No matter how beaten to pulp and stale love as a subject becomes, it never fails to spawn ideas and imagination of our filmmakers. Marupadiyum Oru Kadhal is one such movie that is a mishmash of love from today and back from the eighties – or whenever love entered into the world of Tamil films as a predominant subject.

Director Vasu Baskar weaves a tale of love and longing in the world of internet and Face Book with outdated elements like love without the couple seeing each other and suchlike. As if it’s not enough that the movie is riddled with ludicrous logical loopholes, it’s also mired with concepts that even the television serials are afraid to carry these days.

A couple – two medical college students – are head over heels in love but they haven’t seen each other. If this reminds you of Kadhal Kottai days, what follows is something reminiscent of days even before Kadhal Kottai. You see the heroine singing to the hero, who is in his deathbed, to make him realize that she is the love of his life and you see lovers exchanging photos but the coy girl sending the boy a picture blackening the part of the eye so he cannot recognize her.

The movie opens with an accident. An inebriated man is hit by a lorry and as before he slips into unconsciousness, his entire life flashes before his eyes. The director wants you to believe that the poor guy became an alcoholic because of a girl’s love - who even refuses to meet him eye to eye. In these days of speed dating and relationships influenced by social networking, you have a hard time believing that such drama will be saleable.

The film’s leads Annirudh and Jyothsna fill the screen with their dead beat presence. You tend to think that they are probably tired of the movie, as much as you are as an audience. But that’s probably the screenplay’s strength or the lack of it. They do look like they have the potential to shine in a better story.

Srikanth Deva’s music and the movie’s cinematography are a few endurable aspects. If you consider the things the director should have done away with, the laundry list seems endless - starting from the stale theme of blind love without seeing each other.

That said, but for the very sloppy story and the screenplay, the movie is shot well. The scenes in London are nicely captured and the songs – yes what if the film’s lead haven’t seen eye to eye they can still do dream song sequences – are well shot in good locales. And that remains the only takeaway of the movie that is largely a sappy fare of unrequited love of a man and an unreasonably prude girl.

Verdict: Kadhal – back to the past!