MS Raaja’s Sevappi is set in a small village in the 1990s, and in an early scene, a widower named Paruthi (Sebastin Antony) drops his young son off at the house of a woman named Boomi (Poornima Ravi). She has lost her spouse, too, and she, too, has a young son, Kumaran (Shravan Athvethan). The boys are best friends, and Paruthi knows his son will be safe with Boomi – because they, too, were friends while in school, and this friendship has lasted to this day. Boomi’s brother, one day, asks Paruthi if there could be more to this relationship. He asks if Paruthi would consider marrying Boomi. Paruthi refuses. He says that Boomi seems happy being Kumaran’s mother, and perhaps, for her, that relationship is enough. Why thrust her into a new one?
This is a lovely bit of writing. One way to write this moment would go like this: Paruthi says he, too, has thought about this, and now that he has her brother’s permission, he will go and ask Boomi if she wants him as someone more than a friend. But no! Paruthi sees Boomi on a regular basis, and he has seen her with her son Kumaran, and he is able to guess that she seems happy. The preciseness of the writing made me wonder about other undercurrents: What if Paruthi went ahead and asked Boomi and she did not take it well? What if things got awkward between them? Maybe Paruthi does not want to lose a good friend. Here’s another thought: Maybe Boomi’s brother is still conventional enough to think that Boomi needs “a man’s protection”. And maybe Paruthi feels she doesn’t – or if she did, she’d do something about it, herself.
Sometimes, moments like these are enough to make you like a movie. Sevappi could have been the story of Paruthi and Boomi. (Poornima Ravi is very natural, very effective.) It could have been about the need for a school in the village, as an early conversation hints at. It could have been about the inter-caste lovers who are brought before the village panchayat. It could have been about the man who hires a black magic specialist to find treasure, because he feels wealth will bring him the respect his family once commanded in the village. It could have been a cute story about Kumaran and his hen. But the film does not make any of these tracks the “main narrative”. Instead, we get the feeling of being deposited in this village, where all these people are causing or undergoing all these events.
We are with the men playing cards and discovering a cheater. We are with Boomi’s brother Karnan (Rishikanth), as he keeps visiting her and bonding with his nephew who worships him. We are with the elderly woman, played with wit and nuance by Rajamani, the actor whose Instagram reels with her grandson went viral. We are with a monolithic rock named “oththa paarai”, which the villagers are scared of and stay away from. When the legend of “oththa paarai” is narrated, we see the story visualised through Kumaran’s eyes. All the characters are played by the people around him, the people he knows. We are there with Boomi when her house is robbed. We are there in the midst of a search for the thieves. And gradually, these threads, these vignettes, begin to cohere into the story of the village.
The look-and-feel could have used more finesse, and there’s a sense of the narrative being stretched even with a running time of less than two hours – especially in the “cute” portions with Kumaran and his hen. But Sevappi has what you look for in a first film: an all-round honesty in effort, which shows in the pretty decent writing and the pretty decent performances. There are little touches I liked throughout – say,the fact that the Zamindar is a good guy. (Rich landowners in our films are almost always evil.) And every little plot point converges at the climax, from the hen to “oththa paarai” to the black magic man to Boomi and Paruthi’s friendship to the Zamindar’s goodness. This is not a diss, but Sevappi is what you’d call perfect for OTT. It's a small film, and it is served adequately by the small screen. But it has a big heart, and that is why we keep watching.