VISITOR COLUMN

A wafer thin plot, weak screen play and a deficient direction is not something you would associate with a Bala movie. Without reservations the pride of Tamil cinema, Bala slithered in his last movie “Avan Ivan” and in “ Pardesi” he is just lost…

Five minutes into the movie you can decode the premise of the movie and to your surprise Bala sticks loyally to the banal plot. There are no Bala moments in the movie, save for the parody on Christianity.  The screenplay suffers more for lack of depth in the story and hence very few scenes muster notice. Its Bala’s innate ability to draw performances from the artistes that bring some passion to the lackluster screenplay. Bala’s brilliance in bringing humor out of desperate characters and situations in his dark films is absolutely absent.  The movie so much moves on conventional lines that you wince at its inevitability.

Technically there is nothing much to gloat about. The locales and the art are effective to say the most and the cinematographer has done his job to a T. The background music at times strains on your nerves and the songs give you the “heard before strings”.

The actors are the saving grace of the movie and stick to the Bala script. Atharva carves out a very good performance and so do the leading ladies of the movie. Vedhika and Dhansika perform admirably. The flip side is that the performances remains static throughout the movie as the screenplay gives no scope to improvise.

It’s with a heavy heart that you read the credit towards the end “A Bala film”, for after the movie you would feel “ Perhaps Bala was in “Pardes” while this movie was made here”!!