Nivedhithaa Sathish, Cibi, and Attul play a sort-of love triangle, and they’re trapped in a house in the hills as butterflies flutter around them. The concrete physical and psychological drama is supplemented by lots of abstract metaphorical drama. The story doesn’t fully come together in a way that affects us deeply, but it’s interesting most of the time and there’s lots to think about. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
Gowri (Nivedhithaa Sathish) blames herself for a tragedy. She is in an emotional slump, and keeps imagining worst-case scenarios. For instance, if the neighbourhood kids are playing cricket and the ball falls on the balcony of her house, she hesitates to throw it back to them. She imagines a what-if! What if she throws the ball and a boy tries to catch it, his eyes on the ball and not on the road, and what if a vehicle is speeding by…! Oh Butterfly keeps sliding between Gowri’s troubled present and her equally troubled past, and we slowly slip into a time when the newly married Gowri found herself with her husband Arjun (Attul) and a college senior Surya (Cibi). They are in a cottage in the hills and the three of them get involved in a weird stretch of interpersonal dynamics. The film looks and feels like a chamber play. Or in movie terms, think of something like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but with younger characters and an overarching philosophy about life.
Vijay Ranganathan’s writing (with additional screenplay by Harish Rajagopal) is excellent. He doles out information in small doses, during conversations, like it happens in real life. For instance, we see Gowri’s sister (Lakshmi Priyaa Chandramouli) in an early scene. She is someone who has renounced worldly life and joined an ashram. The “why” comes to us much later. So, unlike in the typical drama, we are not ahead of the characters. We learn about them the way we’d learn about new people we meet in real life, and this keeps us on our toes. And it also gives us drama, like in the moment we learn why Gowri married Arjun. It’s very refreshing to see three flawed people driving a story. You may not agree with the reason one of them gives for cheating (it sounds a bit like how the Kamal Haasan character explains his adulterous nature in Thug Life), but you’ll see that this character believes this is why he did what he did. We do stupid things, sometimes, but it’s by doing these stupid things that we become wiser.
But the film needed better actors and better direction. There’s a disconnected, disjoined, staccato feel throughout – and the big allusions begin to feel forced after a point. At the opening, we get a Carl Sagan quote: “We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” This is a great summation of what lies ahead. It is an acknowledgement that shit happens, and it is our ego that makes us think that we are in any way responsible for any of it. But there’s too much butterfly imagery, including a man (Nasser) who raises butterflies like children and a copy or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, where one of the defining images is that of yellow butterflies. The chain of events in this story could also be seen as some kind of “butterfly effect”. I loved the idea of the panicked Nasser character combing a large forest for a single butterfly that’s lost its way, but these abstract touches do not mesh easily with the three-person narrative at the centre. Oh Butterfly is fascinating at the concept level, and it’s rare to find a tight, word-driven psychological drama in Tamil cinema. But the film doesn’t end up what it could have been.
