UNAKKAAGA MATTUM

A movie review by Balaji Balasubramaniam

At the end of the review of Aandavan, I mentioned that the one bright spot was that things could only get better from there. Chinny Jayanth has proved me wrong! Not content with tormenting us by playing a college student in numerous forgettable movies set in college campuses, he has now directed a movie where he comes as, you guessed it, a college student! Sure, he has made us laugh in several movies and is a very good mimickry artist. But none of that can make up for his crime of making this movie.

Subramani(Aditya) is a traditional, timid Brahmin boy. He falls in love with Lakshmi(Mehar), a no-nonsense girl in the same college and she reciprocates his love too. Raja(Chinny Jayanth), who joins the college after being kicked out of another, has all vices like smoking and drinking but is a good man otherwise. He falls for Lakshmi but after learning of her affection for Subbu, withdraws and is content to remain her good friend. But circumstances force Subramani to suspect a relationship between Raja and Lakshmi, something which is egged on by Guru(Ramji), another student. Dejected and depressed, Subramani turns to smoking and drinking while Raja, urged by Lakshmi, turns over a new leaf.

I can attribute Chinny Jayanth's desire to cast himself as a college student to nothing but his ego(maybe the title of the movie should have been Enakkaaga Mattum!). He has been around for so long and looks so old that it is really difficult to accept him in this role. Granted he is a good actor and has moved away from his image to successfully portray a role that is for the most part serious but that doesnt take away the fact that he should have also considered whether he was suited for the role. The situation is the exact opposite for the other members of the cast. Aditya and Mehar look their parts but are yet to learn the ABCs of acting. Ramji is stereotyped as the villainous college student.

With its sorry excuse for a story, hamhanded direction, bad jokes and poor performances, the movie merrily strides along in the 1/2 star category until almost the end. It is the climax that truly pushes it down into bomb level. First of all, the way the hero realises his mistake is completely silly. To top it off, Chinny Jayanth lies on the floor, foaming at the mouth in the grip of an epileptic fit but Mehar and her friend ask Aditya not to save him so that Aditya would realise the error in his ways! Granted Chinny Jayanth wishes to earn sympathy(and thereby forgiveness for putting us through the movie!) but does it have to be at the expense of the other characters whose behaviour seems to go against even the most basic qualities of human beings?

The movie is an amazing combination of bad direction, characterization and dialogs. Almost every single scene smacks of amateurishness and listing out everything that is silly or laughable would require more space than geocities currently allocates to me! But one example should suffice to illustrate what I mean. A doctor who sees Aditya vomit blood cleverly diagnoses the illness to be 'blood vomitting'! Then he sees nothing wrong with Aditya and asks him if he's recently had a love failure! And pronounces that he can cure the 'blood vomitting' but doesn't have any medicines for love failure!

Aditya's behavior initially(like his reaction when Mehar accuses him of giving her a love letter) makes us wonder whether he is supposed to be innocent or insane. And the character of the father who is more of a friend to his son, which was shown so well in Kaadhalan, manages to be irritating by overdoing it. As in James Paandu, Chinny Jayanth seems to have thought that some 'kadi' jokes(like the scene where Chinny Jayanth talks about the balls in various games) were all that were needed to carry a movie. But even these jokes are unfunny and forced. A couple of songs by Bobby Shankar, son of Shankar in the Shankar-Ganesh duo, do manage to rise above the quality of the rest of the movie.