Having never watched a T.Rajendhar movie other than his debut Oru Thalai Raagam, it was with some trepidation that I rented Monisha En Monalisa. And if his other movies were even half as bad as this one, I'm real glad that I didn't see any of those.

The hero Ramankanth sees a concert of pop singer Monisha(Mumtaj) and falls in love. He woos her over the phone but she, hating all men and love itself, resists his advances. But he wears her down and she finally succumbs, agreeing to see him. But he dies in an accident on the way over and she ends up not being able to even see his face. Another track has Monisha's secretary being wooed by a collegemate. She resists him initially too but this one ends happily.

If tragedy is your cup of tea, the story might actually sound appealing - with its similarities to the old Mohan-Amala starrer Mella Thirandhadhu Kadhavu, but that well-directed romance couldn't be farther away from the mess that is this movie. This movie is cheap, loud, vulgar and almost every other disparaging adjective you can think of can be used to describe it. I was hard-pressed to come up with a single redeeming feature during the entire movie. Loud, garish sets (supposed to be the selling point of the movie! That should tell you something about it's other points) occupy most of the song sequences. All female characters in the movie - young or old - prance around in the least possible clothing (and I use that word in it's loosest sense here). The acting is leaden and other than the heroine, no one in the cast even looks good.

T.Rajendhar appears as Kaadhaldasan, a jubba-wearing, jolna bag-carrying philosopher spouting ridiculous (but rhyming) dialogs about love. A sample - "Soap will dissolve in water; but a stone will not. Similarly, love will not dissolve in one's heart". And so many years in Kodambakkam has not improved his acting or dialog delivery even one bit. Among the zillion songs (atleast that's what it seemed like anyway!), SPB's Hello Hello passes muster.

If Pooveli represented the high-point of recent tamil cinema, this one's got to be the low-point.