Kaatru Veliyidai- A Manirathnam film.

There are two sides to how Manirathnam excels in his movies.
His storytelling prowess and the best use of technicians in his movies especially cinematography, music and editing.

I would rate this movie as one of the best in terms of Manirathnam using cinematography to make each frame of this movie visually pleasing, aesthetically immense and technically proficient. Each frame of the movie can be frozen to please our senses. The visual angle created in cinematography adds to the magnificent and spectacular picturisation.

As for storytelling, Manirathnam seems to have lost his magical touch. He made it as a simple narration of the story alternating between now and flashbacks.
It is all the more confusing to comprehend what he is trying to portray his lead characters as.

The movie starts with an Air Force officer at Kargil war evicting himself from a fighter plane, falling onto enemy territory and then being imprisoned in Pakistan prison. It then beautifully expands into a flashback of pleasant memories of his girl friend and painful memories of how badly he treated her.

He gets badly injured in an accident and is taken to the air base hospital where the fate and serendipity bring love of his life as a young doctor who reports to her duty on the first day. It is not anybody's guess then that she heals his body and steals his heart.

The movie then unfolds as a beautifully scripted Manirathnam's love story where Varun (Karthi) and Leela Abraham (Aditi Rao) who are completely opposite people fall in love. Their love and romance are then moving perilously closer to breakup everytime Varun shouts and fights for no obvious reason. Here is where the audience get confused.

Why Varun enters into unprovoked altercations to belittle his beautiful girlfriend in front of his colleagues? Why Leela with her beautiful, vulnerability coated porcelain like face comes back to him after all his male chauvinistic, preposterous and at times psychopathic behavior? The only plausible explanation for his behaviour, as he himself says in a scene, is that he has been trained to fight. That's not very convincing
Mr Manirathnam!

How does Varun escape from Pakistan prison and cross the Indian borders? Does he feel sorry for what he did to his girlfriend? What is the surprise Leela holds for him? In fact, this is the only surprise at the end for the Indian movie audience who are more used to twists and turns in the screenplay.

Nevertheless, Karthi and Aditi Rao, however flawed their roles are, have done their parts brilliantly.

AR Rahman's music is rich with sophistication and is just fitting to the scenes with one or two catchy tunes. We invariably end up comparing the musical masterpieces Ilayaraja created for Manirathnam in his movies.

I would say AR Rahman music is cerebrally sensitizing but Ilayaraja's music was musically innervating our hearts and making us feel the emotional connections with the movie. This kind of emotional connection by music would have made a greater impact on us of this aesthetically stunning visual treat from Manirathnam 😀