‘Meyadhaa Maan’ opens with a Shakespearean line: ‘All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.’ The man delivering it is Murali (or Idhayam Murali, as his buddies refer to him) and he is standing atop a building, ready to commit suicide because love, and life, has failed him.
But he just can't bring himself to jump.
- Director: Rathna Kumar
- Cast: Vaibhav, Priya Bhavi, Vivek Prasanna, Indhuja
- Storyline: A youngster is perennially afraid of proposing to the girl he loves
That is because he is obsessed with Madhu, who he has been after for the last three years, and, much like Murali in the 1995 flick ‘Idhayam’, struggles to convey his feelings for. In a telephone conversation sequence that seems to stretch for eternity, Murali describes his situation. There are many more long stretches in this film which seems to be in no hurry to finish. But then again, it is this slumberous style of storytelling that helps at times.
Take the scene in which the hero has to convince his best friend to marry his sister. Or, the one in which the friend has to reveal his feelings which he does during a bike ride. In a commercial film, it would have lasted less than a minute but director Rathna Kumar takes his time. He gets an otherwise boisterous Vinoth (Vivek Prasanna) to feel shy. He even packs in a joke about Vinoth wanting to relieve himself.
His casting of Vivek as Vinoth deserves praise; he steals the show in his well-written role, even as leads Vaibhav and Priya Bhavani Shankar enact their parts well. For a film that dwells on romance, the brother-sister relationship (between Murali and Sudarvizhi, played by Indhuja) is well-etched and heartening... they even get a song together.
The numbers do act as speedbreakers in the screenplay but music composers Pradeep Kumar and Santhosh Narayan are quite content with that; when they aren’t getting down and dirty with their cliched ‘local’ offbeat kuthu songs, they’re producing some scintillating melodies like ‘Meghamo Aval’ and ‘Enna Na Seiven’. They almost make you forgive the film’s pacing issues.
