Reviews - Tamil Padam
Cloud Nine Movies' Thamizh Padam (Tamil Movie) is a full-length spoof on the entire industry, warts and all. Major kudos to director C S Amudhan for even coming up with the idea and then implementing it as it's not easy to work in the Land of Cliches, parody it, and then live to tell the tale.
The recipe for this particular concoction seems to be: take an ounce of every single staple of Tamil cinema over the decades, stir it over the fire of comedy and deliver with a huge dollop of witty dialogues.
Plot
Shiva (Shiva) is a young man destined for greatness. As a newborn, he instructs his grandmother to put him in a goods train, instead of killing him. (The logic being that every child dumped in a goods train always arrives in Chennai, to a shot of the Central station.). His grandmother (Paravai Muniyamma) does better than that -- she journeys with him to Chennai and raises him, teaching him the facts of life.
He watches a group of baddies beat up people in the Koyambedu market, fuming, but unable to do anything. Being told to cycle fast, though, he does and transforms into a dashing young man, while the baddies still (!) thrash people. Shiva beats up the villains with panache, albeit with a split seam in his pants.
Accompanied by rousing music, Shiva then proceeds to live life through many more such clichés: he's surrounded by college-going, drink-guzzling friends -- Nakul, Siddharth and Bharath (Manobala, Venniradai Murthi and M S Bhaskar) -- who play carom with him and ogle at pretty girls a la Boys; he falls in love with a pretty girl Priya (Disha Pandey) who hates men with a vengeance, but who later succumbs to his charms when he doesn't announce his love for her through the college PA-system and later goes to prove his worth, when his prospective father-in-law challenges him to get rich quick. Which Shiva manages to do within the mandatory space of one song and actually manages to acquire railway stations and electricity boards.
But life is not a bed of roses -- also translated as Tamil cinema has far too many clichés left -- and Shiva has to run through them all before he can get the girl. This means confronting a great many villains and finally finding out who the horrible super-villain D is.
Performances
Shiva's a master at dead-panning and delivering his lines without a flinch. Fight sequences? Romantic duets? It's all there, and he can out-perform all our heroes without batting an eyelid, wearing Bermudas and Hawaii slippers.
Disha Pandey is your traditional simpering North Indian heroine -- except that here it works great. If anything, it's the friends cast that sags a bit, despite the presence of veterans. But the villains more than make up for it.
Unlike many recent Tamil films, this one actually requires you to keep your brains with you, if only to appreciate all the effort gone into making it. A must watch.
