Kadhalum Kadandhu Pogum – An unfinished story

I want you to imagine something: Take any Tamil film and picture a local businessman with shady connections and a string of minions, now take any random scuffle this ‘gang’ gets into, what do you think of the minions? What if one of them gets beaten up by another gang or even the protagonist? What do you think of the mindset of these aspiring goons? They wake up in the morning, go to work like anyone else, just that the work they found is this… We don’t spare a minute to think of what’s going on with these guys? All of them can’t be sadists or even bad guys… There were many films where the protagonist plays either a goonda or rowdy or an aspiring rowdy working under someone, but I’ve not seen any film which portrays them as regular humans with limitations like Ka Ka Po does. That probably is the only thing going for this film. If I tell you the film has Vijay Sethupathy who plays a ruffian and Madonna Sebastian who plays an IT professional, you might think it’s a typical love story where opposites attract, but that doesn’t even scratch the surface of how the story plays out and that is where the film stands apart and give us at least something to talk about.

KaKaPo is a not exactly a love story, the ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’ do not profess their love to each other, they don’t run around trees, hell there isn’t even a background love song in the movie, it portrays a series of incidents that happen in the lives of two individuals who happen to live in the same neighborhood within a finite timeframe. It may not be a revolutionary concept, but definitely something we should pay attention to and encourage this type of film making.

Nalan Kumarsamy is back after the sleeper cult hit Soodhu Kavvum and teamed up with the same technical talent to bring us KaKaPo. Vijay Sethupathy does an amazing job, but we’ve seen him play this role before, although its different from a regular rowdy roles we are used to seeing, I daresay that he is being type casted (viz. Naanum Rowdy Than, Idharkuthane Aasaipattai Balakumara etc.). Madonna Sebastian emotes well but I am not sure if I would call her pretty, the rest of the cast is adequate. It’s not the cast or direction but it’s the screenplay that takes the cake. It’s not what you would expect; in a typical film like this, a. you would either expect a love at first sight, or b. the relationship starts with fighting but ends up in love, and this film will surprise you by choosing c. None of the above. Yes, there’s some underlying affection between the two but it’s never overt or even voiced (not even in dream sequence or even gossip among neighbors).

Vijay Sethupathy plays an ‘Adiyaal’ in a businessman’s ‘gang’ of ruffians who do his bidding, but he can’t seem to do anything right, he can’t even be a decent bouncer in a bar his boss owns. There’s a hilarious scene where he goes into the bar to control a raucous situation (we hear a snippet of a background song which purportedly pumps up the audience with platitudes about the 'hero'), but ends up getting beaten up by the rowdy bunch. Madonna Sebastian is a down on the luck IT professional who lost her job in the recession and looking for a new job, although she does justice to the role she doesn’t come out as someone the audience can connect to, when she does menial jobs or gets humiliated in a few interviews, I didn’t feel anything for her, its either her character’s fault or her demeanor is not very charming, if you want the audience to feel for someone, first you have to establish the charm, which the film fails to do.

Overall, the film feels like an unfinished story because the ending feels like the beginning, but may be that’s the effect the film makers were going for instead of presenting us with the usual love story that develops between two polar opposites in a short time frame. Either way, the film does a good job of portraying the life of a nameless/faceless minion sans all the drama.