'Kanimozhi' (Tamil, Romance, 2010)
Director: Sripathy Rangasamy
Cast: Jai, Shazahn Padamsee, Vijay Vasanth, Michael, Ashwin Raja, Ranga and Jayashree
'Kanimozhi' revolves around Rajesh, a student of visual communication, who is in the process of directing a short film for his college project.
Spending fun-time with his gang of friends, Rajesh falls in love with Anu, a girl who crosses his path. With his friend Michael suggesting ideas to woo her, most of which backfire, Rajesh hangs around her neighbourhood, waiting for the opportune moment to profess his love to her. The glances and smiles she flashes at him encourage him.
He has a rival in Kaushik (Vasanth), who tries to woo Anu too. Rajesh’s confidante is his diary, in which he jots down his thoughts. As the story progresses, it’s not just Rajesh who is in for a surprise, there’s another one lined up for the audience too.
The director has extracted some very natural performances from his entire cast. Jai fits in his role perfectly, and Vasanth, Vijay and Michael leave their marks. In her first Tamil film, Shazahn, daughter of ad-guru Alyque Padamsee, and Ranbir’s co-star in 'Rocket Singh…', has a tiny role to play and she fails to impress.
Satish Chakaravarthy (son of music director Thai Anban; the person, who has worked with AR Rahman and composed jingles), makes a promising debut as a music composer. His tunes are varied and peppy in this film.
Sripathy (a former associate of Venkat Prabhu) steers the narrative very realistically in the first half. The characters and incidents seem believable. The interactions between friends or the hero and his family come across very positively. The dialogues seem to flow naturally.
However, as the movie progresses, the narration becomes very bland and the story moves at a slow pace. Monotony and boredom tend to set in towards the interval. The director does try to pep it up towards the end by throwing in a couple of surprises, but that attempt falls flat. As for the relevance of the title to the film, one is still trying to figure that out!