Movie Review – Comali

A K TV ish 90’s kids’ nostalgia

This movie was never in my list, I wouldn’t have watched it even for guilty pleasure but I did, that too in theatre, guess it was my happiness hang over. But thanks to have been in theatre, the only good thing that happened is my cold getting exaggerated. This would have been a fitting K TV film, in fact any of Jayam Ravi’s films of recent times would have been. He takes a concept which gives message and makes it into interesting movies, interesting for the ones who watch daily soap operas and Bigg Boss, you should not even think for a second or wonder about anything cinematic during the course of the movie. If you do, you’re in trouble.

Saying that a film like ‘Comali’ doesn’t make any sense doesn’t make the makers stupid, it makes you stupid. One must not analyze a movie like Comali which is made for mere entertainment but only enjoy it. So, the question is whether you’re able to enjoy or not. The majority of the audience did enjoy it, like how they did for Kanchana 2. For me it was irritating beyond a point. I had a couple of laughs, thanks to Yogi Babu and a bad sentiment rain scene in the climax which goes as far as asking the auto guy, “what is your name? my name is Joseph” and the auto turns, we see a plus symbol. Wow! But it still works, like a double cheese Margarita, we know how sinfully cheesy it is but we like it. It’s a craft to make even bad scenes work. When Jayam Ravi talks a lengthy dialogue on how he’d use emotion to win in climax, he wins us emotional fools with such a soupy climax. It flooded in 2015 but the film happens in 2016. That doesn’t matter, even if they had shown that as 3015 I would have had no complaints because if we nitpick such kind of films we are the fools. And I don’t know how many movies are going to make use of the flood situation, nothing has worked thus far.

The first few minutes of the film are fun. In fact, for the most part it is, thanks to Yogi Babu. But first few minutes used the 90s template to its advantage. Except for the gimmicky shaky thing that Ravi does by making his hands shiver, the other scenes are fun. Add to it there is Nikita (a ravishing Samyuktha Hegde). Wish she had been the heroine rather than Kajal who absolutely didn’t make any impact at all. Add to it, irritating acting by the doctor, watchman etc. Only Ravikumar and his wife do their job best. Rest all look like buffoons. And what’s with all these YouTube sensations, they look pathetic on screen. Shouldn’t they know that’s why they’re YouTube sensations.

I don’t know why the movie became a hit just like that, it’s nothing but like an immature speech in symposium, a director with lots of free time, hell lot of friends in Facebook made. The trailer was genuinely funny with Rajnikanth entering politics but thanks to our policing gods even that was removed. That included a very broad-minded Kamal who found the scene to be distasteful. I guess we are again going into that 70s SP Muthuraman phase where all these mindless junkies of blockbuster film came out. God save Tamil film industry. Just few years back I was proud of our films, Soodhu Kavvum, Jigarthanda etc. See now what’s coming up. Malayalam film industry at that time was getting into the groove and now they have a firm grip but look at us, we ended up being disaster.

Maybe it’s a curse, films like this are going to come till eternity but let’s hope against hope that there will again be a Vijay Sethupathi phase, a Tamil New Wave and a lot of good movies.