Mundhinam Paatheney ! - review

Five minutes of watching Mundhinam paartheyney I was like, "Oh my god, Another story about a guy desperately looking for the perfect girl !". Must have been the effect of Vinnaithaandi Varuvaya, Theeratha Villayaatu Pillai and numerous other recent Tamil releases I watched. But then very quickly, I realized this is going to be fun and different. The movie is fresh and entertaining. I felt like watching numerous episodes of a wonderfully written sitcom. And I missed watching this along with my friends, that would have been a blast. Music is refreshing though the songs slowed the pace of the movie. Special kudos to Thaman and team for the very creative re-recording and background effects. Good performances by almost everybody in the cast except a very few of Sanjay's friends. Sai Ganesh and the girl who played Priya have a promising future.

Magizh Thirumeni, the director, dares to walk along dangerous borders in a couple of scenes like the 12th grade student commenting about a condom in her brother's wallet and so on. He has chosen the narrative style for the movie, but there is too much of narration. Sometimes I wonder if he has forgotten the first rule of screenplay - "Show, don't tell". For instance, when the narration is through the hero's point of view, suddenly emerges a very short sequence of the dancer girl narrating her dreams of buying a house. This jump confuses the viewer. 

No doubts the dialogues are spontaneous and funny. A trick writers use during the "initial setup" phase of a  story is to start the scene in the middle of an event that is happening. For instance, a scene opens up in a staircase with Sai Ganesh refusing something. During the next dialogues we come to know that Sanjay had asked Sai to accompany him for Salsa  class and that is what he is refusing. This makes the audience more attentive and eventually follow the movie more carefully. But this usually this is not followed in the second and third acts of story telling since it would give a feeling of  the audience being left out  of the happenings. Unfortunately, Magizh follows this in-the-middle-of-the-event in almost 80 % of the movie. Something has already happened and you see one character narrating or explaining it to another character. And also, I don't see any need for the whole thing to be a flashback from London if the hero decides not to meet her again.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy a few interesting twists like the train scene and the way the truth behind gossips about a girl are revealed in the story. With a typical feel good movie, Magizh thirumeni shows the promise to be a Sekhar Kammula for Tamil