Rating : 3.9/5
Genre : All-In-One
Year : 2014
Running time : 2 hour 52 minutes
Director : Anjali Menon
Cast : Dulquer Salman, Nazriya Nazim, Nivin Pauly, Fahadh, Faazil, Isha Talwar, Nithya Menon, Parvathy
Kid rating : G
Honestly, I decided to see this Malayalam movie because of a familiar face : Dulquer Salman – who starred in Karwaan. The trailer looked promising and Bangalore Days was so highly rated on IMDB that it couldn’t be too bad now, could it? It wasn’t 🙂 . It was good. A few problems here and there but it was very enjoyable.
In the genre category this falls somewhere on the Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, Dil Chahta Hai scale, and kinda in the same vein as the lovely French film “Little White Lies” – so basically about a gaggle of friends and their lives and the challenges in those lives. And not to get your hopes up too high, if I rated all these films together, Bangalore Days would rate at the bottom, but as films go it is a pretty good film, even if not as well done as ZNMD. But then ZNMD is the bomb. And a high bar.
Bangalore Days is about Divya (Nazim), Arjun (Salman) and Kuttan (Pauly), three friends who are also cousins. They all get a chance to be together as adults when all three happen to be in Bangalore – Divya because she is newly married and settling into her husband Das’s (Faazil) apartment, cerebral engineer Kuttan because his job brings him there, and fancy-free and footloose Aju because he just wants to be with his friends. Divya’s new marriage has problems right off the bat, Kuttan misses his hometown too much and Aju has past demons to conquer.
Bangalore Days is a little slow to get going, and initially came across as a little too hammy. It improved though and the characters got better delineated, and more sympathetic. Each of the cousins had their own interesting story to tell and you get pretty invested in each one since they are such a likeable lot. The film offers up moments of humor, romance, anger and strife – and depicts them well, so it feels realistic and you feel for each of the characters as they struggle through their specific predicaments.
Problems with Bangalore Days – I had issues with the rosy lens through which Divya’s marital situation was depicted, but won’t give too much away. And then, there one or two plot-points which went off the deep end, and seemed so off and uncharacteristically flashy/pandering to the masses, that it detracted from this serene, self-sufficient film.
I thought the casting was pretty darn perfect, and the actors did very well. For those of you seeking more familiar figures in this film : Isha Talwar (she played Aditi in Article 15) has a minor role here, Nithya Menon (of Mission Mangal fame) is on-screen fleetingly, and Parvathy (starred in Qarib Qarib Single) has a decent sized role as RJ Sarah.
Bangalore Days is a lovely coming-of-age/finding-yourself-and-the-love-of-your-life kind of film and does a sweet job of it. Recommended.
Kidwise: Clean and family-friendly.
