The recently released movie, Naan Kadavul, a majorly hyped project, allegedly dealing in isolated and bold themes, brought in many curious viewers. I am surely not one among them. Honestly, I like dark cinema, but not depressing cinema. And that's why I have consciously stayed away from Requiem for a dream, no matter how groun breaking it is supposed to be. But again, it's hard to take Naan Kadavul that seriously too, much because of it's phony filmmaking. It's more like a sham of a film really, that tries too hard to be different that the director keeps going back to his own stereotypes time and again throughout the movie.
It could have been something, but Bala is an amateur and a wannabe and in his hands, what could have been a powerful film goes completely flat largely due to lack of direction. The movie fails to stick to one thing, and tries to cram in one shocking 'reality' after another that it ends up being quite a bitter and hasty concoction.
While it provides a promising start featuring a naïve father and daughter roaming Kasi in search of a long lost son who has in fact turned into an Agori, you know you are in for nothing different from the run of the mill masala, only a bit disguised, when the camera pans and zooms in on the man doing seershasan with a swelling theme to back it. Okay.
And sooner than later, the poor father, daughter and thankfully and annoying mother are shunned and enter a group of crippled and twisted beggars. At this point, you are left wondering, what’s the point…but not so soon! The film takes a complete turn towards the begging Mafia and then soon abandons it to lurk a little bit into human trafficking. Again it goes back midway to the Agori, lest we should forget him in the middle of all this rigmarole, and then finishes with a highly spiritual message of Karma and Mukti. What the? Like a I said before the director is in no urge to stick to one plot element or even a central character, really, the blind girl has more to do that the phony kite-high Sadhu. And he wants to shock you so much that he keeps trying to invent more depressing and gruesome plot points one after another that he forgets what he started out to do in the first place.

As for the acting chops, if someone out there still thinks huffing, puffing and grumpily mouthing hoarse words equals intensity, they be damned, after Vikram, Arya takes this hamming to a repelling new level. The blind girl is plain okay, with a character that makes the performance handicapped as the actress herself is quite adequate, just that the character is poorly fleshed out, being the weakest and most hapless of the lot. The supporting cast of beggars, apart from their physical disabilities are not entirely new to us, we have seen these before. The only freshness lies in the main antagonist, the tall, lean and mean bad guy with a face that would make you think, this guy looks evil, but then not seriously threatening, but he turns out to be much more than that.
As for the director returning to his stereotypes, the scene in which the blind girl coaxes the agori to go back to his family, irksome, straight out of Nanda where Laila confronts Surya about finding him in the mortuary. The irrelevant and out of place song and dance sequence in the police station, the Simran outing in Pithamagan. And the fact that Arya, much like Vikram in ugghhh inducing Pithamagan, claims he is god, an avatar of Shiva. yeah right.
So is this one any good. Nope, movies like these come along every now and then disguised under layers of phony subjects, and are strictly made for awards only. For a jury much like that of the academy awards really, just check a few boxes of melodrama, weirdness, handicapped and they’ll give you the award

Labels: Movies

Posted by Sat at 11:57 AM
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