Film: Aivaraattam | Director: Mithun Manickam
Cast: Niranjan, Dushyanth, Amruth Kalam, Jayaprakash, Nitya Shetty
Sports-centric flicks mostly revolve around popular games like cricket, football or kabaddi. But a little known sport, unknown outside regions like Sivaganga, becomes the plotting arena for Mithun’s film. It’s a five-a-side football game. The film depicts the rivalry among local teams, the juniors and the seniors. The captains of the two sides are estranged siblings. And strangely, so are the coaches, the brothers here too at loggerheads.
The plot had enough room for family drama and of course the thrill of the underdogs winning. But the slow paced screenplay, handled more in a docu-drama style, ensures that both the thrill and the emotional punch are missing.
Niranjan and Dushyanth (sons of actor Jayaprakash), share frames here as the estranged siblings captaining each side.
The roles hardly fleshed out in the screenplay, there is no performance that leaves any impact. The narration moves at a snail’s pace. The antagonism between the siblings is brought out in a very casual way. Dushyanth, the younger sibling, is the angry one, Niranjan the cool one. There is Niranjan’s romantic dalliance with the local bigwig’s daughter (Nithya Shetty) - these moments reminding you of similar ones in Subramaniapuram. There are the two coaches, the antagonism between these brothers, more open and aggressive. Though the preparation for the impending football tournament is the mainstay of the film, the director takes a long time to reach the point. And when the competition does happen, it is one of the most listless and uninteresting ones we have witnessed on celluloid.
The final game is mostly taken in long shots, with rare individual moments. There are no edge-of-the-seat moments, no thrill or suspense build up, nor the usual rooting for the underdogs. What the director could be commended for is bringing a lesser-known game into the spotlight, and wrapping up his story in just 108 minutes.