Kadali Review

The difference is perhaps in the grammar of your clichés, perhaps even in the style of the clichés. With his latest offering Mani Ratnam makes clear that his genre is style A Mukul, S Anand with a repute!! While many film makers navigate their film towards a conflict, here conflict is the premise of the narration. Unfortunately this time it is too message soaked to be an entertainer and too entertainment sucked to be a message film. Unapologetically from the pulpit Mani Ratnam pushes the envelope too aggressively for comfort.
It reflects the conflict dealt with hitherto by Hermann Hesse in Narcissus and Goldmun or go even further to the Nietzsche’s Apollonian Versus Dionysian. Here too the conflict through a brief epilogue starts in a seminary but the lines are sharply divided between the good represented by Sam Fernandez (Arvind Swamy) and evil exemplified by Bergman (Arjun). Bergman is given marching orders from the seminary and he vows to get even with Fernandez. Years later Fernandez is a Father at a church in a fishing coast where the local have more than just abandoned the church. In the village is a young boy (Gautham Karthik) who is the illegitimate son of a local fisherman Kitti (Ponvanan). The kid aching for legitimacy is finally accepted in the church and christened Thomas. The conflict grows with time, circumstance, script and narration. Thomas is gradually attracted towards Beatrice (Thulasi Nair). After a successful attempt by Father Sam to get Thomas into the mainstream and to a moral code, circumstances push him towards the successful pic of evil Bergman. The conflict between good and evil brews at one level between Sam and Berman and at another in an internalised format in Thomas.
Apart from what has been pointed out earlier, the script is loosely written and the characters improperly etched. Yet the film is engaging. Mani gives you some cinematic moments to cherish: the scenes showing the craving for social acceptance by a person (Thomas) with the baggage of being an illegitimate child; his craving for acceptation by his father; his lone spirit in the boat swinging when his father is dead; the moment when he makes the cross over to evil…..
The protagonist has a Jonathan Livingston Seagull like flight and is drawn towards his love ever with hesitation but always with eagerness. The debut making couple Gautham Karthik and Thulasi Nair are raw but endearing. Neither are conventionally promising stars but chosen by the director with the halo, they deliver with sincerity roles poorly etched but wonderfully canned.
Just when you hope that conflict resolve moment is epiphanic it gets apocalyptic. Two other factors recommend the film. AR Rehman gives the film just the music fit for the backdrop and the content and there is dream cinematography from Rajiv Menon. His cinematography is a cinema in itself and he handles the camera not like a technician but like a true artist. Brilliant is the word.
Watch the film and you are reminded qua the central character, assuming you perceive Thomas to be the fulcrum, of what Hesse said: scattered and infertile, the scenes of his life stretched out behind him, rich in magnificent images but broken in so many pieces, so poor in values so poor in value. To take recourse to the very same source, it sums up this Mani Ratnam exercise, “The basic image of a good work of art is not a real living figure, although it may inspire it. The basic image is not flesh and blood, it is mind. It is an image that has its home it in the artist’s soul”. It is here that the artist somewhere deceives to impress but fails to convince.

L. Ravichander.