Monday 24 October 2011

Veppam

2011 by Anjana - Tamil movie

Most prominent Malayalam movie directors can be seen down playing the success of Tamil movies. I can understand their worry, when even female directors from Tamil are able to make better movies, how can they not down play the success of their neighbours.

Two brothers are nearly orphaned at a very young age and is been taken care of by a foster father. The elder brother works hard for his younger and also the daughter of the foster father. The younger brother also has a very close friend, who desperately wants to save a girl from a brothel. For this he gets into a drug deal and just for the sake of the friend, the younger brother is with him. Nothing works as they planned. 

Mostly the story is quite routine, but is really nice how this old story is changed for the modern times. In fact the script has so many issues tangled in like a web. The fate of a brother who unknowingly kills his mother, who lives for his brother, the friendship between the two friends and the girl, a father who works as a pimp in the same neighbourhood but is kept away by the elder brother, a lady local thug running the drug deals, the friends relation with a brothel girl. I liked very much how the script was able to hold all these together.

And the director, Anjana, has done a very good job too. She has not tried to go over board actually, has kept a kind of overt subtlety to every thing around, and there is a kind of realism every where. And through that very first shot and the end one, I would say, she really had given a real female version for a puzzle in the script, which would have normally been a different matter with other directors. She could have still done without one or two of those songs though.

Climax was really nice, except that it looked like both the brothers had pre planned what to do with their father.

Performances from all actors were brilliant, and so was the cinematography. I was especially impressed by Karthik Kumar,  who is so used to play a brilliant rich/middle class boy. What a difference from the typical stuff.

I am ready to wait for the next movie from Anjana.