While watching Bethlehem Kudumba Unit, I kept thinking about one of my favourite quotes about love, by Victor Hugo: “The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young girl, it is boldness.” You see the timidity when Justin (Nivin Pauly, who seems perfect for these characters) is entertaining feelings of love again. He’s amid his drunk friends when someone notices that he’s blushing, and this makes him blush even more. You see the boldness especially when Ashley (a delightfully real Mamitha Baiju), in that gorgeous proposal scene in the car, pretty much bullies Justin into being clear with her. It’s the kind of film that shows the capacity for tender emotional detail.

I like how realistic, how casual, the idea of love itself is in this film, and the nature of the events surrounding its bloom. Someone casually plants an idea in a man’s mind. Someone else loiters around Ashley. Someone’s trying to make a short film. Someone is dealing with an addict husband. None of this feels blown up in the pursuit of engaging cinema. Even the second-half conflicts remain real for the most part, with fights breaking out over women, over love. It’s probably why that whole Kantara-inspired fight scene felt like a strange fit in this film.

And the humour is a real achievement in this film that’s got plenty of isolation and pain. The first image of Ashley we get is of her crying. Justin, meanwhile, has made peace with his loneliness, and of course, later, we hear why, and there’s death there.

Meanwhile, the women seem to be living burdensome lives, with little agency. It’s all heavy stuff, and yet, it’s phenomenal that Girish A.D.’s film remains effortlessly funny, characters chiming in with casual one-liners, sometimes even after a scene has seemingly ended. There’s also some slapstick comedy, some absurd comedy when Glikson suggests that Ashley can be kidnapped from nuns because they are sworn to silence, and someone asks why they can’t simply write about it… and I ended up laughing.

The music by Vishnu Vijay never gets intrusive, with songs gracefully entering and exiting almost like they weren’t there, the music happy to accentuate the beauty of everyday life and character interactions. Some of the showy transitions add character to the film too, and I remember being impressed by quite a few of them, including that opening shot of Justin. This reminds me of other well-composed images, like the one early on when Ashley is playing the guitar and the camera uses the doorway to frame her, communicating her isolation. That image really spoke to my own feelings of isolation.

It’s a sweet film that seems to believe in destiny (“I’m meant to be with you”; “You’re the first person I saw”), and in a kind of rejuvenation. In fact, I often thought the film itself felt like a child: happy and innocent in the face of pain, with a great capacity for recovery and optimism. And yet, I thought two ideas seemed a bit out of place in this sensitive film: Justin slapping his brother about (even though, yes, he cares), and to a lesser degree, this film, with its many alcohol addicts, normalising, perhaps even romanticising, alcohol use… before, of course, it cleverly wakes up to the idea of Justin giving up alcohol for Ashley.

But I’m really moved by films like Bethlehem Kudumba Unit, films that remember to cherish plains of beauty that are often overlooked, as they seem to exist between affecting valleys of sadness, isolation and social pressure. It’s perhaps why the film isn’t celebrating the wins as much as it is celebrating the moments that lead to the high of those wins, and those that follow. The interval arrives almost quietly, moments after the high of a romantic proposal has been allowed to come down. The end comes not when Justin reciprocates Ashley’s feelings, but after they both agree to quietly get married, so he can get a visa to join her in Ireland.

And I like that Ashley’s love itself blooms over no dramatic, cinematic events, but realistic, everyday ones. Oh, you drive a car well? Oh, you can sort out a laptop? Oh, you like the same music as I do? Ashley and Justin briefly discuss The Breeders and their song Off You, a song about… breaking away. And perhaps that’s what both of them are learning to do in their lives. Justin learns to break away from romantic isolation; Ashley learns to break away from being controlled by her family. New roads lead to new places; for some, that might mean cutting off a harmful family; for some, leaving a familiar land; for many others, perhaps it is simply the realisation that love is beyond rules. For Ashley and Justin, it seems to be all of them.