Film: Viraivil Isai | Director: V.S.Prabha
Cast: Mahendran, Dilip Roger, Sanjay Shankar, Shruti Ramakrishnan, Arpana, Delhi Ganesh
The film tracks the journey of three room mates-turned friends. Each comes to Chennai with the hope of making a place for himself in the glamour world of films. Ram (Dilip), inspired by Rahman, wants to be a music composer; Sushi (Mahendra) is an assistant director struggling to get his first break while Shankar (Sanjay) is an aspirant actor, who doesn’t mind making some quick money to tide over their financial problems. Both love and opportunity knock on their doors, but a certain incident almost puts a brake to their goals. The tale the director weaves is quite different from what one would have expected from a cinema-centric plot. The cinema-angle seems just incidental in the meandering screenplay the plot soon deviating to a thriller mode. The screenplay is weakly etched, the narration lacklustre.
The romance between the wealthy Kavya and the struggling Sushi is insipid. A little better is Ram’s thawing towards Lekha, a marketing officer of a holiday resort centre, whose calls he had earlier avoided. The actors try to fit into their roles. But with their characters weakly fleshed out, there is only that much an actor can do. For a debutant, Sanjay Shankar (son of actor Jaishanker) is uninhibited and confident in his comic act. A semblance of realism is brought in by Delhi Ganesh playing the man who runs a tea stall, where the trio are regulars. How frustration can lead to unfortunate consequences, is brought out through the character of an aspirant lyricist who frequents the stall.
The choreography sticks to the basics, making it seem like there was no choreographer present on the sets. Varadarajan, a businessman, is the villain of the piece and a crucial link in the plot. But both in the characterisation and performance, it falls flat. Neither meaningful nor entertaining, It’s a film that has nothing to offer a viewer.