Kushi (2023) Review

A young couple madly in love with each other brave excommunication from their parents and makes an idyllic life of their own before the vagaries of marital life threaten to shatter their little paradise. They then find each other again after a turn of providence, and inspiration from a more mature and eye-opening couple.

That is both Sakhi, and Kushi. The latter is Shiva Nirvana's homage to Mani Ratnam. It explicitly references Mani Ratnam's filmography many times in the first hour, and implicitly draws its soul and beats from Sakhi in the second hour. Nirvana's Kushi wants to be Ratnam's Sakhi.

But it falls short in a number of ways.

Firstly, Mani Ratnam's films are magical on a visceral level because of his direct access to some of the best craft that worked in cinema. Santosh Sivan and A R Rahman had the Himalayan snow crystallise right in front of our eyes and ears in the breathtaking Paruvam Vaanalaa. Barring an actual trip to Kashmir, that song, and film, was the default imagination of Kashmir for crores of people across south India.

Shiva Nirvana doesn't have that luxury. His technicians are not bad, per se. But "not bad" isn't getting very close to the pure alchemy his inspiration achieves. About an hour of Kushi takes place in Kashmir and it looks rather... ordinary. Likewise, most of the songs are entertaining while they play, and forgettable right after.

Secondly, Ratnam creates moments. He can pull a stunningly romantic moment out of thin air. Like that one charming shot in Sakhi where she, from across the wire fence, tells him off for being a rich kid who wastes his time with things like love, and he gives her the shortest, flirtiest, handwave in response. Again, set to Rahman's otherwordly score. Was that peak romance? To some of us who grew up in the nineties, it was.

This kind of ethereal moment creation is not Nirvana's strength. By contrast, even Nirvana's best film Ninnu Kori (also a favourite of this reviewer) barely had any of those. Ninnu Kori had its moments but that's because it worked as a whole story, making good use of its talented actors to effectively communicate the beats of that particular story. It may well be worth a rewatch, but it's not something you go searching on Youtube for specific scenes that you want to wash over you all over again.

Lastly, Mani Ratnam made Sakhi with complete newcomers as leads. He had full control over his film and it worked as a whole as his cinematic work. In Kushi, though, Shiva Nirvana is saddled with star power which, it appears, takes away from his own vision and direction.

This is not to say Samantha or (The?) Vijay Devarakonda turned in bad performances. In fact, Kushi may be each one's most earnest performance in a while. Samantha, in particular, knows a thing or two about emoting vulnerability which comes in handy in the latter half of the film. Devarakonda, too, goes back to his comfort zone of ordinary Hyderabad boy smarting under the travails of being in love.

But this is really a case of the stars benefiting from the talents of the director and not the other way around. We are of the humble opinion that it is the star power of the leads that crushes Kushi and reduces it to a pale and distorted version of what it could have been without the fourth-wall-breaking stardom.

Fourth-wall-breaking, you ask? Yes. How else does one explain this wholesome love story of two ordinary young people and their families containing overt references to Samantha's wildly popular item song Oo Antava Maama, or Devarakonda's misogynist image in the market? Why is there that fight scene where the apparently ordinary young man thrashes a whole cricket team in a moving metro?

Kushi falls prey to the tendencies of inserting "commercial elements" which are supposedly there to improve marketability of the film. There is a gratuitous "wife-bashing" song that a drunk Devarakonda dances to in sync with dancers. There is strange "comedy" involving fertility clinics and manliness. Ante Sundaraniki may not have been ground-breaking, but can't we move on to a cinematic norm where men getting their fertility tested is a routine matter?

In the middle of this incongruous mess, Shiva Nirvana does manage to create a few affecting moments. A nameless Kashmiri woman in the first half walks away with the most worthy moment of the film. Then there is the ever dependable Rohini given a wonderful opportunity to pull your heart out and knead it till you weep some sadness out. And there are the other bunch of parental actors (Murali Sharma, Sachin Khedekar and Saranya) making the climax as affecting as it turned out to be sheerly on the strength of their conviction. And, above all, there is Lakshmi being effortless in a role that doesn't call for even a fraction of her superior powers.

It is these performances (including those of the leads) that spark joy in Kushi. And it is then that Shiva Nirvana comes into his own as a filmmaker. That he creates these situations for his actors to breathe life into and that he gets them to do it effectively will remain his strength. And as much as he may be inspired by filmmaking stalwarts, referencing to them or to his stars is only a weakness which will eat away into his vision.