There’s Always Tomorrow – A Refreshed Affection for Living

Tanay Chaudhari

“It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.”

― late John Joseph Powell

A foreign land with picturesque locales, pleasant-seeming weather happens to be the backdrop to the chance meeting of a once romantically-involved couple, years after settling down into different lives and places.

In the process of loosening their underlying awkwardness about the times that once were – Durga and Anthony – start opening up with polite conversation and a subsequent trip around the town. Little did they know that it’ll end up helping them letting go an innocuously-stuck past along with briefly rediscovering “an old friend” in themselves and a refreshed affection for living.

From discussing their individual husband-wife alchemy, concerns of post-natal parental issues to the future of children in the kind of world we’re living in; to idiosyncrasies they love about their spouses, and longings to be more with their lives. Their dialogue is personal, absent of melodrama and is potent enough to be the film’s backbone; and even more so when it is derived from everything that constitute “life.”

It shan’t be a hyperbole to state that the target viewers (presumably the age-group of the protagonists) would receive it with open-arms for such genuine-characterization and storytelling.

The casting of Gayathri Gopal and Balaraman Kunduvara as protagonists – the former with the most-expressive pair of eyes and the latter with his rather evolving-style of emotiveness – display a great chemistry; faint-reminiscent of films like – “Lost in Translation.”

What’s further enriching are the picturisation by Mathew Jenif Joseph especially with those well-framed post-card shots of Abu Dhabi, and the mellifluous Carnatic-fusion score by B. Prasanna – the regular-collaborations of writer-director Shilpa Krishnan-Shukla, who is yet again presenting a matured, relatable compassionate tale of friendly drama combined with the personal catharsis, where the language is thankfully not a hindrance – quite evident for this recent recipient of “Best Foreign Film” at this year’s Nevada Film Festival.

At the culmination, I found gently smiling to myself only wishing that anyone who’ll be watching it shall be smiling, too.