The film is about a husband and wife who love each other but also keep fighting. It’s vaguely watchable, but nothing more. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
Pandiraj’s latest film about a large family, Thalaivan Thalavii, stars Vijay Sethupathi and Nithya Menen as a married couple named Agasaveeran and Perarasi. The story opens with their names carved on a big rock in the Madurai area, as though they were legends – and in a way, they are legendary. They are both emotional to a fault. They are either all over each other with public displays of affection, or it’s the other extreme, with them fighting with each other, with lots of shouting and screaming. (In general, this is a very loud film in terms of decibel levels.) The story opens in a temple, with the couple appearing to be separated. Perarasi is with their daughter and her family, for a ritual. But at least for a while, Agasaveeran is absent. Slowly, we learn about the series of events that led to this point, as the film keeps cutting between the temple and the couple’s home.
The best thing about Thalaivan Thalaivii is this couple. Vijay Sethupathi and Nithya Menen keep you smiling. He makes you see a man who is totally in love with his wife, and she makes you see a short-tempered woman who keeps going to her parents’ home after big fights with her husband or his family but can’t help running back to him. They are equally matched. If he raises his hand to slap her, she’s quicker; she slaps him first. If he makes a comment about the weight she’s put on, she remarks that his stomach has become bloated. He is a parotta master who runs his own hotel. In other words, he loves to cook and she loves to eat. They seem perfect for each other, but apart from their volatile nature, their respective families keep causing trouble. And this on-off relationship keeps going on and off, on and off, on and off…
And this becomes tiresome after a while. Yes, the whole point may be that marriages have their ups and downs, and sometimes for the silliest of reasons. And it is nice to see a screenplay that is constantly in a state of conflict, as opposed to one big explosion at interval point followed by another big explosion at the climax. The entire first half of Thalaivan Thalaivii feels like a pre-interval block, and the entire second half feels like one big climax. But as interesting as this structure sounds, the screenplay doesn’t find enough to do with it. The fights become very repetitive, with exaggerated mega-serial type developments, and I wished the film had shown a little more restraint – perhaps with more private, romantic moments between Agasaveeran and Perarasi. The whole conflict point with her brother, played by RK Suresh, is terribly artificial. It’s there only because every film needs a big action block.
In a nice bit, when the RK Suresh and Vijay Sethupathi characters clash with weapons, we cut immediately from this physical fight to a verbal conflict in the past, between Agasaveeran and Perarasi. But along with this playfulness, we also get developments that involve Agasaveeran’s family getting beaten up and Perarasi’s family initiating a separation. It gets worse, with heavy-duty temple rituals and confessions about the ego. All this is too heavy, too serious – especially with a huge cast that keeps shouting. (There’s Yogi Babu, Roshini Haripriyan, Deepa Shankar, Chemban Vinod Jose, Saravanan, Kaali Venkat, and about a dozen others.) Thalaivan Thalaivii has a few moments that click, but the whole film might have worked had the writing been more in sync with the fact that this is essentially a Tom and Jerry marriage story. Some parts of the film say that we are not meant to take any of this seriously. Other parts have Perarasi walking on coals in a temple, while shedding tears. You wish they had made up their mind about what exactly they were going for.
