Nooru Sami

Director Sasi and actor-composer Vijay Antony reunited for Nooru Sami, 10 years after Pichaikkaran, a film that ended up as a sleeper hit for the actor. Pichaikkaran is an emotional drama about a mother and son, while Nooru Sami explores the concept of remarriage for a widow in a conservative world. Selvi (Swasika), a widowed mother, raises her two sons Bhaskar (Ajay Dhishan) and Vivek (Sakthi) on her own. She watches them come up in their lives only for them to be consumed by ego and hating each other. One day, Selvi, in passing, mentions that she might like to remarry, much to the shock of her two sons.

Life in the hinterland can be brutal. Identities are distinctly carved out between the haves and the have-nots — the “have” here can refer to material wealth or social standing. In director Sasi’s Nooru Sami (A Hundred Gods), Selvi (a fabulous Swasika) is a young widow with two sons, struggling to raise them in a society that is judgmental and not very kind. Sasi is known for his deft portrayal of village life and its people, and Nooru Sami, based on a real-life story, benefits from his vision. It is filled with little nuggets, some pleasant, most not, which drive home the torment in Selvi’s heart.

Sacrifice. Every relationship is gauged by the compromises and sacrifices people make. More than the love shared, the hate espoused, the money spent, the resources exhausted, it is sacrifices that are showcased and remembered. And if Tamil cinema has taught us anything in its more than 100-year-old history, it is that a mother’s sacrifice is paramount. Director Sasi’s latest film, Nooru Saami, takes on the responsibility of not just placing the mother on a pedestal, visually representing every iota of her sacrifice, but also asserting that it was all done by a mere mortal, not a divine being, as is often proclaimed. How do you bring a mother down from the pedestal and say that she is a biological being with physical desires? Yes, technically we know how babies are born, but our ‘culture’ prohibits the concept of both sex before marriage, and sex after the couple has reached the socially acceptable number of kids in a family. It is in such a world that Sasi asks a very important question: Shouldn’t a woman be more than just a mother?

We’ve seen way too much amma sentiment in Tamil films for us to fall for it immediately. And yet, Nooru Sami, within ten minutes into its screentime, manages to do that. We don’t even know the characters well yet; all we realise is that two young children are being sent by their mother off to a hostel to pursue education, much against their wishes. The two throw tantrums, refuse to get on to the bus, and look teary-eyed at their mother, who just cannot look into their eyes to bid goodbye. She turns back, unable to process the look on their forlorn faces. She closes her eyes and clutches her chest, almost as if the entire world were resting on it. It’s a scene Selvi (Swasika) sells immediately. You almost wish the rest of the film had emotional heft like this. Alas, it doesn’t.