We’ve seen way too much amma sentiment in Tamil films for us to fall for it immediately. And yet, Nooru Sami, within ten minutes into its screentime, manages to do that. We don’t even know the characters well yet; all we realise is that two young children are being sent by their mother off to a hostel to pursue education, much against their wishes. The two throw tantrums, refuse to get on to the bus, and look teary-eyed at their mother, who just cannot look into their eyes to bid goodbye.

She turns back, unable to process the look on their forlorn faces. She closes her eyes and clutches her chest, almost as if the entire world were resting on it. It’s a scene Selvi (Swasika) sells immediately. You almost wish the rest of the film had emotional heft like this. Alas, it doesn’t.

Nooru Sami, director Sasi’s latest film with Vijay Antony, wants to make a case for remarriage. The story centres around the life of Selvi, who is toiling away in the fields somewhere in interior Tamil Nadu. Having lost her husband, she is left to raise two young boys (Bhaskar and Vivek) on her own. Her parents and brother are unable to pitch in, and so, Selvi has to eke a living, educate her boys and at the same time, live with the perspective with which rural society views a widow.

Early in the film, she voices a desire: to remarry, and to live life on her own terms.

What starts with much promise slowly veers into melodramatic territory. The dialogues hit home hard, but a lot of them are too literal and almost take the audience for granted. Sample this from the son in the film (played by Ajay Dhishan): “Like the rat caught in a trap, my mother too is caught in this house.” Or this, a line that Selvi utters: “Even if I killed my husband, I would have been in jail only for a few years. Now, with my husband dead, I seem to have been jailed for life.” This Sasi directorial spoonfeeds a lot more than it ought to.

The biggest problem with Nooru Sami is the multitude of conflicts packed in it. A mother wishes to remarry, but then changes her mind. The son who has opposed it in the first place has changed his mind. Meanwhile, there are nosy villagers; director Balaji Shaktivel is one of them, and I enjoyed the neat reference to his own directorial Kadhal. And then, there’s an uncle (played by Karunas) who is hell-bent on one aspect: getting his young daughter married to one of his sister’s sons. The conflicts are a tad too many in Nooru Sami; it would have helped to focus on the central internal conflict of the mother's remarriage alone, rather than throw in other angles that have nowhere to go. Only at the fag end of this 131-minute picture does Sasi arrive at the meat, which is: what if love blooms in the forties for two individuals whose partners have passed away? This idea of finding love after loss seems far more interesting than the multiple narrative conflicts, and ends up as a missed opportunity for the filmmaker.

Vijay Antony makes a rather late entry into on-screen proceedings, but creates some sort of an impact. Balaji Shaktivel and Karunas are big names with little presence. Among these relatively more popular names is Swasika, who is undoubtedly the lifeline of Nooru Sami. Packing a powerful performance, her outing ought to nudge Tamil filmmakers to write heftier female-led characters, something that Sasi himself did way back in 2008 with Poo.

Music composer Balaji Sriram strikes the right notes with his melodies — ‘Amma Amma Dan’ and ‘Maaya Kanavo’ are lovely, but ‘Sonnalum Sonniye’ and ‘Yedo Yedo’ feel tonally misplaced. Nooru Sami would have benefited from more focus on the emotional turbulence of the lead character.

Nooru Sami is currently running in theatres