyam 2” and a not so good offerings such as “12'th man” and “The Body”, I wasn’t looking forward to anything special and so it was. To compare the court scenes all you need is to watch “Kaathal The core” where they are done to a perfection and that too with actors who are not big players. In “Neru” the court scenes lack that “punch”. The judge was poorly cast and they should have replaced him. Both Siddique and Mohanlal are very good actors but they lack lustre here with dialogues that aren’t hard-hitting.

One very annoying thing that happens throughout the first part of the interrogations was the lawyers repeatedly asking the witnesses to look at the judge while answering their questions. It was plain irritating. Is this something new that has crept into the procedures? When a lawyer is asking a witness a question what is wrong if the witness looked at the asking person (the lawyer) and answered the question? Afterall it is only natural to reply to the person asking the question, isn’t it? Why then keep reminding and gesturing to the witnesses to look at the judge while answering them. Asking the witnesses repeatedly to look at the judge while answering questions was just annoying. The “not in my court” that has crept all the way from Hollywood judge scenes to Hindi films and now it has been used in this film too.

The sculpturing skills went a bit too far. The final scene itself gives it away because if that is the time she takes to properly study the anatomy of a person’s face to make a good sculpture of the person’s head and face, doing all that while she is being raped is actually preposterous. Now, let’s take it up a notch. We see how she needs to really spend time touching the lips of the face of the person she needs to sculpt which in itself is a somewhat sensual thing to do. So imagine she doing all that while she is being sexually assaulted. That really goes overboard, doesn’t it? I will still give some points for Anaswara Rajan’s performance. Also this is the first time I am seeing a blind girl shedding tears while crying which is actually not untrue (I looked it up).

I am still looking forward to Drishyam 3 if it were to happen.