Journey Of Love 18 Movie Review: Meenakshi Dinesh, Nasleen Film Is A Sedate Elopement Excursion

Normally films about elopement are an adrenaline rush: Raj Kapoor’s Bobby and Samuthirakani’s Naadodigal come to mind immediately.

This elopement procedural is remarkably shorn of melodrama and violence. In fact, I didn’t even realize until the climax that the boy is a Dalit and the girl of a supposedly high caste, and that the root cause of the resentment in both the families is: how dare he??!!!

The most daring action in the calm and restrained(sometimes to the point of dullness) plot is a bus that is burnt down in the prologue by a bunch of students in the middle of the night. One of the young arsonists Akhil(Naslen K Gafoor, who was also in the director’s previous film) gets a call which he must attend. It is his girlfriend Athira(Meenakshi Dinesh) agreeing to elope with him.

The question is, how? None of Akhil’s friends have a clue. Only one braveheart in the entire length and breadth of Vadakara has ever dared to elope. Now the sole eloper Rajesh(Binu Pappu) must become Akhil’s elope consultant.

Rajesh decides the colour of the wedding saree, the time and venue of the wedding, etc. A blouse must be stitched overnight to go with the wedding saree. And there is a deadpan comic sequence where the tailoring mistress is woken up in the middle of the night to do the needful. But what is the bride’s blouse size? One of Akhil’s friends eyes the tailor’s daughter.

“About her size?” the lad offers coyly.

All this makes Journey Of Love 18+ sound like a comic take on puppy love and elopement, which it is not. The film is deliberately sombre in tone, giving away nothing of the intrinsic tension or humour in the situation. No one is in the mood to cause lasting damage to the youngsters like they did in Anurag Kashyap’s recent Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat.

For a film about a recycled Romeo & Juliet, Journey Of Love 18+is a surprisingly reposeful film. A slap here and an abuse there, but otherwise the lovers face no major hurdles even during the climax when, traditionally, all hell should have broken loose.

If you are looking for guns to come out to stop the lovers from coming together, this is not your cup of tea. This lowkey drama offers the ‘confront’ of the familiar. As in real life here too the actors don’t behave as if they have a camera recording their expressions and feelings. Many of the actors from the director’s debut film Jo & Jo show up to do something entirely unexpected. They are in a potentially dramatic situation. But they never succumb to the temptation of conforming to the traditional pattern of feuding against love.