TJ Gnanavel’s Koottathil Oruthan has an average Joe as the protagonist. From his childhood, Aravind (Ashok Selvan) has been a timid, average middle-bencher, not displaying any sign of excellence or genius. His family members take him for granted, and his class teacher doesn’t even recognise him. He grows up to be a shy young man who wouldn’t talk back or protest even when he is pushed to the wall.
When you have such a character at the centre, the next logical thing to do is to weave an interesting narrative that would make this man worthy of the audience’s attention. However, Koottathil Oruthan has a plot and characters more feeble and duller than Aravind. The film toys with Aravind’s inferiority complex, and his irrational fear of the world, and makes this mental disorder a laughing stock.
Priya Anand plays Janani, a 17-year-old girl Aravind falls head over heels in love with. A topper in academics, sports, music and all forms of art, Janani takes an interest only in the best of things and people. That Anand has been cast as a first-year degree student is less baffling when compared to the love story she is a part of. After bumping into Janani on a beach, Aravind starts day-dreaming about her. He hears her on television saying that journalism is her dream profession, so he joins the same college to study journalism. He starts stalking her, and when she pays him the slightest attention, he assumes that she is in love with him.
Another important character in the film is a classmate of Aravind and Janani, who decides to kill Aravind because the latter ruined his chances of working with the BBC. Koottathil Oruthan is one of the films that tells you how mentally messed up youngsters in our colleges are.
John Vijay has come to be the master of hyperbole acting. In Koottathil Oruthan, he plays a police officer who goes all out to finish off his arch rival, a local don named Swamy (Samuthirakkani). When he is angry, which he is for the most part of the film, he clenches his teeth, widens his eyes, and bites down on his words.
The only actor who lends some rationality to the film is Samuthirakkani, whose Swamy has a brotherly affection for Aravind – the young man who saved his drowning child. At their first meeting, Aravind downs some alcohol and unpacks his list of woes. “The girl I am in love with doesn’t even know my name,” he weeps, and Swamy looks at him tenderly. While Aravind remains a character for whom you feel no sympathy, Swamy comes across as a man to reckon with. Samuthirakkani delivers a measured and convincing performance.
Recommended
Ashok Selvan’s performance as the shy Aravind, who considers himself inferior to everyone else, is disappointingly one-note. In the song sequence, Yen Da Ippadi, which details the miseries Aravind has to face on a daily basis, Selvan’s act is between that of a clown and a sulking child. Priya Anand hams up a badly-written role.
The only positive aspect of Koottathil Oruthan is perhaps its title, which is a nod at the mostly invisible middle-benchers in our classrooms. Any amount of interest that the title evokes is unfortunately negated by the narrative and the performances.
*****
The Koottathil Oruthan review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the movie. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have any commercial relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.