Cute-as-a-button Nazriya as Divya charms you. Yes, some of these moments would be classified as ‘filmy’ but they all have one origin – the writer-director’s heart. Insight into human behaviour and relationships, a love for the little flourishes of life, and genuine fondness and affection for the characters being written.

I don’t want to give anything away, but these little moments show that a lot of thought went into putting the film down on paper. The film is also about little moments, little deft touches which add a wonderful texture to the story. So what eventually make the twists work is the fact that they tie in with the lives of the characters beautifully. But one way to look at them is to find out how our primary characters will deal with them. Yes, the film has its share of ‘twists’ that seem a tad out of place. They stand by each other, fight, make up and pull each other along beautifully. Because not only is each of the characters written well, but their relationships with each other have also been crafted with love. Put together, though, it makes for a soul-stirring ride.

Newly-married Divya’s problems with a reticent husband – the fourth important character in the film Kuttetan’s yearning for a simple, Malayali girl who’ll make him happy and the nomad Arjun’s journey towards internal stability each of these tales could have been a story in itself. Handled with a surprising amount of patience and maturity, we get involved in each of their stories equally. As it turns out, their life takes them exactly there and their journey is something truly worth sharing. Extremely close to each other while growing up in Kerala, they always promised each other that they’d go to Bangalore when they were older. The three main characters, Arjun, Divya and Krishnan (fondly called Kuttetan), are cousins. The characters are given room to breathe, explore and discover themselves.īangalore Days, thus, surprised me on multiple levels. (We’ve reached a stage where not many have that kind of an attention span, and most films hover around the 2 – 2.5 hour mark.) The answer, again, lies in the characterization. Now if you look at the run-time of the film - just a shade under 3 hours – you wonder why a film that is about young people and by inference, targeted primarily at young people, would be so long. I was pleasantly surprised, then, when Anjali Menon’s Bangalore Days had a lot of the second kind of predictability.

Bangalore naatkal movie story