Kaatru Veliyidai - Song of Ice and Fire

Kaatru Veliyidai is a sort of movie that fails you when you want it to be a total love story and when you want it to be a war thriller.

The story at all points is on the cusp of being eternally great and abjectly dismal. Once, you are hooked, something beautiful is developing on screen, you forget the disappointment the previous scene so efficiently and effortlessly bestowed on you and then this one too meets with the same fate. You sigh. Get distracted by the hooting. 

Repeat. 

This goes on at various junctures for better part of 148 mins.

Mani Ratnam's mastery in direction is still intact. His screen writing is mostly intact. Where he falls flat is repeatedly placing similar build-ups to identical scenes one after the other. It gets challenging to even go through the motions. 

His sketching of Leela is poignant to understate, superbly dazzled on screen by Aditi. She is mesmerising. Her flawless lip-sync is so heartening to see. Efforts reap spectacularly. She carries the movie at various stages when it wanes in intensity. 

Can't say the same about Karthi's VC. He can't find his base and roots in a story that just has no scope for his role. You can't be an egoistic cry baby, a pilot and still want a devoted girl friend.

And the buck stops there. There is nothing to take home about any of the support cast. Some can't perform in Mani Ratnam movie and others are just too new.

Rahman glimmers through this fading light. Unplugged versions of Vaan and Nallai Allai are what you want to wake up to every morning, latter though, placed and enacted in the most un-Mani Ratnam way possible and former, as beautiful introduction.

Ravi Varman paints but I couldn't experience more of the snowy peaks than what was there in the sneek peeks and trailer. However the locales stand out. Kashmir has to build a monument for Mani for he is one of the reasons we knew of its existence & beauty, us southerners. Sreekar cuts are at times too jumpy and haste. For a love story shouldn't have there been more fade-outs? 

However overall production value of the film remains true and aesthetic. Climax sequences are well choreographed and stands out, albeit not logically.

Kaatru Veliyidai won't stand among the best of Mani Ratnam's works but isn't entirely a damp squib. Amidst the ruins stands one of the uncompromising works of a waning master.

**/5