Sita Ramam

Sita Ramam (2022)

Written and Directed by: Hanu Raghavapudi
Starring: DQ, Mrunal Thakur, Rashmika Mandanna
Spoilers Ahead.

They say, everything is fair in love and war. Though love and war seem like two opposites, they’re quite similar. You fight in a war, and you do the same for love. There is pain in war, and so is in love. So, a romance set amidst war is a beautiful way to explore the extremes of life. Sita Ramam is shot beautifully, with visually appealing locations, production design and costumes. The film borrows the structure from Mahanati, where two people are on a quest for a big story, played by Rashmika and Tharun Bhascker. The film keeps intercutting between DQ’s story and this track. Although there is a terrific twist in the ending, which joins both these tracks. For me, though the romance in the first half was middling a bit, it beautifully talks about longing. Waiting for someone’s letter for days together, in today’s day and age of quick replies, I can’t even imagine how it’d have been to wait for hear from someone indefinitely.

The interval gave me goosebumps. The film already has a lot of barriers between the both of them, and the film keeps increasing these barriers further and further as the characters grow become fonder of each other. The ending was really good, especially the scene where the small girl takes the letter from his hand with an innocent smile on her face. That shot broke my heart. Rashmika’s character has a beautiful arc – from being an arrogant woman, to being someone who learns gratitude. From someone who hates India, to someone who realizes that an Indian man saved her, who didn’t care about which country she was from. He saved her, only because both of them were humans. In the ending when she meets Noor and asks if he’s alive, Noor says no, and she almost says it with a straight face. That expression carried a lot of pain. I enjoyed the film, and the terrific ending made up for whatever middling there was in the middle here and there.