EXCERPT:

“Doesn’t M Sasikumar know this? Doesn’t he know he can’t just spring out of nowhere and dazzle us with craft and control and give us one of the best first features ever made, so wonderfully written and so beautifully shot and put together? Doesn’t he know he’s got to make tinny excuses about not having the support system of a multiplex culture or not being able to rope in saleable stars, and therefore end up making a highly compromised work – with item songs like Kathaazha kannaala – that merely exhibited promising slivers of his talent, rather than one that showcased him as a fully-formed visionary who appears to have done for the bloody bylanes of Madurai what Scorsese did for Little Italy in Mean Streets?

I realise I just might have oversold Subramaniyapuram to a degree that the film cannot hope to live up to, but when you’re excited about something and when you rush back for a second viewing immediately after the first (possibly to pinch yourself and check if, indeed, your reaction to the film was proportionate to its merits), you want to shout from the rooftops – especially when the kind of theatres the film is playing in are likely to deter certain classes of the audience. (Couldn’t the city’s multiplexes have knocked off one screening of The Dark Knight, say, or the dreadful Kismat Konnection, and accommodated this local product? Not even in a noon show?)

But go – please go. Go and strap yourself to the time machine that is Subramaniyapuram, which is set in 1980 – amidst single-sheet Bombay Dyeing calendars and plastic wire furniture and posters of Maanthoppu Kiliye and TV sets with sliding-door shutters bursting to life with Koodayile karuvadu. And against this backdrop lies the story of a bell-bottomed gang of five that looks ready to audition for the sequel of Paalaivanacholai, featuring a schoolteacher who wears the kind of fugly rectangle-rim spectacles we saw on Nizhalgal Ravi in Mann Vaasanai, and a heroine named Thulasi (Swathi) whose ears are pierced by gilt-hoop rings and who ceaselessly bats her enormous eyes in a manner that leaves us in little doubt that her favourite heroine is the Sridevi of that era.”

Complete Review at: LINK