What among all the myriad expressions in a film would have made the creators choose for its poster, the image of a couple strolling in the night? There, in a dimlit street is a clear picture of Zarin Shihab in her faded kurta and a barely visible smile on her face. Alongside her is Roshan Mathew, tall and dreamy, hands in his pockets. Like a postcard of a memorable night, the poster of Ithiri Neram on the fences of buildings and online pages prompted viewers to revisit an old memory, bring back a lost lover, and picture an evening together.
Young people interviewed as part of the film’s promo waved away the chance. No, they said, they did not want anything to do with their ex, it was traumatic or bad enough the first time around. “That was a surprise,” says filmmaker Prasanth Vijay, who assumes it is a generational difference. He would have thought there would be more regrets, or desires for a second chance.
The film is essentially a love story, woven in conversations, when two old friends separated by years and long distances come together for an evening. But wouldn’t that familiar picture – the stroll, the gesture, the night street – bring alive memories of another couple on another stretch of road in the much loved film 96, I ask Prasanth. That was the initial idea, he admits, to let the reference create some interest in the film. “But later on,” he says, “it became a baggage. Now we are eager to correct that impression, that once you are inside [the film] it is not anything you have seen before.”
Ithiri Neram too is a reunion, but the script flows in a different direction. The seed of it was sown, Prasanth says, on reading the Facebook post of a journalist friend, about a real life incident involving a man and a woman and something that happens to them on a night. Prasanth plucked out the incident and placed it under layers of fiction, giving the man and the woman a past, and adding a curious mix of characters to aid them along.
When it was time to write a script, he roped in an old friend, techie-turned-writer Visakh Sakthi. “From working together before, I know he has a taste for writing conversations that are witty and without cliche. There was a lot of back and forth between us and even among the actors. We must have already had Roshan Mathew in mind because when we originally wrote the script, his character was called Roshan. The only suggestion that Roshan made was to change the name of the character, so we made it Anish,” Prasanth says, laughing.
Zarin came into the picture after Prasanth saw a preview of Aattam, the film that would prove her to be one of the most competent young actors to look forward to in Malayalam cinema. It helped that Roshan and Zarin both came from a theatre background, and knew each other from attending an acting workshop together. That familiarity was needed for the film to work well, Prasanth says.
“We also wanted it to be clear that her character had spent some time outside of Kerala while the male character had remained here. There is that contrast. We chose to make it subtle, her expansion of views, her change in attitude, not by outward appearances of clothing or language, but the way she expressed herself, how she thought of things.”
Senior actor Nandhu and young Anand Manmadhan play two other important characters, in roles unexpected of them.
This is the first film that Prasanth has cast so many known faces in. His first two features, critically acclaimed and screened at film festivals, could not get proper theatre release because of their offbeat nature and because the actors, though skilled, were little known. Athisayangalude Venal (2017) is a beautiful drama about a little boy who is obsessed with becoming invisible. In Daayam (2023), a teenager tries to come to terms with her mother's sudden passing.
It seems like Prasanth is letting his protagonists grow with every film. By the third venture, the main characters have stepped comfortably into their late 20s. Only here, he attempts a more mainstream approach, in the choice of actors, in getting a good production from fellow filmmaker Jeo Baby, in the generous sprinkling of the background score, and in what he calls ‘the supply of information’.
“I connect all the dots, unlike in my arthouse films where I left something unsaid. As a viewer, I enjoy all kinds of cinema, so making a more commercial film was not a problem. The kind of [arthouse] films that I love making need little resources. But what happens to them afterward is a problem—the films are not available online, there would be limited theatre releases, and there is no future for them. When I try to pitch a new film, I am viewed as a newcomer, because they haven’t watched the others,” Prasanth says.
He hopes Ithiri Neram will make a difference. He has not gone out of his way to give it a mainstream appearance. He says it is treated with the same kind of love that filmmaking never fails to trigger in him.
Ithiri Neram releases in theatres on November 7.