A Disappointing Musical . Review on Vishwa Thulasi Movie

Here is another woman director Sumathy Ram who has no formal training in film making comes all over from USA to Tamilnadu to make her poems into a movie titled “Vishwa Thulasi”. Film being produced by her husband she takes all possible freedom to make a film in her own style without any compromises. My expectations were sky high when I heard about this movie with two legendary music directors Illayaraja and M.S. Vishwanathan joining hands to score the music. But what is the net result, it is a half baked love story which fails to impress. It neither shows any brilliance in style of making that can pull niche audience nor has any commercial elements to pull the ordinary masses.

There is no Plot at all in the movie. The movie takes us to 1962 from where it again travels back and forth between 1942 and 1962. Vishwa (Mamooty) and Thulasi (Nandita Das) love each other but unfortunately circumstances forces Thulasi to marry her cunning cousin Siva (Manoj.K.Vijayan) and leaves Sundarapuri. Siva suddenly disappears and is untraceable for almost twenty years. Vishwa lives as a bachelor all his life. After twenty years he meets Thulasi again and they both explore the buried love, longings and emotions again but they hesitate to open up the desire due to social constraints. Finally when they decide to get married Siva comes back and the rest is to watch on celluloid.

Sumathy ram has literally translated her poems into visuals and the story is developed just to build coherence between the visuals. Better she could have opted to make a music video of all her poems composed by MSV instead of making this movie which wasted both my and her money and time. The pace of the movie tests our patience. A visual can look poetic if conceived well with care but due to lack of experience in this media she couldn’t make poetic visuals out of her own poems.

Concrete Script and Screenplay

The main disadvantage of the movie is absence of a concrete script and some small twists in the screenplay. Festivals and family get to gathers comes one after another which makes Vishwa and thulasi to meet often and she plays usual hide and seek game with Vishwa, smiles with shyness and runs away. In between a strange mad man is shown doing strange things including a cruel killing of a chicken and drinking the blood of it. In the very first scene every one can guess that he is Siva who vanished from the life of Thulasi after their marriage for past twenty years. So, there is no big shock or twist when we come to know that he is Siva.

Half Baked Characters

The director fails big time because of half-baked characterization. Both Vishwa and Thulasi characters are ambiguous. Though Thulasi lost her husband and lived alone for past twenty years, there was no pain, sadness or somberness seen in her face. She is very happy always. Though Vishwa knows the fact that Thulasi lives alone without her husband why he waited for twenty years to meet and marry her. The way Siva character has been made to disappear from Thulasi’s life is illogical and no clear reasons are given. An abrupt ending, not even a single frame is shot to show Vishwa’s reaction when Thulasi is killed by Siva. There are lots of such large loop holes in the movie.

Performance

The scenes between Vishwa and Thulasi in young age are amateur because of the amateur performance of the adult actors who played the characters and their artificial conversations and expressions especially the person who played Siva’s young age character is annoying. We can excuse Sumathy even for not extracting a decent performance from these young actors but she does the same with veteran Mamooty. We see Mamooty coming and going with so called subtle expressions (subtlety has its own limit), plain face without any expressions on all occasions, plain dialogue delivery and body language. But Nandita das is refreshing for a change she runs around trees, sings, dances and always comes with a smile on her face and weeps minimally. She has done her best but with a half baked character even her performance couldn’t life the movie. Manoj.K.Vijayan in a mad man role is not at all convincing though he comes up with good performance at some places especially when he looks at his own disgusting face in the mirror in the pre climax scene.

Music

Only one thing about the movie for which we can congratulate Sumathy Ram is for making a complete musical. In very old movies we had around 60 songs in a single movie. “Vishwa Thulasi” is a contemporary musical in same fashion which has short haiku songs placed all through the movie. Hardly there is conversation between lead characters. Everything is conveyed with songs penned by Sumathy herself in the background. Hats off to the Maestro Illayaraja for such an extra ordinary background score for a romantic period film. The songs are soulful melodies. The movie is unthinkable without background score and songs by the legends MSV and Illayaraja. With such divine music, if there was a solid script the movie would have gone places.

Cinematography

Another laudable effort is from cinematographer B.Kannan who has made Nandita Das look gorgeous than ever before. The tone and the color of the visuals are apt to the period. The visuals of Sundarapuri village in the title credits are pleasant to watch.

Sumathy aimed something big but failed miserably due to lack of experience. Better luck next time Sumathy. Don’t waste your time and money on watching this movie. But don’t forget to buy the music album of the movie when it hits the shop.