Sufiyum Sujatayum - A visually enchanting experience!

Bharath Vijayakumar

Sufiyum Sujatayum is a film that can be described in multiple ways. For the most part, it plays out like a poem with the actors (especially Aditi) moving around in a canvas that the cinematography captures like a painting. This is accompanied by a captivating musical score that sucks you in. With so much going for it and an extremely promising start, I was really hoping that this would be one movie experience to cherish.

The film deals with a very basic premise of what happens to a girl who is forced to let go of her love and is pushed into a marriage. The problem with Sufiyum Sujatayum is that we get to see very little about Sujatha's present life with her husband. We know that she isn't happy and is also refusing to embrace this life with her husband. But we get to see this part directly, which is 10 years since she got married and has a school going kid. It is not as though problems cannot arise at this point but the couple behave as though they discovered something overnight which we understand later is not the case.

The best portions of the film are early on as we are drawn into a landscape that almost looks like a make believe world, something that an artist would sketch if he was asked what Paradise would look like. The pivotal romance between the Sufi and Sujatha does strike a chord and the presence of a certain taboo angle does make it a bit more engrossing. Sujatha is a mute and is always fascinated by music and we do get as to why she is drawn towards the Sufi. But the very little time spent on their bonding dilutes the after effects of this romance to a great extent. Also, the onus is too much on Aditi to make us buy into this track. She is all grace and ravishing on screen and moves like a dream. But the emotional beats keep diminishing as the film progresses.

The film sort of loses its hold in its final leg. It aims for a poetic closure but it does not create the impact it ought to have. It aims for an epic romance and it is as though the universe/Sufi conspires to make something happen so that Sujatha can finally move on. But these don't really come together. You get that Sujatha feels cheated and that her parents have robbed her of the love of her life. But given the fact that she is portrayed as a rather bold girl, some of her decisions aren't convincing or rather we are not really shown the specifics and so it all appears as a convenient excuse for the screenplay to reach where it wants to.

Bottomline:

A visually enchanting experience with some mesmerizing music and sparks of poetic brilliance but falls short as a whole.

Rating: 2.75/5