Gautaman Bhaskaran’s review: Kadhalil Sodhapuvadhu Yeppadi

Cinemimi[Thursday, February 23, 2012]
Kadhalil Sodhapuvadhu Yeppadi (Love Failure)
Director: Balaji Mohan
Actors: Siddharth, Amala Paul
Rating: ** One must give it to Tamil cinema. It dares to film unusual subjects. Rooster fights (Aadukalam/Playground), the seedy side to a supermarket (Angadi Theru/Marketplace), leather puppetry and the dilemma of creating a robot are some of the themes that have provided a whiff of fresh air to movies.


Balaji Mohan’s Kadhalil Sodhapuvadhu Yeppadi (Love Failure) focusses on what we have often read and heard. Men are from the Mars, women from the Venus. One does not remember ever having seen a film that tells us about the diametrically different expectations men and women have from life itself and relationships. Mohan’s work tries weaving this into a fiction feature.

Zooming into a generation keyed to Facebook and maniacally mobile, the movie, expanded from a short nine-minute feature that went viral about two years ago, follows the lives of Arun (played charmingly by Siddharth) and Parvathi (portrayed a trifle stiffly by Amala Paul), a blow-hot-blow-cold couple in college. Punctuating their story with the angst of Parvathi’s parents ready to split and that of other students in various levels of highs and lows in their own love lives, KSY struggles after the first hour to hold attention.

For, Mohan has simplified what is essentially a complex issue still defying answers; he runs out of situations and the movie sinks into repetitiveness. And this gets very obvious towards the end. Arun’s one liners are ticklish, but his commentaries a drag. Perhaps, the film’s greatest predicament lies in how to bring it to an end that jells with the overall mood of romance. Some of the turnabouts (about Parvathi’s parents, most notably) are quite silly.

Although T.S. Suresh’s editing helps the film to switch with silken smoothness, KSY could appear a little too puerile even to the college kid.