Manamey Review

When it's the turn of Vikram (Sharwanand) to babysit Khushi (Vikram Adittya), his curly-haired two-year-old ward, he feeds the kid a mountain of chips and biscuits and lets him sit around in a stinky diaper. Subhadra (Krithi Shetty), who is also the boy's caretaker, comes home to find the house trashed and Khushi crying from a stomach ache. At the doctor's office, they discover that Khushi hasn't been bathed for three days. As two unmarried strangers who suddenly find themselves in charge of an orphaned child, Vikram and Subhadra's predicament in Sriram Adittya's Manamey makes for a frothy drama about growing up and finding love in unexpected situations.

For a family film with a poetically-inclusive title, Manamey is overly centered on Sharwanand's character. Vikram is an immature, goofy, harmless womanizer forced to take on Khushi's guardianship after the child's parents pass away. After some trite scenes involving poopy diapers, the narrative toys around with a few sub-plots before it orphans them and flits around aimlessly. There is a sub-plot about a kidnapping carried out by the film's (closest thing to a) villain played by Rahul Ravindran. But he gets dismissed as soon as Sharwanand clocks in a few action-hero minutes: a high-speed car chase and a superhero-move where Vikram drops onto the roof of a car and takes down the kidnappers. Another sub-plot involves Vikram's neighbour girl whose character is used to establish Vikram as a playboy. Later, she is married off and this becomes a good excuse to insert a haldi song.

Subhadra and Kushi, despite being pivotal characters, exist primarily to facilitate Vikram's personal growth from a manchild to a man. Whether it is Subhadra's repetitive dialogues or her one-note demeanour, she is as flimsy a character as the film's comedic reliefs: Rahul Ramakrishna as a vlogger named Rolex Ramulu, and Vennela Kishore who plays a clownish doctor.

One the film's key visual symbols, a hot-air balloon, serves as an apt metaphor for the gassy story. There is not much more to the movie than the vibrant visuals featuring beautiful shots of the UK countryside where the film is set, or the kick-ass costumes that Vikram wears. The insubstantial and inflated narrative is at constant risk of collapsing if it is not gassed up with sunny songs (Hesham Abdul Wahab composed an earful soundtrack of 16 songs!) and unnecessary montages.

Yet, you can see the faint outline of a promising story. An intriguing character enters the film at the midway point and adds some heft to its ideas. Subhadra must make a choice between the head and the heart. In the end, though, there is not much that is novel about how she resolves her choice, and worse, she doesn't even have the agency to make the choice by herself.

Sharwanand does his best imitation of Siddhu from Bommarillu, a similarly fruity character, but his comic timing is not all there, nor is his intonation of dialogue very effective in making us laugh. The child actor playing Khushi, Vikram Adittya, is a bambi-eyed cutie who charms us by seemingly following every directive in the shot. Krithi Shetty has a narrow berth of emotions to express, and she does so with ease, though not with much depth.

Manamey is a far cry from Sharwanand's last film Oke Oka Jeevitham which was overly sentimental but at least tried to be authentic. It is instead more concerned with keeping everything so light and shallow that it completely fails to tug at your heartstrings.