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When Longing Becomes Virtue: Cinema’s Comfort With Emotional Cheating

From Meghamalhar to Ithiri Neram the narratives romanticise emotional infidelity while demonising its physical counterpart — letting characters sin in thought, but never in deed.

Neelima+Menon

Nov 18, 2025

Promo poster for Ithiri Neram.

VERY EARLY in Prashant Vijay’s Ithiri Neram (2025) we are ushered into Anish’s (Roshan Mathew) seemingly stable world. He is a journalist trying to squeeze time between his baby’s baptism and a long-promised drinks treat for his colleagues. There’s an easy domestic rhythm to his life, and his wife even suggests the budget for the party — a small, telling detail that captures the warmth and casual intimacy of their marriage.

It is into this rhythm of comfort and predictability that Anjana (Zarin Shihab), his former lover, re-enters, carrying with her the unhealed remnants of their past. When Anish’s phone lights up with her name, on his way to meet his colleagues, he freezes, his face registering a flicker of confusion and recognition. You can almost sense his mind spiralling backwards, unearthing feelings he thought had long been buried.

Their reunion begins casually at a bar, with Anish teasing Anjana about her new drinking habit and cigarettes. The conversation soon turns revealing when both admit to following each other’s lives online, with Anish confessing that he often checks her college website.

As the evening wears on, the awkwardness gives way to bittersweet familiarity as they begin to dissect their breakup, trying almost helplessly to make sense of what went wrong. In subtle gestures and glances, the film shows Anish slipping into emotional infidelity: the way he watches her, the irritation when she gently calls him out, the wistful comment that they could have settled things over a drink. So when Anjana quietly remarks that if they had set their egos aside, he might not have ended up marrying someone on the rebound, he doesn’t even try to deny it.

But what’s hard to ignore is how the film concedes to the popular cinematic comfort zone where emotional cheating is softened, even romanticised, in a way physical infidelity never is. The narrative seems to cushion Anish’s actions, framing his longing as something bittersweet rather than ethically fraught. In fact, it’s a familiar pattern in our cinema where desire, when confined to words and glances, is treated with empathy, but once it crosses into the physical, it becomes instantly condemnable.

So even when it becomes evident that Anish’s yearning has crossed that invisible line and that if not for Anjana passing out after a few drinks, they would have inevitably spent the night together, the film hesitates to confront that truth head-on. His desire isn’t concealed; in fact, it lingers in every pause, every look that lasts a second too long. Yet the narrative offers him a quiet exit, allowing his guilt to remain unexamined. In doing so, Ithiri Neram mirrors a larger discomfort in our storytelling — the tendency to forgive emotional transgressions as nostalgia rather than name them for what they are. And when you strip away the film’s romanticised lens, what remains is a quietly tragic ending — two people who never truly moved on, yet choose to return to their separate, unfulfilled lives.

In sharp contrast, C Prem Kumar’s 96 (2018) treads similar emotional terrain but ventures into a far more complex territory. Here, the woman is married, and the man remains single. Janu (Trisha) and Ram (Vijay Sethupathi) were childhood sweethearts separated by miscommunication, and when they meet decades later at a school reunion, the past comes rushing back with disarming tenderness. Their reunion becomes an exploration of memory and emotional inertia, of two people suspended in time, unable to rewrite their history or move beyond it.

ALSO READ | C Prem Kumar talks about how his films celebrate the primordial ability to love and care for another being

But unlike Ithiri Neram 96 is acutely aware of the imbalance that gender and circumstance impose. While Ram’s loneliness is romanticised as he wears his heartbreak like a badge of eternal devotion, Janu’s choices are bound by social obligation and family pressure. She doesn’t get the privilege of following her heart, even when it aches to.

The conversations and staging in 96 are filtered through such a puritanical lens that even intimacy feels sanctified. Ram’s confession of being a virgin becomes less about his personal choice and more about the film’s moral framing, as though purity were proof of the depth of his love. He remains tenderly diffident in front of Janu, who wears her heart on her sleeve, her emotions brimming just beneath the surface. Every glance, every hesitant touch, every pause in their conversation becomes a quiet admission that Ram has never truly moved on from where she left him. Perhaps that’s also why the director keeps their chemistry poised delicately between divinity and adoration — a love too sacred to be touched, too idealised to be lived.

