DVD REVIEW: Vinnaithandi Varuvaya

LOVE STORY 2010

By Joyojeet Pal

“Yenna daa maccha? Love-failureaa?” (trans: ‘What’s up buddy? Love failure?) This is one of the most repeated lines in recent Tamil cinema, perhaps at par with pregnancy proclamations of yore. So what makes a great love story? For most Indian cinema, failure is a good starting point. Indians love unrequited love, especially when it’s peppered with a dash of misogyny. What other culture can boast such a vast archive of ‘sad songs’ in practically every vernacular of film songs, with a distinct numerical skew towards the brooding male baritone. Theories abound through overturned quarters of Old Monk: perhaps the love story is situated perfectly at the point of bare contact between tradition and modernity in urban India. Indeed, the college or neighbourhood sweetheart (that one possibly never even got introduced) was a brilliant distraction, a blinding hope that obscured the reality of a parent-induced partnership that lay in ambush somewhere down the line. 

With much pomp, popular cinema freed us to fantasize in this direction. Like a banal ending, after the temporal lapse of reason, the relationship, real or imagined, would shatter as reality caught up through a vicious wedding notification, leaving the grieving man to his fermented molasses and other male friends. Right, that settles why we love the star-crossed love genre. Now, we move towards those qualitative benchmarks of a good love story. It is particularly difficult to relate to a love story in which one cannot relate to the characters. This is director Gautham Menon’s smoothest coup. He takes Silambarasan, known as ‘little superstar’ based on his junior Rajnikanth reputation and strips him of his enamel grin, studded belts and dandruff-flick hair swivels, and turns him into a boy-next-door so real that his acne could just as well burst past the cakey make-up. The female protagonist is an easier conversion. Trisha, who plays Jessie, Karthik’s (Silambarasan) landlord’s daughter, already fits the girl-next-door mould effortlessly. 

The tense chemistry between the two begins with the beautiful albeit melodramatic slow motion framing of the couple’s first encounter. The camera lingers on both faces, speech mutes down to lip-reading as we find out she lives upstairs from Karthik. Their nearly middle-class two storey home then provides the camera with the perfect setting for protracted follows of her climb up the stairs, hair splashing against a backless blouse to the stolen gape of the aspirant standing downstairs. Menon is a very gifted filmmaker. Much like his mentor Rajiv Menon (to whose film Minsara Kanavu the name of the film is a tribute), he has an exceptional visual eye and his roots in ad films are clear in his pastel colours and slick editing. Everything in the frame is a tool, for instance, Jessie strategically lives a floor up. The staircase leading up to Jessie’s home, the roof where she picks clothes off a lazy laundry string, and the wrought iron gate downstairs from which Karthik ceaselessly watches all set up a constant flow of Karthik’s upturned and swiftly switched glances. 

Menon turns Jessie into the audience’s muse. The film begins in disaster. Jessie is getting married at a church in Kerala, and Karthik is sitting in the audience, not in a getaway car, mournfully resigned but intent on seeing the story through. The flashback takes us through the early stages of the chase, Karthik’s own struggle with leaving engineering for a career in film, the turning point when Karthik pursues Jessie to Kerala, and the inevitable cracks as Jessie’s family rejects the inter-religious union. And now we’re back to scene 1. Menon pulls competent performances out of the cast – Trisha is consistently good and understated. Simbu is introduced with his flying fonts of ‘Young Super Star Silambarasan’ and is very good in parts, but in fairness to his image trap pulls off a fair share of hams and a rather repetitive ‘running hands through hair’ routine that will undoubtedly hit the mimicry circles soon. 

The surprise package who lights up the screen each time he shows up is stone-faced Ganesh Janardhanan who plays Karthik’s cinematographer mentor and unwitting accomplice. The art direction, costumes, and visuals are lush. The viewer practically has a sensory overload since each shot is carefully composed, from lighting, to the colours, and the careful framing – and it is not understated, but lush in Almodovar-esque intemperance. The music by AR Rahman is exceptional in both the songs and the clever background score. Few Indian films do a good jobs of long shots and blurs, which cinematographer Manoj Paramhansa carries off deftly. Perhaps the only excess is the overuse of slow motion. But finally, the film’s greatest victory is the way all the elements come together -- Vinnaithandi Varuvaya is a director’s film. The screenplay is taut, there is very little fluff to sway from the plot save for the occasional corny line, and several tense narrative sequences at turning points in the film. The director keeps us guessing till the end, which is probably one of the cleverest endings for a love story in recent Tamil cinema. Was it a cheesy love story? Absolutely. The best there has been in a long time.

Comments

[Car dvd players]

I could really use the DVD player and i am sure someone in the family would like the DVD, thanks!!