Holdin' out for a Hanuman

Sita Ramam (2022) is the Columbo of epic romance.  There's never any question about  who is going to fall in love with who, or how the relationship is going to end; that's all in the title.  Instead, an angry Pakistani college student takes up the part of rumpled detective, following shaky leads as she pieces together exactly how the story unfolded.  The question isn't "will they/won't they?", it's "How did they?"

The year is 1985.  Afreen (Rashmika Mandanna) is a college student studying in London, but originally from Pakistan.  She is fiercely proud of her native land and has a very large chip on her shoulder.  When she hears about some Indians burning a Pakistani flag, she promptly sets fire to a car decorated with Indian flags.  Unfortunately, the car happens to belong to Indian philanthropist Anand Mehta (Tinnu Anand), who happens to be a major donor to her college.  The administration wants to expel her immediately, but Anand has another offer - she can apologize.  If she won't apologize, she can pay for the car.  If she can't do either within a month, then she'll be expelled.

Afreen absolutely refuses to apologize, so instead she returns to Pakistan to ask her grandfather, retired General Abu Tariq Ali (Sachin Khedekar), for the money.  She's too late; her grandfather has died, and before she can inherit anything she must grant his last wish and deliver a letter from an Indian Army lieutenant named Ram (Dulquer Salmaan) to a woman named Sita Mahalakshmi (Mrunal Thakur).  

She travels to India to begin the search, where she is met by her college classmate Balaji (Tharun Bhascker), who will be her designated sidekick for the rest of the movie.  The address leads her to the former palace of the Nawab of Hyberadad, now a girl's hostel, but nobody there has ever heard of Sita Mahalakshmi.  Balaji suggests starting the search by finding Ram, since they have a name, a regiment, and a year of service, and it works!  Kind of!

Afreen travels from side character to side character, slowly piecing together Ram's story in convenient chronological order.  Ram was an orphan serving in the Madras Regiment in Kashmir in 1964.  Ram was a surprisingly effective soldier, but his secret weapon was compassion; being able to listen to people and look for peaceful solutions rather than shooting first and asking questions later.  In fact, his compassion enables him to foil a plot by terrorist leader Ansari (Ashwath Bhatt) to cause friction between the local Kashmiri Muslims and the Indian Army; Ram manages to save an entire village in the process, all without firing a shot.

After radio host Vijayalakshmi (Rohini) runs a story about Ram and encourages the people of India to write letters to the orphan hero, Ram is delighted to discover that he now has family all over the country, and he makes a point of answering every letter and visiting the people who wrote them.  But there's one letter he cannot answer, and one writer he cannot visit.  He receives a letter from someone calling herself Sita Mahalakshmi, chiding him for calling himself a lonely orphan when he has a wife waiting for him.  She spins an engaging yarn about a marriage that never happened, but there's no return address.

Sita's letters keep coming.  They're poetic, charming, and present a window into an alternate life.  She also peppers the letters with clues and riddles.  And then she mentions a magic show she'll be attending in Hyderabad, and the train she's taking to get there, and Ram finally has a clue that he can act on.  

As Ram searches for his Sita, Afreen searches for news of Ram.  Along the way she places a call to his old superior, now Brigadier Vishnu Sharma (Sumanth), and when Sharma hears that this young Pakistani woman is looking for Ram and Sita, he drops everything and orders a search for Afreen, hoping to stop the young woman before she can deliver her letter.

Meanwhile, back in the sixties, Ram searches the train and finds his Sita.  She's stunningly beautiful and every bit as witty and profound as she is in her letters, but oddly standoffish, almost as if she were hiding a secret life as a royal princess and couldn't possibly contemplate a marriage with a common soldier.  Ram delivers a bundle of letters, replies to every letter she ever sent him, along with the phone number of his friend Durjoy (Vennala Kishore) if she ever chooses to contact him, then he leaves.

When he reaches Durjoy's house, he learns that the phone has been out of order for a week, so once again he has no way to contact Sita.  He's upset - until she comes to the house because the phone is out of order so she can't call him to tell him that they won't be meeting again.  Ram takes a discreet photograph of her, then realizes that that was kind of creepy and promptly apologizes.  She leaves him standing alone in the rain, but they meet again at the magic show and start spending more and more time together.

1985.  The trail of acquaintances leads Afreen to Durjoy.  He tells more of the story, and gives her a photograph of Sita, a picture that Ram took years ago.  She brings the photo back to the college/former palace of the Nawab, only to discover that the photo is a perfect match for the Princess Noor Jahan, the woman who donated the palace and founded the college in the first place.

That leads Afreen to the princess's friend and former assistant Rekha (Rukmini Viyayakumar), now a teacher at the college, who fills her in on the other half of the story, about a princess who desperately loved a common soldier but couldn't bring herself to tell him the truth about why they could never be together.  A princess who found herself engaged to the Prince of Oman, a match arranged by her brother (Jisshu Senguopta) in order to save the family fortune.

Afreen is upset about the story ending there, but Rekha explains that the story doesn't end there - Noor Jahan left the palace and Sita arrived in Kashmir, ready to marry her ram.  In fact, Noor Jahan is in Kashmir now, so Afreen can deliver the letter personally.  before she can do that, though, Afreen is picked up by the military and brought before Brigadier Sharma, who tells her how the story really ends, how the letter ended up in Pakistan in the first place, and just how Afreen herself fits in.

Sita Ramam is not the first movie romance to use the "How did they?" format - not by a long shot.  There are strong similarities with Veer-Zaara, a movie in which a young Pakistani lawyer must unravel the secrets of a cross border love affair, only to find herself marveling at the depth of feeling of the star-crossed lovers.  Sita Raman similarly elevates its protagonists and humanizes both sides of the border, but things do not wrap up so neatly.

One advantage of the puzzle-box format is that it forces the movie to develop the romance slowly, starting with a series of poetic letters, then walks in the rain, and so on after that.  Afreen is finding out about the star-crossed lovers at the same pace that they are finding out about one another, and she realizes their worth, their fine spirits and depths of passion at the same time as the audience does.  It gives the viewer time to fall in love before the plot swings back around with one more thing.