Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kaanom – Perfectly Glued

You don’t see many movies without any major promotions releasing nowadays. They either decorate the cities with the ’50 days’ poster even before its audio gets released or TV channels play serials and movies in between the movie’s trailer. Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kaanom mainly used social networking sites for promotions (the trend that is catching up). This movie has still managed to be the talk of the town during its release – partly because of the promotions given by various cine personalities in social networking sites. In the era of  ‘over hyped – under performing’ movies, Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kaanom is the exact opposite.

Right from the opening credits, the debutante Balaji Tharaneetharan has proved his uniqueness and brilliance in writing and direction. The way he splendidly manages to cover the prologue of the story in the opening credits with Mano singing one of the most perfectly placed and written situation songs, making the audience glued to the screens even during the opening credits and avoiding the utterly boring and lame ‘introductions’ during the start of the movie is definitely a laudable attempt.

Even though he only repeats the same dialogues for most of the parts, Vijay Sethupathi is brilliant throughout. But it’s his three friends who get more screen space and dialogues than the hero. They are also equally brilliant. Except for these four people, all other casts have given very ordinary performances. As most of the movie is covered only by the four friends, the ordinary performances go unnoticed.

The only place the cinematographer (whose life this movie is based on) proved his presence is the cricket scene at the beginning and it will go down the history as one of the best slow motion shots ever. Another laudable thing done by the director is sensibly avoiding songs knowing it won’t fit in anywhere unlike some movies nowadays where people deliberately squeeze in 5 songs just because they have been composed. There still is the ‘promotion song’ which comes during the start of the second half which sure is unique, but seemed unnecessary during the movie.

Even punch dialogues after repeating for a couple of times seems irksome but repeating the same dialogue throughout the movie and still not making it annoying even for a single time is not an easy task. A big hats off to Balaji Tharaneetharan for this. Another big hats off to Vijay Sethupathi for maintaining the same expression and modulation each and every time he says the dialogue and still making it laughable.

One can undoubtedly say that this movie has one of the best background scores in the recent past. By not using pathetic comical sounds, Siddarth Vippin has contributed a fair amount in bringing emotions to audience’s faces. Inspite of being in the comedy genre, this movie contains a fair amount of serious scenes. Making people burst out in laughter in serious scenes, with serious dialogues and serious BGM is not a piece of cake. Balaji has pulled this off neatly throughout the movie with the help of Siddarth.

Concentrating on a single storyline and not deviating to any sub stories in the middle is one of the movie’s major strengths. Every single scene seemed to contribute something to the story and every single one of them seemed enjoyable. The length of the movie might be tiresome for the audience which could have been shortened by reducing the length of the scenes. Most of the frames are just the expressions of people without any dialogues. This might work out for TV serials but not for feature films. There might be some logical errors which won’t show up unless you are looking for them.

Movies without any major names or promotions are the ones that perform well nowadays. With audience becoming more and more mature, it’s movies like this that entertain them. Making a comedy movie which is full of serious scenes with subtle humour throughout is not something that you see every day and definitely not from a debutante. Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kaanom will go down in history as a milestone in Tamil Cinema and hopefully people will make movies keeping this as their inspiration instead of fatuously ripping from other language movies.

Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kaanom – Missed pages that you don’t want to miss

[rating:1]