'Kadhalar Kudiyiruppu' (Tamil, Romance)
Director: AMR Ramesh
Cast: Anish Tejeswar, Shruthi,Dilip Raj, Saranya Ponvannan, Avinash
His debut film, ‘Kuppi’, a bilingual (‘Cyanide’ in Kannada), had earned him critical appreciation and a (Karnataka) state award. The depiction of the final moments in Bangalore of Sivarasan and his team, who had fled Chennai after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, had a realistic feel.
And now director Ramesh comes out with his second venture, ‘Kadhalar Kudiyiruppu’. A love story set against the backdrop of the police quarters in Bangalore, it revolves around two Tamil families living there. This film is again a bilingual, the Kannada version (‘Police Quarters’) released a month ago.
The early scenes depict the deep bonding and trust shared by two Tamil families, despite differences in caste and status. But their respective progeny Ashwin and Anita, are a bickering twosome, carrying on their mutual dislike into adolescence.
Caught in the crossfire is Ashwin’s buddy Raju. Till an incident — where Ashwin rescues her from a riot-stricken area — changes hatred to love. But Ashwin’s mother, widowed and beholden to Anita’s family who had stood by her in her times of trial, would not have her son marrying their benefactor’s daughter. And when persuasion fails, she takes a step that changes the whole course of the love story.
For a debutant, Anish acquits himself fairly well. Shruthi (aka Sonu from Kannada screen), renders Anita with perfect understanding. But the scene stealer is Dilip Raj, lively and spontaneous as Raju. After the initial few promising moments, the script takes a downslide. The director makes a futile attempt to give a realistic tone to the happenings, all the while lacing his narration with formula ingredients, and the fight-song routine, with the result that it is neither realistic, nor engaging enough as a pure entertainer.
Using scenes of the Babri Masjid demolition and the resultant riots in Bangalore, while not relevant to the plot but just incidental to it, seems just a ploy by the director to give his narration a realistic tone. For it could have been any crisis that Ashwin rescues Anita from. There are too many twists and turns and back-and-forth narration, which jar after a time. Some of the portions seem to be dubbed from Kannada, and the poor lip-sync is another distraction.
Just a passable fare, ‘Kadhalar Kudiyiruppu’ doesn’t live up to the expectations, and is not a patch on the director’s earlier film.