There is a line between portraying an abusive relationship as problematic, and showing it as glorious. Prisoner of war VK (Karthi) reminisces about his romance with an army hospital doctor, Leela (Aditi Rao), while plotting his return to India. The film, mostly told in flashback, is an endless array of abusive segments pegged as somehow romantic and indicative of the intensity of the fighting man. With each missed warning signal of "Run, Leela, Run" the educated, independent doctor is endeared more and more by the egregious excesses of her fighter pilot suitor. If relationship abuse were were required to be flagged with a written warning accompanying the scene (as the Indian government requires for scenes with characters drinking or smoking), the film would have a second layer of subtitles. The only mildly redeeming feature of the film is the locales, which Mani Ratnam's films are known for, though they scarcely do much to assuage the unwitting unfolding of the portrait of an acid attacker as a young man. The screenplay mainly consists of seven or short-film like sequences of bizarre behavior, offset by a momentary apology and close-up shots of the protagonist's pained face, to set up the next. There is no real plot development or dive into the characters, which even the lovers of the MGR model of macho screen romance would find hard to empathize with. The best scene in the film is when a paunchy character actor dies, and is stuffed into a coffin at best designed for a svelte fashion model, leaving the audience to rue the scriptwriter editing away the compelling scene in which his arms would need to be sawed off to fit the grave. That scene was only saved by its irrelevance to the plot.
Review of Kaatru Veliyidai
