How much you take to Radhamohan’s Gouravam may depend on your tolerance for earnestness, the kind often displayed by filmmakers who aim not merely to entertain but to leave the world – or at least, its Tamil-speaking terrains – a better place. In the very first scene, Arjun (Sirish) says he will remain in India and not go abroad because he wants to develop his local businesses and provide his countrymen with employment. (He also doesn’t want to miss out on his mother’s cooking and playing with his sister’s children.) Right there, I knew what I was in for. A refreshingly un-PC joke about airline stewardesses apart, the film is a relentless assembly line of expressed virtue. By the end, a victim of rape is offered the prospect of marriage. Chennai is extolled as a place where no one cares about caste. (Hasn’t anyone seen the To-let ads lately?) And the urban youth is presented as people with more on their minds than just their next meal of pizzas and burgers. At least on that last thought, Amen!
It isn’t wrong for a film to showcase its earnestness so baldly. But when married to an exposition-heavy style, we feel trapped in a goo of good intentions. Take the early moment where Arjun, on the road in “some part of Tamil Nadu,” chances upon a signpost. He instructs his driver to stop. He gets down and examines the sign. He calls a college-mate and asks him if their friend Shanmugam, the one who’s dropped off the radar, wasn’t from the village named in the signpost. And after receiving this confirmation, he decides to go in and find out what happened to Shanmugam, thus alerting the audience to what he is going to do – all but issuing a statement of purpose to the camera – before he goes ahead and does it. What if Arjun had seen the sign, stopped, ordered his driver to turn around, and then, as he made his enquiries, we gradually woke to what he was after? Wouldn’t that preserve some of the mystery?
But keeping the audience in the dark isn’t probably a major consideration for a film that wants us to invest in the mystery of what happened to Shanmugam, when the pre-release reports have all been screaming that this is a story about honour killings. For a plot strewn with internecine caste rivalries, petrol-bomb attacks, a procedural-type investigative setup and a simmering Prakash Raj (he plays the village’s periyavar), Gouravam never really gets going. About the only thing I was thankful for was the absence of duets between Arjun and Yazhini (a miscast Yami Gautam), a lawyer he befriends in the village – though there is a let’s-rise-and-fight-for-the-right number, where everyone wears matching denim outfits. Between buying glasses for Shanmugam’s impoverished father (whom he begins to call appa) and making speeches against violence, Arjun is idealised as such a saint that it’s hard to care about anything he does. At least he isn’t wolfing down pizzas and burgers.
An edited version of this piece can be found here.
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Baradwaj Rangan 
KayKay
April 21, 2013
“He calls a college-mate and asks him if their friend Shanmugam, the one who’s dropped off the radar, wasn’t from the village named in the signpost. And after receiving this confirmation, he decides to go in and find out what happened to Shanmugam, thus alerting the audience to what he is going to do – all but issuing a statement of purpose to the camera – before he goes ahead and does it”
Hahahaha…couldn’t stop laughing reading this. Sigh! Do they STILL resort to this literal crap?
What else do they do in this film? Does someone get a letter and ACTUALLY read EVERY word out loud so we the audience are privy to it’s exact content, even if the actor is actually alone in the scene?
Does the delivery of bad news precipitate immediate flashes of lightning and thunder?
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KayKay
April 21, 2013
“By the end, a victim of rape is offered the prospect of marriage”
Damn! I thought crap like this went out of fashion in the ’70s along with Sivakumar, Ravichandran, bell-bottoms and songs with lyrics like “Jillu Jillu Gullu Gullu, Charming Beautiful Bulbul”?
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Raj Balakrishnan
April 22, 2013
KayKay, I would blame the largely unrefined Tamil media and the audience for this lack of subtlety in Tamil films. I haven’t kept in touch with Tamil media but from what I remember everything had to be in bold and underlined. One usual complaint against Mani Ratnam used to be “avar enna solla vararne puiyalai”. What can the filmakers do?
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vijay
April 23, 2013
“though there is a let’s-rise-and-fight-for-the-right number, ”
how about this number which I caught yesterday after a long time?
The violin just about clears its “throat” in the first 2 bars before launching into a full fledged dirge
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Rahini David
April 24, 2013
Regarding the “avar enna solla vararne puiyalai”, you’d be surprised how much of that Gautham Menon got that for NEPV. A college girl sitting next to me in the theatre kept saying “Entha scene a pathi peasuraanganea puriyala. Yaar copy adicha? Scene cut pannitaangala? Avungala eatho peasuranga”
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Shankar
April 24, 2013
@vijay, what coincidence! A few days ago, somebody had posted this lovely track from the same film in Baddy’s post in another forum. A beautiful number that I hadn’t heard in a long time…
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Iswarya
May 18, 2013
Haven’t watched the movie yet, but was moved to speculate on how the defenders of Vazhakku Enn 18/9 would react to this review. Unsurprisingly enough, your comments like “relentless assembly line of expressed virtue” and “the urban youth is presented as people with more on their minds than just their next meal of pizzas and burgers” haven’t attracted the ire of the trolls who took offence to your “Us Vs. Them” view of VE18/9. And yes, some might do well to take note of statements like: “Chennai is extolled as a place where no one cares about caste. (Hasn’t anyone seen the To-let ads lately?)”.
Perhaps, your attack on the insipid goodness of the “urban” characters should set the record straight about their perceptions of your ‘casteism.’ After all, gooey goodness attributed to the politically correct Us is as enervating as devils-with-horns-and-cloven-hooves portraits of Chennai-ites.
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