Through these women, we witness Sara herself at different stages in the future if she were to listen to society and do what is expected of her. But what works best is how the film also adds a character named Anjali-a ‘has-been’ star who had to quit at her peak for marriage. We also meet his mother (another excellent performance by Malika Sukumaran), a woman who perhaps sacrificed everything for her children and has nothing to show for it. We get Jeevan’s sister (Dhanya Varma), a single mother trying to juggle work and her two impossible children. But the film uses the couple along with fascinating characters around them to show us different variations of their future. Of course, all this appears a tad simplistic in parts, especially when solutions appear in the form of speeches along with the overall chirpy tone of the film. Even Sara’s confusion better makes sense because you see that Jeevan too is only trying to be reasonable, rather than a sledgehammer of patriarchy. He gets what Sara is going through even though he struggles to understand what’s happening to him during the same point in time. It’s the same with her husband Jeevan, played wonderfully by Sunny Wayne. Sara’s character is committed to what she wants yet we always see her as real person and not as the representative of an ideology. Yet this debate between career and family isn’t as on-your-face as the debate at the centre of last week’s Cold Case(science versus paranormal). Even the phrase ‘labour of love’, takes a different meaning in this context. Even words like theatre (operation and movie) become interchangeable over here and you get a brilliant subversion of a father waiting in the corridor. A Malayalam film takes pretty much the same time to make as a baby. The parallels between filmmaking and childbirth have never been so much fun to witness. In other words, it’s a time when she has to choose between her birth-child OR her brainchild. As an associate director, she gets pregnant exactly when she gets to make her first film.
The film’s central conflict deals with a time frame when Sara is both pregnant biologically, as well as ‘creatively’. Nor do I mean that Sara is pregnant with twins. By this, I don’t mean one pregnancy followed by the other. That’s mainly because the film is about two pregnancies. It’s all matter of fact and the arguments the film puts worth through Sara draws us in to a complicated debate that rarely gets space in our movies. But over here, there are no judgments being made, neither is there an excessive emphasis on the ‘sin’ Sara wants to commit. If a film with the exact same situation had released twenty years ago, the film itself would have deemed her selfish and inconsiderate (like Pooja Batra’s character in Priyadarshan’s Megham). She is unapologetic and sure about what she wants. For Sara, though, these are not even close to the life-goals others make them out to be. Her family, friends and even her luck conspires to ensure that words like ‘baby’, ‘marriage’ or even ‘family’ becomes her personality-defining possession. But it’s the specificities that make the film both endearing and interesting. They both fit just fine and the film’s pretty much about her world and what happens to it.
It is also very much about what follows the apostrophe and the power Sara has over what will be added to it later.įrom a distance, it’s safest to add vague words like ‘life’ or ‘world’ to the name. The film isn’t just an entry into her mind when she’s put in a particularly complicated situation. Sara’s too is about Sara but the apostrophe makes the difference. But there’s one tiny difference that separates this from her earlier film Helen, which is pretty much about her character and what happens to her when she’s stuck inside a freezer for a whole night. In Anna Ben’s short-yet-already illustrious career, Sara’s is the second film to be titled after the character she plays.