I remember the clamour following the release of Arjun Reddy’s faithful Tamil remake, Adithya Varmaa, last year, when a section of people asked to see Bala’s version of the remake. I won’t lie to you—I too was among those who fantasised about the cinematic joys the Bala version of this film would hold. After all, the Arjun Reddy universe is Bala’s backyard. It’s pretty much his debut film, Sethu. The one-liner is the same: A misanthropic, alpha male forces a meek woman to submit to his ‘pure love’, and when it all goes to hell, he becomes deranged. Given the inherent melancholy and madness in this subject—Bala’s playthings—the question was, how would he reinterpret this story that is right up his alley? What would the Bala of today change about/add to this story that’s been told so many times now that you can predict its every beat? Well, it turns out that he hasn’t. He has settled to giving us a jaded, curtailed version instead.

Director: Bala
Cast: Dhruv Vikram, Megha Chowdhury, Easwari Rao, Akash Premkumar, Raiza

Sure, if you had to nitpick, you would find minor changes here and there. The football match is a hockey match, only so Varmaa can flaunt the hockey stick as a symbol of his masculinity. That’s not the only organ-ic commentary in this film, of course. Varmaa shows someone the middle-finger. He makes a girl pray to his member. Later, there’s a Muslim patient who talks about the pain he suffered when he underwent circumcision—which results in a nurse giggling. Women aren’t excluded from such strange situations. When asked to undress during a bullying session, a couple of women share that they have their periods. Later, a cigarette lighter is involved in making a half-delivered baby do a backflip. In good Bala films, such ideas add to the viscerality of it all, but here, they make you react in much the same way as a woman does when she sees Varmaa slipping ice cubes into his underwear.

For the remainder of this review (and there’s a lot more left, I assure you), visit https://www.cinemaexpress.com/reviews/tamil/2020/oct/06/varmaa-movie-reviewa-listless-lifeless-remake-of-arjun-reddy-20643.html