Anandam — A Tale Of Love At Second Sight
Psychology says “ It takes only 8 seconds to fall in love” because the hormones stimulating the emotion in an individual takes that amount of time. Perhaps this study is speaking about the concept “Love at first sight”. Whether this a myth or a fact is a different topic to discuss, but Sreenu Vaitla believes in the concept of ‘ Love at second sight’. The sight I am referring to here is the deep sight of one’s soul and falling head over heels at it.
Anandam that released in 2001 is a movie that explains such a phenomenon. Anandam happens to be a story of a young pair who are always at loggerheads and try to outwit each other in petty quarrels. Later they fall in love with each other and get united. On reading this, the dejavu story that might strike your mind is Nuvve Kavali. In fact, the plot of the movie bears a resemblance to it, but interestingly this is nowhere similar to Nuvve Kavali.
The entire first half of the movie is a laugh riot with Kiran (Aakash) and Aishwarya (Rekha) pulling each others legs. Being immediate neighbours, they face each other very frequently and to make it worse they study in the same college. Kiran never misses a chance to tease Aishwarya and Aishwarya never fails to out smart Kiran . This friction between them becomes more when they start interfering each other in personal affairs. On one fine day, they part their ways.
This part just gives a mere introduction to the characters’ personalities on the exterior and the hostility that kept growing between the two since childhood. The narrative switches its gears and enters into a serious bubble when Aishwarya & Kiran start writing to each other on behalf of their friends, Deepika & Vamshi. This forms the crux of the story .
This movie is rumored to be Sreenu Vaitla’s life story. He has made the movie a feel-good one by creating a fresh feel with a lot of vigor and novelty in the the story. The theme of the story that there could entirely an unknown person in a known person is novel. Because of the repulsion, the pair has developed towards each other since childhood they were never allowed to know about each other well. As love happens between two souls, by the truest sense of the term, they see an entirely a new person in a known person and fall for each other.
Performances, dialogues, the cinematography and the music induce a lot of feel-good factor into us. For eg: the dialogues between Aishwarya and a retired military officer explaining the impact of words in a letter , then the dialogues in the second half that render the sensitiveness of Vamsi and Deepika’s souls and the tenderness of their love, reflect the reality of life. The first half is filled with hilarious dialogues and one liners from Chinthapalli Ramana. DSP’s music is the killer in the movie. Without his music, the movie would not have been the same. The songs were soulful, vibrant, youthful and euphoric. Since DSP was a budding music director then, his music came as a big sigh of relief to the people who were used to Mani Sharma’ songs for a long time. Especially the songs– Kannula therichina …and Evaraina eppudaina.. are not just soulful and melodious but also have a lot of lyrical value. BGM in the movie is brilliant, especially the climax track at the cemetery. Perhaps this is the best album of DSP in his career till date.
Anandam is a love story that is perhaps first of its kind. If Nuvve Kavali told a love story between two best friends, this story showed blossoming of love between two bitter foes. Anandam says — Life is beautiful, Love is more beautiful through a tagline which is justified through its story.
