When three generations of women from the same family, cloistered by the misogynistic men in their lives, set off on a road trip together, what do they come to discover about themselves? This is the premise of Sweet Kaaram Coffee starring Lakshmi, Madhoo and Santhy Balachandran, and directed by Bejoy Nambiar, Krishna Marimuthu, and Swathi Raghuraaman. The new eight-episode Tamil web series streaming on Amazon Prime Video starts off as a sweet watch, but is ultimately bogged down by uneven performances.
Veteran actor Lakshmi’s role as Sundari, the grandmother, is a refreshing dismissal of the conventional ageing, widowed mothers we usually see in Tamil cinema. Sundari’s overzealously duty-bound son exhausts her with his infantilising attitude in the name of caring for her, and she feels suffocated by him. On his father’s first death anniversary, while the son assumes that Sundari must be in mourning without even trying to understand her feelings, Lakshmi has actually forgotten the date. Instead, she is secretly attempting to find out the whereabouts of a mysterious figure from her past.
Madhoo as Kaveri, the daughter-in-law, seems to have not much else to her life other than caring for her family, and occasionally dispensing sexist advice to her own daughter. But she too is hurting in a home that has scant regard for her besides the expectation that she must see to their daily needs.
And then there is the young daughter, Nivi (Santhy Balachandran), who wants to be a cricket player. But her boyfriend Karthik (Dev), who is also a cricketer, is bent on killing her dreams in the name of family and marriage. “Women’s cricket hasn’t reached that level yet. Who buys tickets to go and watch women play in the stadium? I thought you would realise on your own that I have the better chance of [becoming a professional cricketer] between the two of us,” he berates her, after Nivi rightly calls him out for hiding her profession from his parents.
The introduction to each of these women’s lives makes one thing pretty clear. Among the men we see across the same three generations, little has changed in the way they view women and their desires. The embattled relationship between Sundari and her daughter-in-law Kaveri is also not one that is common in Tamil cinema. During their road trip, Sundari tries to get Kaveri to open up about her sexual desires, leading to a warm and hilarious conversation between the two. At the same time, Kaveri is able to tell her mother-in-law how she was just realising that she’d been written off as a ‘bore’ by Sundari until then.
Throughout the show, the women speak their minds on each other’s flaws, and acknowledge their own biases towards each other.
Of the three actors, it is Lakshmi who outshines her co-stars by several miles. Tamil cinema audiences who are old enough to do so will recall her long-standing ability for balancing comedy and character acting in the same role. In Sweet Kaaram Coffee, Lakshmi does a great job of portraying Sundari’s irreverence towards tradition and convention. The way the actor brings forth Sundari’s infectious personality makes it hard to not like her.
Madhoo manages to convey the emotions of a woman with long-forgotten dreams, disillusioned with her marriage and neglectful of her own humanity, but nothing particularly stands out in her performance. In many sequences, her attempt at projecting a woman confused by the world outside of her home life comes across as cutesy and contrived.
Santhy too just about lets us understand her character Nivi’s inner conflict between her cricketing aspirations, her love life, and her fear of the future. There is a degree of depth in Lakshmi’s acting that is missing from both Santhy’s and Madhoo’s, which makes the series lack depth too. It’s hard to connect with Nivi and Kaveri at times, despite the plot spelling out exactly what they’re going through.
Despite the impeccably framed scenes and a golden glow of sorts following the trio around on their road trip, the uneven acting of the three protagonists lets the series down. In episodes five and six, the show introduces several increasingly flimsy twists, making it difficult to remain invested. But the big reveal about the mysterious figure from Sundari’s past whom she’s secretly seeking on their trip is interesting, and tells us a lot about who she goes on to become.
Why the songs and background score are almost exclusively based on Carnatic music is anyone’s guess, as if this Brahminical genre is the only soundtrack to life experiences for Tamils. This becomes particularly grating when a sequence has the mandatory white man awed by how ‘connected’ to each other the three women are, while his girlfriend says, “I guess it’s in their culture.”
For a show set in Tamil Nadu that wants to explore the suffocation of Indian family ties, perhaps the writers need to understand that birth families do not become places of shared connection due to ‘culture’ of all things. In romanticising a loose term like ‘culture’ and crediting it for good family ties, the series misses an opportunity to explore the intricate power dynamics of Indian families and society. It also feels like an unnecessary attempt at a balancing act, as the show does take several noteworthy stances on intergenerational hurts and feminism. The ending, a cliffhanger, did not quite work for me. But perhaps it is a hint at another season to follow.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. TNM Editorial is independent of any business relationship the organisation may have with producers or any other members of its cast or crew.