Little Hearts in Telugu, written and directed by the promising Sai Marthand, ends with a warning from its little hero for all critics to give positive reviews to the film.
Okay, then.
It’s a gesture that defines the mood of the entire film. Little Hearts draws its strength from being self-referential to the point of seeming like a spoof on the romcom genre rather than the real thing. The young protagonists’ journey into the heart of romance, seems thunderously spoofy. But, somewhere, the tone modifies, and we are supposed to feel the good-for-nothing loverboy is actually has a heart, little as it may be.
Like so many Tamil-Telugu films, the emphatically cliched combination of Wastrel Son and Disgruntled Father is here transposed wholesale from its origins to its cloned avatar without a hint of a variation. The problem, if we may call it that, is the lack of variation in the routine romcom rhythms which is both a boon and a blah.
Rajeev Kanakala and Mouli Tanuj Prasanth as father and son are a made-for-each-other team. And the father’s sarcastic comments on the son’s absolutely unmitigated aimlessness, are priceless.
However, Little Hearts is not about parental blight. It is about a vagabond discovering love. Akhil (Mouli Tanuj Prasanth) is everything that an eager-to-score teenager should be, except libidinous. The director avoids all references to post-pubescent hormonal hecticity, making Little Hearts a Disney version of American Pie.
Nikhil and Akula (Shivani Nagaram ) are carryovers of all their mutually enamoured predecessors, except that their destiny together is not percolated with prickly plotting. It’s all good with the couple who are intertwined in a mutual grasp of mediocrity and ambitionlessness.
Nikhil and Akula are what is widely known as a pair of losers. They score below average marks in everything. This gives them the freedom to slide across their relationship with minimum expectation from each other and from us the audience.
Midway through, the tone makes a strategic shift from amusement to sincerity. I am not very sure this couple share an everlasting love. But from what we see, and what the writers have envisaged for the couple, it appears as they might hold on to one another for the want of a better choice. In the meanwhile Little Hearts is a befitting homage to the rituals of the heart when the stakes are so low that the couple have nowhere to go but up.
