Kamali from Nadukkaveri

The issues start right after Kamali comes to Chennai. The film's novel commentary on the inherent discrimination in conservative families and the lack of opportunities in small towns vanishes and it suddenly gets reduced to an overlong college ad. While I was eager to find out how Kamali would fight her homesickness, lack of parental support, and linguistic barriers in an urban college, Rajasekar conveniently turns a blind eye to all this and makes every character onscreen chant the magic word 'IIT'. If you are given a rupee every time a character says the institution's name, you are sure to go home with a handsome amount. This is also the kind of universe where the bad guys speak English and the good ones don't. And how does one find out whether these baddies have turned a new leaf? It's simple: they start speaking Tamil! These not-so-friendly characters feel so under-written, alien, and sometimes, unintentionally funny.

What we know about Rajasekar’s Kamali is that she hails from a town many hundred miles removed from Chennai, and so getting into an IIT, as the topper Ashwin wants to, seems out of reach. Nambi steps in to help and Kamali makes it to IIT-Madras. Since there hasn’t been a campus film — with its spirit in the right place — in Tamil cinema in an eternity (come to think of it, there is very little representation of ‘2K kids’ on the big screen), it would have been apt for the filmmaker Rajasekar to, perhaps, explore aspects of “big city culture shock” that a small town girl is likely to face. But, he ties a fruitless romantic angle to drag Kamali along and what it instead does is generate relentless boredom.