Breach the Skies

I watched Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya with mixed expectations, and emerged from the theatre with mixed feelings. The company I went with hated the movie, and although I did curse and mutter on my way home, lest my peers brand me unintelligent and sappy, I couldn't help feeling that I was being harsh on a movie that had its moments.

VTV is a long, twisting climb to nowhere, but so is its subject - love. That sounds depressingly bleak, I know, but I'm just speaking from personal experience. Love (and more particularly, relationships) is (are), for the large part, pointless. Once their initial freshness wears off, they are boringly repetitive. (Just like VTV.) You like the same things about each other, you fight about the same things, your peeves are the same. Love, at the end of the day, is a facade, a front, a construct even - reinforced by years of popular cinema, popular music (how many non-metal songs are about anything other than love?), literature, peer pressure. Hell, sometimes I wonder if man was ever built to be monogamous...

I had you there for a second, no?
Tee hee.

Lets get back to the main 'review'.

VTV is a long, twisting climb to nowhere, but so is its subject - love. On the surface, the 'obstacles' to love in VTV are the usual ones - parents, angry-bearded-don't-touch-my-thangacchi-type brother (he comes as a package offer with a gang of men with unkempt hair and beard also), religion, age and other usual suspects. But these are only ancillary to the obstacles inside his leads minds - Jessie's confusion and Karthik's obsession.

The reason for neither is clearly spelt out. Karthik is madly in love with Jessie merely because she's walked past him a few times. (Hosanna, en vaasal thaandi ponaale/ Hosanna, verondrum seyyaamale...) Sure, his obsession escalates as he gets to know her better, but it is born in a very Maniratnamesque manner (think Madhavan in Alaipayuthey, Arvind Swamy in Bombay, Shah Rukh Khan on the railway platform in Dil Se (in both cases, the wind blows the veil off Manisha Koirala's face), Rajnikanth when Shobhana walks past him in Raakamma...). But that isn't completely unrealistic. Firstly, he has to contend with Trisha walking past him looking absolutely phantasmagorical in that sari. Moreover, it's not improbable, is it? Men do fall madly in love (lust?) at first sight - we only cool-ise and stop admitting it to ourselves and the rest of the world after a while. (What men don't do is thump their chest or jump around like apes like Simbu keeps doing in the movie.)

Jessie, on the other hand, is never sure of Karthik. Does she like him enough to marry him? He does make an impact on her, at some level. She admits to that much. Perhaps she's not convinced about Karthik's seriousness? She ends their relationship when he refuses to come back from Goa. Or is she scared of her parents? Does that vague back-story of her sister weigh on her mind? Jessie's confusion creates VTV's most engaging moments. For instance, you know Jessie's not going to get married at that church to the random Mellu groom. But you aren't sure how and why it will happen. Karthik looms ominously in the background and you think he's going to jump out at them and do something. Jessie seems slightly off, slightly nervous. In the end, Jessie just tells people she needs more time to think about life. You're still not sure if Karthik's the reason for her confusion. Even when she admits it to him later that night in a lovely little exchange, she doesn't do it convincingly.

Or that scene in the cameraman's house - when they're unwilling to let go of their hug and Karthik declares that he wants that moment to last forever. We've all made such declamations (inspired by cinema, perhaps?). But Jessie makes a comment that could have only come from a character like her, "This might be the last time?" It strikes an odd, discordant note, and you immediately know. Their romance will spiral downwards from there. Then, there's that superb scene towards the end where declare love for each other at Central Park. It is a mushy, mushy scene - the dialogues are cliched, long and leave one pretty winded. But there's an honesty to this scene that makes it really beautiful.

This is why I liked VTV. It gives you that space to chew on the characters. And it gives the characters enough meat to let us chew.

Now for what I didn't like in the movie.

It was slightly longer than it should have been. This, I fail to understand. After making tight thrillers like Kaaka Kaaka, and Vettaiyaadu Vilayaadu, why has he made two rambling messes of movies (VTV is slightly less rambling than Vaaranam Aaiyram, I will admit)? What happened to that slickness?

Also, the dialogues were really problematic. First, I don't like the English that Gautham Menon uses. He pokes fun at it early on in one of those meta-moments that has become fashionable in Indian cinema these days, but one cannot forgive him for some of those lines. "This was a one-way ticket to heartbreak city." Really? Dude? I can understand being true-to-life and all that. But that line? Really? Simbu? And tell me this - how many average, mechanical engineering guys go tell a girl they've spoken to thrice in their life, "I want to make love to you"?

Even otherwise, some of the Tamil dialogues were just so execrable, they killed scenes for me. The other problem was that the movie, in parts, got too talky. A silence here, an unsaid emotion there would have made it more effective, more honest.

Gautham Menon needs to watch more Wes Anderson, I think. Or even Dibankar Bannerjee (No, I haven't seen LSD yet, I'm going on the evidence from OLLO). He needs to learn how music works on an image. VTV has such wonderful music, but each song is murdered by its video. Systematically. Line dances for everything? Really? This brings me to a question - does a director need to know music? Let me give you an example. In Hosanna, the song bursts into life and colour at the words, "Vanna vanna pattupoochi..." (listen to the sudden euphoria in the background music at this point), but the image just has Simbu jumping around, just like in the previous verses. No bursting into life and colour. He jumps off some steps, yes. But the image was not even vaguely as exuberant as the verse.

In the end analysis (at the end of this maundering review that eerily resembles VTV itself), VTV was an enjoyable movie. I would, probably, even watch it again. But it left one with the sense that it could have been so much more...