Maybe it’s because there’s so much here from our long-ago lives – the rebellions, the compromises, the fights, the reconciliations. I wondered, as I did while watching Bangalore Days, how something that’s so much fun is making me so emotional at times. (You may just need to give it a little time to erase memories of the earlier actors and see the new ones in their place.) Give or take some casting choices, a few scenes added or let go, it’s practically the same film, the same story woven around the lives and loves of cousins Ammu (Sri Divya), Ajju (Arya) and Kutty (Bobby Simha). It works because it follows the original template pretty faithfully. These characters aren’t included in a “we.” They’re isolated as a “them.” And Bangalore Days was very much a “we” movie. The rule is the film where perfectly ordinary occurrences like, say, hanging out at a Café Coffee Day, are enclosed in quotation marks. Films like O Kadhal Kanmani are the exception. This is more about the fear that’s usually the most marked characteristic in Tamil filmmakers attempting to make an upper-class urban-centric movie. This isn’t a reflection on whether the audiences in the B- and C-centre markets are open to movies like Bangalore Naatkal, which has been directed by Bommarillu Bhaskar. I wondered if they’d “mass-ify” it, in order to make it palatable to the interiors. This, really, was the “2 states” Chetan Bhagat wrote about, not just 2 physical states but 2 states of being.Īnd I wondered if the necessities of the Tamil market would make Bangalore Naatkal a 1-state movie. Agreed, this is a very small segment of urban India, but I suspect this is the India that proved aspirational to the audiences that made the Malayalam original such a blockbuster.

The fact that we love our parents and yet find times we’d rather not have them around. The fact that we like tradition and also speak of freedom and personal space. The fact that we have MBA degrees and work in multinationals and also watch first-day-first-shows of films of our “local” heroes. The fact that we listen to Indian film songs on radio shows hosted by English-speaking RJs. The fact that we like sambar as well as pizza. The fact that we slip easily between local tongues and English. Because the biggest strength of the film is its warm embrace of the polarities that make urban Indians tick.

When they announced a Tamil remake of Anjali Menon’s Bangalore Days, I wondered how they’d pull it off.

Bangalore naatkal movie story