'Kiss' Movie Review: A Charming Kavin Headlines This Lost Love Story

Nelson (Kavin) is a kiss and tell kinda guy. He sees two lips meet, and with “kiss jyotisham” can tell how the lovers met, and since he is a romantic fatalist, how the lovers will part ways. Nelson, though, has never really kissed anyone, not for lack of options. Handsome, a sweet lisp, a loving son, and a band member, he is desired but doesn’t desire. Women propose, he disposes. 

Kavin, one of the few actors who have successfully made the arc from television to the big-screen with a stop-over at Bigg Boss Tamil, is perfectly pitched to the character—his body language and lost eyes show a complete disinterest in the world, not as arrogance, but as a vulnerability. To watch him inhabit Nelson is to see how yielding sweetness and cocksure coolness can coexist in a character. 

There is a scene in the film where he protects his younger brother from goons by turning his brother into a weapon—a shield sometimes, receiving their punch, and a sword sometimes, puncturing a baddie. It is jovial, collar-up cool, but also deeply invested—it is the kind of care that doesn’t express itself through shrieking melodrama but shirking realism. The eyes never flare, they blink. The ‘sorry’ isn’t weepy, it is flung out like two small, soft syllables.

A still from 'Kiss'

The marriage of his parents, what he had assumed was a romantic ideal, crumples in front of his eyes when he sees his father cheating on his mother, kissing another woman on the forehead. The parents divorce, Nelson and his brother stay with the mother—who runs a department store with their help. The flat white tubelights of the store—an eyesore—are balanced by the freezer aisle where a misted open door to the freezer turns into a barrier in a pivotal scene. The aisle becomes a cordoned off space to while away the years. Nelson isn’t particularly ambitious, and his sense of the future is like his sense of love—he doesn’t see it, even if it exists. 

A mysterious book is handed over to Nelson at a park one day, by Sarah (Preethi Asrani), a dance instructor, who thinks it belongs to him. Before he can return the book to Sarah, noting it is not his, it rains, and she disappears. He keeps the book—one that gives him that “kiss jyotisham”. 

As it is, Nelson does not believe in love. Not because he is wounded, but because he just hadn’t found the person who could make that word make sense. It begins to feel like a phobia of love—one that gets realized after he gets this foresight, for every kissing couple he turns his eye to have a bleak ending. His capacity to see the future, and the future being overwhelmingly tragic, only reiterates this love-phobia. Of what use is love in a world that constantly breaks it apart? He wears a shirt that says “The more you perceive easier it seems” — but Kiss has other plans. 

Trying to disentangle the mystery of the book, he goes back to its source, and tracks down Sarah—only to fall in love with her. New worries plague his feeble heart. What if they kiss? What if he sees how their love ends? 

A still from 'Kiss'

As Nelson is jostling with these worries, he is also trying to figure out if his powers of foresight can be challenged by his actions. Is it just fate or does he have agency to muscle life to his will? 

It is a compelling framework—how to soften Nelson’s hardened worry about the end of every relationship, how to make him believe in the power of action against the anxiety of fate. But the film does not entirely know what to do with its sweet set-up, taking it to the most absurd, unforgiving end—death, cancer, rings of fire. 

This makes the second half of the film more bleak than necessary, its stakes suddenly shoved into the stratosphere of storytelling. It is the presence of RJ Vijay who plays Nelson’s side-kick, his true love—the eternal friend—and the friend’s father, played by VTV Ganesh, that allows a breath of comic joy every time the film feels like it is going to tip over into tragedy. 

Choreographer Sathish Krishnan’s debut film, there is ballroom dancing, salsa, with even smatterings of urban alienation and a romantic duet expressed through dance—though it isn’t quite as sharp, shapely or necessary to the story. There is even a dance championship that is abruptly cut off, like the film’s original premise and promise, a true testament to squandered potential.