No review of Aindhaam Thalaimurai Sidha Vaidhiya Sigamani can begin without acknowledging that title, which seems to have been devised solely as a means to rag students from Mumbai and Delhi who’ve just stepped into a Chennai college. “Pronounce this without pausing.” They’re done for.
The film, on the other hand, seems to have been devised as a hazing session for the audience. “Try sitting through this without looking at your watch every five minutes.”
The story is something that appears to have been scraped up from the reject pile of K. Bhagyaraj’s scripts, circa the 1980s. An unschooled youth (Sigamani, played by Bharath) dreams of marrying an educated woman (Nandita) and pretends to be an MBBS-wielding doctor — although he is really a naturopath, which, in director L.G. Ravichandhran’s eyes, is a lesser accomplishment.
The sticky situations Sigamani finds himself in should have been a riot, but the laughs are few — a joke about a half-boiled egg and an omelette tickled my inner six-year-old — and we are thrown at the mercy of melodramatic plot elements (villains, infidelity) that quickly become a drag. A Gaana Bala lyric seems to sum it up best: panamarathula vavvaalu, maattikitta ambelu...
