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Home » Features » Lovestruck: How Pranav Mohanlal’s Hridayam encompasses the first love, rebound and true love phases

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Lovestruck: How Pranav Mohanlal’s Hridayam encompasses the first love, rebound and true love phases

Vineeth Sreenivasan’s coming-of-age romantic drama, which also has Kalyani Priyadarshan and Darshana Rajendran, will be streaming on Disney+ Hotstar from February 18

Sanjith Sidhardhan

Feb 15, 2022

Hridayam poster

Right after the release of Vineeth Sreenivasan’s Hridayam in theatres, a keen fan observed and tweeted how the names of its female protagonists – Darshana (Darshana Rajendran), Maya (Annu Antony) and Nithya (Kalyani Priyadarshan) – alluded at the three phases of love that its central character Arun (Pranav Mohanlal) goes through. Darshana hinted at love at first sight, Maya a passing fantasy and Nithya being the constant, concluded the Twitter user.

While the theory does have its flaws, considering minutes after Arun sees Nithya, he tells his friend and colleague Jimmy (Aju Varghese) that she’s the one he’s going to marry, the protagonist’s tryst with all three characters does reflect three stages of love, with each serving a different purpose.

This is in no way an expert deduction of how Arun’s relationships in Hridayam – because matters of the heart can rarely be understood by onlookers – but we are trying to see how the movie showcases the first love, rebound and true love phases of the character.

First Love

“I am crazy about you. I fell in love with you the minute I saw you,” says Arun to Darshana as they engage in probably their longest conversation after the introduction to each other. Their initial relationship is defined by all things campus romance – hearts fluttering with every twin beep of a message to adventurous first dates and eventually an ‘I love you’ and yearning for a first kiss – without quite understanding the person.

It’s that teenage rush of blood that also makes Arun fall for temptation, because he isn’t yet quite as invested in the relationship with Darshana as she is. But it being his first love, is also why it affects him deeply when he loses her – almost as if the entire world he had conjured slipped out of its axis and he sees nothing ahead.

In a way, Arun also seeks a bit of his first love in all his relationships, and putting a pottu on Nithya the first day after their wedding, was probably a way of depicting this.

Rebound

Pottu wasn’t the only thing about Darshana that he reminded him of his short-lived romance. There was the loose hair, which is what he had asked Maya to do during their first meeting. It was clearly aimed at irking Darshana, but over time it almost became toxic from Arun’s part. His relationship was primarily his way of showing Darshana that he has moved on, which he clearly didn’t especially because he was on the lookout for her when she began going out with the womaniser Kedar. However, the shallowness and the emotional non-availability of his romance with Maya was best evident when he had asked her to spend time with him in a room, in the spur of a moment after he sees Darshana with Kedar.

With Arun mending his ways, he did become a support to Maya, but his heart and eyes almost always were wandering – a fact that didn’t go noticed by her either.

True love

Arun and Nithya are almost a ying and yang combination in many ways. While he falls for her right after their meet cute, over time, she becomes gravity for Arun, who for most part has been seeking something closer to what he has experienced with Darshana. This time, however, there’s no rush of blood. There’s a maturity in the relationship, and Nithya complements this with her vivacious personality and most importantly their mutual love for things they bond over. In fact, he keeps gravitating to her with a maturity that was absent in his past relationships. Arun’s conversation with Darshana, in the same beach where they had their first date, describing the moment with his wife and son, provided both of them closure.

Also read: Exclusive! Dulquer on his web debut with Raj and DK’s Guns and Gulaabs: I loved the world and my role in it

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