The film is an easy watch, but it asks some difficult questions about making a relationship work. But there is no preaching, and there is no overt messaging. The rest of this review contains spoilers.
Kadhalikka Neramillai is a rare kind of movie for Tamil cinema. It is delicate. The filmmaking, the acting, the dialogues, the scene segues, the background score, the cinematography – everything is delicate. There’s no emphasis, no deafening explosion at the interval block or during the climax. Writer-director Kiruthiga Udhayanidhi has a light touch. When a man says “I love you”, the woman says nothing in return. She puts her head on his shoulder and smiles. She may not want to say those words at that point, but she likes hearing them and this is her response. In an earlier scene, when this woman reveals something to the man, he says, “Oh!” and then – a pause – and he, again, says “Oh!” The first “Oh!” is for the surprise of the revelation, the second, slightly sadder “Oh!” is for what that revelation implies for a man who does not want to bring a child into this world.
Ravi Mohan (formerly Jayam Ravi) plays this man, named Siddharth. He is a structural engineer. Nithya Menen plays Shriya, an architect. Unlike Siddharth, she is pro-child. One of her earliest lines is: “I want to get pregnant.” The story then goes on to sperm donation, IVF, two break-ups – and the hero and heroine still haven’t met. Then Shriya has a son, and so on and so forth. At the opening, we get a title card about the film’s streaming partner, and that’s what Kadhalikka Neramillai feels like: something easy and breezy that you’d unwind with on Netflix. That doesn’t mean that the film has no substance. It does. It handles important questions about marriage and single-parenting and how being around children can make you change your stance on “I don’t want to have a child”. But there is no preaching, and there is no overt messaging.
On the surface, there are many taboos that this film breaks, very casually. Shriya is a TamBrahm, and she’s anything but conservative. Siddharth is a Tamil-film hero, and he’s anything but macho. There’s no action scene just so that he can flex his muscles. Vinay Rai plays a gay man, and no big deal is made about it. The man who cheats on Shriya is not shown to be a total villain. An excellent TJ Bhanu plays Nirupama, a fashion model who walks the ramp in Paris. And so forth. But the real subversion is in the way this tale is told. Kiruthiga is not making a movie she thinks the audience will like. Except for the casting of Yogi Babu for some comic relief, there is no pandering – and even his character is treated with dignity. In a way, Kadhalikka Neramillai is like Madha Gaja Raja (though the films couldn’t be more different). They give us something we don’t see in today’s Tamil cinema.
Kadhalikka Neramillai may be a story about the top one percent of Tamil society – but in that upper than upper-class world, it is completely “rooted”. Nothing looks fake. When a character reads Proust, she looks like someone who’d be reading Proust. When Shriya watches TV late at night, the camera captures her dark circles. Without being told, we see that she has not been sleeping well. The scenes feel real because they are allowed to breathe. There is a long exchange between Siddharth and his girlfriend, and it goes back and forth, back and forth, until we get this line after she learns about his sperm donation: “So it just takes a cup to replace me.” The lines feel so fresh and so true to this world. We get funny lines, too. Vinodhini Vaidyanathan gets a couple of zingers, one of which suggests that she is a closet smoker. I wish we’d seen more of her. Mano and Lakshmy Ramakrishnan play Shriya’s parents. The “mother sentiment” is handled sharply, but not sentimentally. Nice!
There are a few clichés that could have been handled better, like the stretch where Shriya discovers that her fiancé is cheating on her. We can see this coming from a mile away, and yet the way Shriya reacts is not a cliché. She opens the bedroom door, sees the act of adultery, shuts the door, and then opens it again to verify that her eyes are not deceiving her. Nithya has an astonishingly expressive face, and even more amazing are her instincts about when to dial it up and when to keep it casual. As for Ravi, he slips into this ultra-urban, wine-sipping world with ease. It’s one of his finest, most relaxed performances, and maybe this is who he is when not trying to conquer the A and B and C centres, all in the same movie. The scene with Siddharth and Shriya at a bar is fantastic. There is a sense that the universe is conspiring to get them together, but this point isn’t pushed on us.
Nothing, really, is pushed on us. When Siddharth and his ex are conversing, Shriya’s head enters the frame at the last minute, at the right minute – and we know she’s been listening and wondering all along. Shriya’s reaction on seeing Siddharth bond with his father, another single parent, says so much about what she wished she had with her parents and also about the missing male influence in her son’s life. The scenes are alive and not “finished”, and we are free to read what we want. You expect that the truth about the sperm donor will be used to resolve the story, but the film has other ideas. It is open-minded, and also open-ended. Kiruthiga has made an unapologetic movie where she says, “This is my wavelength, my vibe… if you feel like it, hop on for the ride.”
AR Rahman certainly hops on for the ride, with superb songs that aren’t templated in any way, especially Lavender Neramae and the chartbusting Yennai Izhukkuthadi. The song plays again during the end credits and in my theatre, almost everyone stayed back to watch it. There are some minor issues, like the fact that Shriya’s son keeps vanishing, or that Siddharth’s friends practically disappear in the second half. There are some plot points I didn’t buy. But Kiruthiga gets the big things right. The heroine is as strong as the hero, and the hero has as many questions about life as the heroine. It’s nice to watch a movie where we know more about the characters than they do, and yet, they keep surprising us with their actions, their decisions. What I liked best is the film’s generosity. No one is painted in a bad light. At one point, Siddharth’s ex tells him: “Only I know what you’re like when you are in love.” You feel for her, even though you want Siddharth and Shreya to get together.
Kadhalikka Neramillai can be seen as a spiritual sequel to OK Kanmani. (Nithya Menen played an architect in that film, too.) It is a true “relationship story”, in the sense that the focus is only on the relationships. And like in that earlier film, we get a hint of where modern-day relationships might be headed, at least in a certain segment of society. In OK Kanmani, the couple got married and then ended up in a long-distance relationship, with the man in the US and the woman in Paris. Some ten years later, Kadhalikka Neramillai asks if marriage is even necessary. Whether this film will pass the audience’s “Thamizh kalaachaaram” test is anyone’s guess. But in a sea of films set in the status quo, it’s nice to be reminded that not everyone is cut from the same cloth. For a love story, the film feels fresh, and sometimes that’s all that’s needed.
