A shaggy fish story.

You might think that Maara (2021) is a movie about finding love, or the strength of a found family, or learning from the past in order to face the future, but don't be fooled.  It's much simpler than that.  This is a movie about stories.

A young girl named Paaru (Aaradhya Shree) is taking a long bus ride with her family, and she is bored.  Her mother and grandmother (Maala Parvathi and Seema, respectively) offer to tell her a story, but she doesn't want to listen to a story she's already heard.  A nun in the next seat over (Padmavati Rao) steps in and offers a story about an immortal soldier searching the world over for the fish that contains his soul.  Little Paaru is captivated, but before the story ends, her grandmother suffers a stroke, and the bus breaks down.

 

In the present, Paaru is not particularly interested in the groom her mother has picked out for her, so she leaves town.  For work.  She's a restoration architect, and she has aproject in a small coastal village.  But when she gets to the village, Paaru finds beautiful murals, all over town, depicting . . . well, it looks an awful lot like an immortal soldier searching for the fish that contains his soul.  

 

Paaru rents a house that belongs to the artist, a man named Maara (Madhavan.)  It is filled with Maara's art, including sketches of many of the villagers, which gives Paaru a place to start searching.  Nobody knows where Maara is now, but everybody has a story about him.  Paaru gets caught up in story after story, stories about a kind antique dealer (M. S. Bhaskar), an unhappily married thief (Alexander Babu), a depressed doctor (Sshivada), a wise prostitute (Abhirami), and a drunken pirate (Guru Somasundaram).  They are not always nice stories, touching on subjects such as suicide and child abuse, but Maara himself emerges as a decent man who helps people when he can.

 

Paaru and Maara nearly meet while he is performing one of his good deeds, rescuing a child from dire peril.  But they don't meet, and Maara goes about his business.  The film shifts over to Maara's perspective from time to time, which makes him less of a mystery to the viewer than he is to Paaru.  But the most important thing we learn about Maara is that he is also driven by a story he heard as a young man, a story told through an undelivered letter that a retired postman (Moulee) has carried with him for decades.

 

Ostensibly Maara is a love story, and there is love here, deep, passionate abiding love.  It just doesn't really involve the two leads; Paaru isn't chasing the man, she's chasing the story, while Maara is chasing a story of his own.  That does make them a uniquely well suited couple, but that's beside the point.  The story is the point. 

 

And the story ambles along at its own languid pace, backed by some stunning cinematography.  (Well done, Dinesh Krishnan, Karthik Muthukumar, and anybody else involved in the process!)  It takes its time, but is worth the journey.