But despite all its tenderness and restraint, 96 never quite escapes the moral dilemma at its core. Here is a married woman confiding in her former lover that her marriage is “peaceful” — a word that quietly conceals years of compromise. She looks at Ram with a mixture of longing and regret, never crossing a line, yet never fully stepping back either. When they meet in her hotel room, Ram’s restraint is palpable — he honours her dignity, careful not to let desire overstep emotion. And yet, it’s Janu who bares her soul, speaking the truths she had long buried under duty and decorum.

In the film’s penultimate scene, their goodbye mirrors that of Anish and Anjana in Ithiri Neram: two people gutted by circumstance, choosing responsibility over instinct, heartbreak over defiance. Both films end where they began, in longing, reminding us that sometimes love doesn’t die; it simply learns to exist quietly within the limits imposed by society.

There’s something to be said about our filmmakers’ enduring obsession with romanticising emotional infidelity while demonising sexual betrayal. Kamal’s Meghamalhar (2001) is yet another example, again, of childhood sweethearts who reunite later in life, both married and seemingly “peacefully” settled with partners who are very much present. When Nandita (Samyuktha Varma), a journalist, meets Rajeevan (Biju Menon), a lawyer, the past comes rushing back with the disarming sweetness of nostalgia, that seductive ache that blurs moral boundaries.

Rajeevan is already half in love with her even before he realises their shared past, while for Nandita, the recognition strikes later — that he is the boy who once held her hand through the loneliness of childhood. Their reunion carries a quiet sense of destiny; in her eyes, Rajeevan becomes a missing piece of her emotional puzzle, the metaphorical longing she has been writing into her stories all along. Kamal frames their connection with a touch of sanctity — a soulmate aura that makes their affection appear divine rather than adulterous.

Unlike the couples in Ithiri Neram and 96 Nandita and Rajeevan even travel together, lying to their spouses, sharing unspoken intimacy. There’s a faint suggestion of physical closeness, but the film never lingers on it — it hurries instead towards the safety of moral redemption. In the end, as always, responsibilities and societal expectations pull them apart. Their emotional infidelity, though more ethically compromising, is brushed aside under the guise of sacrifice — love purified at the altar of duty.

But Ranjith Sankar’s Ramante Edanthottam (2017) unlike the other films where the characters appear to be in seemingly “happy” marriages, introduces a clear justification for its emotional transgression — an emotionally abusive spouse. Here, Malini (Anu Sithara) is trapped in a marriage defined by neglect and casual cruelty. Her husband’s (Joju George) indifference slowly erodes her self-worth, making her gravitate towards Ram (Kunchacko Boban), a widower whose quiet charm and empathy stand in stark contrast to her domestic despair. Through him, Malini begins to reclaim her sense of self; she finds her voice, agency, and the courage to step out of her marriage.

It’s easy to empathise with her helplessness, to see her emotional drift not as moral failure but as an act of survival. Yet even here, the director leans on the familiar cinematic stereotype: as long as the relationship doesn’t cross into physical intimacy, the woman’s emotional entanglement remains forgivable, even redemptive. Malini’s longing is thus framed not as betrayal but as rebirth — a woman finding herself through another’s kindness. The moral safety net stays intact; her “misstep” is conveniently reinterpreted as self-discovery, ensuring the film never has to grapple with the messy reality of female desire.

ALSO FROM THE AUTHOR | Judging Desire: Malayalam Cinema’s Reckoning With Voyeurism & Virtue

Put together, Ithiri Neram, 96, Meghamalhar and Ramante Edanthottam expose a telling pattern in how our cinema treats emotional infidelity — aestheticising it as nostalgia and longing, rarely confronting its moral weight. We are told that as long as the affair remains unconsummated, everyone, including the characters and the audience, remains absolved. That’s why emotional betrayal is turned into poetry, while physical desire is seen as sin. And yet these films endure because they mirror an equally conflicted society. We yearn for connection, and yet we are terrified of addressing our desire.

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