The Courage to be Tender
Chinna, Chinna Asai - movie poster C hinna Chinna Asai is a new Malayalam-Tamil bilingual movie that I watched yesterday. This film is marked by a quality that’s quite rare today in the industry. It enters our hearts and leaves us with a renewed faith in humanity. At its heart lies a simple yet profound truth: human life is essentially vulnerable. Leela is a 52-year-old woman from Tamil Nadu who is apparently lost from her group that is visiting Varanasi. Later we come to know that she intentionally left the group in which she felt quite alien. In fact, Leela feels alienated from the whole world. No one other than her father ever loved her. When her purse and phone are stolen, she feels utterly helpless in a place whose language is totally alien to her. So, she is forced to accept the assistance offered by Mahadevan, a retired schoolteacher from Kerala, who is in Varanasi because his daughter is learning Kathak dance there. The movie has been described by a few critics as “a...
