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'Nilavuku Enmel Ennadi Kobam' Movie Review: Dhanush's Featherweight Young Romance Helped by a Dozen Great Scenes
With 'NEEK,' the filmmaker in Dhanush shows that he gets Gen-Z for real and the tiny issues that make their lives salty.
Director: Dhanush
Writer: Dhanush
Cast: Pavish, Mathew Thomas, Anikha Surendran, Priya Prakash Varrier, Venkatesh Menon, R. Sarathkumar
Language: Tamil
One may recall a million films while watching Dhanush's Nilavuku En Mel Ennadi Kobam (Why is the Moon Angry with Me?) but the one film that kept crawling back from memory was the first hour of Kanguva.
What I’d lodged in the back of my mind as some form of repressed trauma, returned to haunt me for the way Siva's film tried to show you the lives of youngsters today. Memes were inserted, a specific lingo attempted, and you could see the desperation of a disconnected director trying to behave cool.
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But try placing that abomination next to Dhanush’s NEEK and see how little the actor-director needs to do to speak the language of 20-somethings. The effort is invisible and there’s zero condescension in the way he looks at people half his age.
Instead of simping for Gen-Z approval, he slaps as a filmmaker, who for real gets them and the tiny issues that make their lives salty.
This ease is obvious right from the first sequence. When Prabhu (Pavish) is forced to meet a girl in an arranged marriage situation, the inherent tension of this formal setup is deflated almost instantaneously. We learn that Preeti (Priya Prakash Varrier) and Prabhu were classmates, and this meeting reconfigures itself to the mood of a reunion as these two friends meet each other after years.
They speak like friends often do (in an argument, Preeti says, “dai panni”) and their decision-making is practical, even when it comes to marriage. What we’re getting from all this is that the film’s Gen-Zness isn’t restricted to surface-level gimmicks, and extends to the way it shows us their thinking too.
It’s from this space that we get a terrific idea for a midpoint. Up until then, the film felt like a combination of many things… love failure, love after heartbreak, and marriage as an extension of friendship. But at the midpoint, the film also asks a set of valuable questions, including, 'Can you partake in the celebrations of your ex-girlfriend’s wedding?'
From here on, NEEK transforms from what was until then a film about falling in love to one that’s about actively staying out of love.
It becomes a wedding movie too with each of the film’s major dramatic events written around a major wedding festivity. So, if the haldi ceremony re-establishes the status quo among the couples, the sangeet function is where the emotions begin to get messy again. The wedding itself is set in a five-star resort with alcohol flowing in every scene. There’s a lot of fun to be had because of this, even if it all feels a bit too distracted and scattered.
This has also got to do with the number of characters the film is trying to juggle. Not only is the film written around a “love pentagon” with five characters fighting for each other, but we also get another love triangle developing on the side. It’s heady and confusing, but unlike the loudness of a Priyadarshan comedy, there’s a surprising amount of deftness in the way all these characters get their due.
What helps is how most of them are also inherently likeable. And when Prabhu and his bestie Rajesh (Mathew having a lot of fun) choose to have an impromptu dance party even in the middle of this mess, we realise that they’re all kids after all.
It’s the likeability of these characters that gets us to stay invested even when the film begins to come apart in its third act; the conflict is too obvious and takes too much time, and the narrative smoothness of the first hour goes missing once we move into the wedding.
Also, the film’s two viral songs slow down its pace and we begin to miss characters like Prabhu’s parents, who had kept the film real. Through it all, we wait for that one big dramatic scene or a hilarious sequence to bring back the excitement.
GV Prakash’s music and the film’s La La Land visuals try to keep the movie from slipping away, even when it already has. But with a bunch of able actors including the assured debut of Pavish (in some scenes he reminds you so much of vintage Dhanush) and Mathew who keeps the film light, NEEK is exactly the "usual" love story it aspires to be.
It's mid at best, but the few scenes that land work so well that we get the feeling of having watched a film that is not simply made for youngsters, but also made by a youngster.