Before I start talking about the U/A certified Kavalai Vendam , I have to confess that I am a huge fan of sophomore humour—the kind pioneered by Judd Apatow and gang with films such as The 40-year-old Virgin, Knocked Up and Funny People . Orange juice has never been the same either after how our own Delhi Belly taught us how it can be substituted for toilet paper. So despite its Tamil remake Settai being a massive disappointment of scatological proportions, I believed that we would always find a home-grown Tamil film that would hold its own, shtickly speaking.
Deekay’s second film Kavalai Vendam (after the highly successful comic-horror Yamirku Bayamey ), begins with this promise…a long line of men ogle at Divya (Kajal Aggarwal) as she crosses the street with one of them in particular, drooling (very literally) at her sight.
- Genre: Comedy
- Cast: Jeeva, Kajal Aggarwal, RJ Balaji
- Director: Deekay
- Storyline: A woman on the verge of divorce, visits her soon to-be ex-husband
- Bottomline: A juvenile, immature comedy
Moments later, Divya describes her husband Arvind (Jeeva) as someone who faked drowning just so he can be mouth-to-mouth resuscitated by the female swimming instructor. To facilitate this drowning, Arvind even pees into the pool so he gets the whole pool to himself.
You sense a pattern from then and you realise that Kavalai Vendam is less a film and more a consistent flow of bodily fluids, of every imaginable kind. So Arvind pukes all over Divya just after they get married. Later, two diarrhoeic men, find "solace" right in the middle of the police station…that too, all over a bunch of criminals.
As liberal as it may sound, my issues aren’t with the use of excremental gags to get laughs, but with their lack of inventiveness in their usage. When you’ve decided to take the lower route, couldn’t you have gone all the way down…way, way below the belt?
I guess the films writers, who I assume have an early bed time, couldn’t have spared the time to think of cleverer stuff for a subject that’s so ripe with comic possibilities. It is, after all, about Divya approaching Arvind to get him to sign divorce papers so she can move on to her richer, more qualified boyfriend.
Barring a few scattered moments of laughter, Kavalai Vendam ’s just a repeat of last week’s disappointing Kadavul Irukaan Kumaru . This stuff is tough to flush away, even for those of us who find no harm in an occasional fart in the arts.
