Vinnaithandi Varuvaaya

Will You Cross The Skies For Me?

After having seen three Gautham Menon movies so far, I can boil them down to three statements or formulas.

Hero + Heroine1 = First part of the movie

Hero-Heroine1 = Middle portion of the movie

Hero + Heroine2(w/ Heroine1 optional) = Second/final part of the movie.

Proportion of Heroine1: Heroine2 will depend on which part the more box-office worthy heroine plays.

The above formula will be juiced up with music from Harris Jayaraj or A.R.Rehman. The hero, although his story will start in Chennai and thereabouts, will take a B1/B2 visa  to the United States at some point in the movie and will invariably find himself in a major American city with a prominent bridge (which takes all US cities except San Francisco and New York out of contention.)

By now you might have deduced which of Mr.Menon's movies I had the privy of watching. Yes, Vaaranam Aayiram, Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu and Vinnaithandi Varuvaaya.

Vinnaithandi Varuvaaya is the least 'filmy' of the three. The positive aspects of the movie for me:

1. Cinematography

All I carry back from the movie is the cool blues and greens, fluid likes of water and traffic, instead of the dusty grimy India that one is used to, here we have a vibrant refreshing country and what is more, it has one of the best shot movie scenes in Kerala's landscape. Shame on you Malayalis, a Tamil film had to cross the ghats and come to Alleppey to do that. Beautiful. 

2.Script

Natural, off the cuff dialogs go with the age and subject of the movie, so does the snippets of technology like texting. I also like the way they have interspersed dialogs in Malayalam when it is an internal dialog in the girl's family(whose character is that of a Malayali Christian settled in Chennai.)

3. Art direction

Set design, locales - thought of and brilliantly woven together into the fabric of the story

4. Actors

Simbu and Trisha look very much the part and seem to have a good chemistry between them which they don't spoil by their 'acting'. Neat.
What I didn't like was the that the movie started losing its pace in the second half, dragging along at parts. I wanted to fast forward but didn't do it so as not to miss the amazing camera work. A.R.Rehman's music, didn't really click for me this time, maybe it'll grow on me like Yuvvraj(another A.R.R musical I didn't appreciate much in the first place but ended up doing rounds on my music charts.) Overall a good entertainer.