The film's hero Shankar gained acceptance as a romantic hero, while its villain Mohanlal went on to become everything an actor could dream of, effortless in romance, thrills, arthouse and noir. The film came with zilch expectations with a bunch of newcomers and the rest, as they say, is history. Perhaps the first of the all-out romantic tale to get Malayalis to accept puppy-love romance was Fazil's Manjil Virinja Pookal. But all these searing love stories, especially those by Lenin Rajendran, Mohan, Padmarajan, Bharathan and Balachandramenon, among others, had a streak of intensity and subtlety.

With mainstream cinema becoming less commercial-oriented and more content heavy, there was a profusion of campus and youth movies in the late 1970s-early 1980s. Audiences preferred the rather brute realism of Sukumaran-Soman movies. While Vincent, Ravi Kumar, Sudheer and Jose, came along, to endear Malayalis, their sticking power was low. Prem Nazir must have been the evergreen romantic hero of Malayalam films but films of the era were markedly 'social' than 'romantic' in their genre-clause. That is not to undermine the overpowering emotion of love that ran through classics such as Chemeen but 'romance' as a stand-alone genre was always challenging. Romance was rather mature in movies and there was an overarching disdain for unrealistic love stories.

It appeared that there was something in the Malayali psyche that was against so-called syrupy romantic tales for a long time.Įven when Bollywood and Tamil industry celebrated teenybopper love stories, Malayalam cinema attempted to take a rather realistic stand. Love is a powerful plot point that has been interpreted variously by filmmakers, and romance is often regarded as the easiest genre, especially by Bollywood.īut romantic movies have arguably been the most difficult to pull off in Malayalam cinema. 'EVERY INDIAN FILM is a love story' is not a sweeping generalisation that applies to Malayalam cinema.

Ennu ninte moideen genre