A reflection on the 12-odd minutes spent with the characters that continue to haunt us, even after ten years. Many spoilers ahead, so make sure you see the film first.
Spoilers ahead…
How interesting that Trisha’s two most memorable films — and her two most memorable performances — have been stories about unrequited love. There was 96, recently. And before that, Vinnai Thaandi Varuvaaya. Both times, she moved on, at least to the extent she could. The man is stuck. Perhaps it’s no accident that Karthik Dial Seytha Yenn, Gautham Vasudev Menon’s short film that picks up where VTV left off, opens with the camera peering into Karthik’s room through the grills of a window, as though it were a prison. Today, of course, he is “imprisoned” because of COVID-19. But then, he’s still still confined in a prison of memories. “Divya brushed her teeth…” he types out, then deletes the scene in his screenplay and writes, “Divya was alone at home…” That’s what he wants. “Divya” without anyone around, “Divya” without her husband and her twins…
Read the rest of this article here: https://www.filmcompanion.in/tamil-movies-karthik-dial-seydha-yenn-gautham-vasudev-menon-str-and-trisha-give-us-a-lovely-reunion-with-a-pinch-of-pain-baradwaj-rangan-ar-rahman/
Copyright ©2020 Film Companion.
Baradwaj Rangan 
lakshmi
May 21, 2020
For those who haven’t read BR’s short story
http://indianquarterly.com/the-call/
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AdhithyaKR
May 21, 2020
“Angeyum ellaam azhaga irukku… Naan enna panradhu sollu.” That line was so good. One thing that struck me about the film was the equal importance given to silence and dialogue. The pauses carried so much meaning and weight in themselves. I thought Simbu’s small expressions were brilliant.
Good review. It got me thinking more about Jessie’s thoughts and internal life, things that I hadn’t noticed when I first watched the short film. Time to watch it again!
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neabs
May 21, 2020
“some people, some women, they never go away from your life, from your soul”
This is what makes the story be it the movie or short film more special.
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brangan
May 21, 2020
neabs: I think it’s also the feeling of the “unrequited”.
As an abstraction, it could be anything. Someone you loved and let go. A close friend who vanished. I was talking today to someone about a Jeyamohan story about a boy’s love for his Chithi (obviously “unrequited”, as it’s taboo). It could even be someone you meant to apologise to and they died or went away somewhere before you could.
The “lack of closure” is what I feel very interesting in these stories, the uncertain look on Trisha’s face after she hangs up.
So many films and novels insist on closing the loop, on happy endings. It’s not that don’t like neat endings. But when something like this comes along, it leaves you in a messy place, makes you stop still and think about it.
I felt the same way when I finished the last page of A LITTLE LIFE, which I have spoken about before.
Here, the “moving on” is not about a relationship, but about trauma and abuse in one’s childhood. We are used to narratives that say “X struggled a lot, and finally, he was able to put all of it behind him and smile into the sunset”
But what if that is not the case? This is another kind of “unrequited”… You seek closure, and when it doesn’t come… 🙂
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abishekspeare
May 21, 2020
Karthick saying two of movies have been in trouble and are yet to release was GVM self referencing Dhruva Natchthiram and Naragaasooran. I actually smiled at that point. GVM has this very unique sense of humor. The funny lines don’t come and shout “see this is a joke” but happen so organically..
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N Madhusudhan
May 21, 2020
I loved it. It is an interesting look into the lives of Karthik and Jessie 10 years after their break-up. Karthik has turned into a self-centered man child, unable and at some level unwilling to let go of the past (a baby, as Jessie rightly calls him) while Jessie appears to be more sorted. The tables seem to have have slightly turned.
Simbu plays Karthik (again) with a believable likability that it’s not hard to see why Jessie doesn’t want to cut him off. But at the end, i got a feeling that he wants to channel his pain into his work. He feels much lighter after the conversation and starts writing soon. But she doesn’t seem to feel “light”. Karthik probably opens a pandora’s box for her each time he calls her. Looks like the tables haven’t turned much, after all.
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KS
May 21, 2020
I get how VTV was charming. Two young people trying to make sense of their feelings, and ending on a bittersweet note.
But dragging this on 10 years later is just plain obsession, nothing poetic or romantic about it. Its one thing to look back on fond memories and sigh over what could have been. But Karthik’s creepy line “I need you” and Jessie telling him she sees him as her third child both sounded so wrong. ARR’s bgm is needed to keep reminding us that this is the VTV universe and not Nadunisi Naaigal 2.
Nonsensical tropes like “saagum varai kadhal” and “true love happens only once” are to blame for such celebrations of delusion. GVM himself depicted moving on beautifully in Vaaranam Ayiram, where Surya spirals after the death of Sameera Reddy but soon picks himself back up to find Divya Spandana. Thats the healthy approach to romance we should celebrate.
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Anu Warrier
May 21, 2020
I think the short did more justice to the characters than the film itself did. I found this an infinitely more satisfying watch. It was interesting to see those dynamics of an ended-but-not-quite relationship play out, the tightrope walking between the gratification of feeling needed with the exasperation of ‘Are we still on this merry-go-round?’
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Honest Raj
May 21, 2020
‘Karthik calling Karthik – No one called Jessie’ could’ve been a much better title.
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Alex John
May 21, 2020
It has the drawbacks of a short film(like, the sound resonates the same way in long and close shots), but it is really nice to see these great and big artists squeeze themselves into the narrow space of a short film.And this film testifies,both vocally and silently, that cinema, like a river, will find a way around its obstacle and will eventually reach its audience. Only a few things are more comforting than this in these times of despair.
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Varsha Ganesh
May 22, 2020
Nostalgia was the word running in my mind when I saw this short. I immediately texted friends that I had seen the original movie with and it caused a sweet trip down memory lane. We all had varied reactions to the ending back then and its fun to think back and reminisce and compare.
I think nostalgia also had a lot to do with the two leads. I see a lot of frustration (people’s reactions) about Karthik not having moved on yet but it could just be nostalgia upon seeing her picture again on FB, kindling long-buried desires. And hers could just be beginning after the call ends. BR’s right – it`s so easy to keep their universe going in our heads!
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krishikari
May 22, 2020
I’m semi-seriously beginning to think all men are needy babies.
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Prasad
May 22, 2020
Hi – Interesting review . Need to watch. On a different note please check these TV shows to binge watch.
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Bala
May 22, 2020
In VTV, did Jessie marry Roy Thomas? I thought she married the guy who appears in aromale song in the bridge..
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KS
May 22, 2020
@varsha ganesh:
Nostalgia is where you glance at old photos and smile with a heavy heart. Calling his ex and having a friendly, even flirty (in jest) or wistful, conversation would be relatively okay. But what Karthik is doing is psychotic, and Jessie is enabling him. He’s explicitly kooptufying her, saying he needs her as a man needs a woman. She’s married (supposedly happily) and is a mom of two kids, yet she’s continuing to lead him on this way. All while the husband Roy is sitting and eating mixture in this amali-thumali.
Just to be clear, this isn’t about the message it send to youth and society and all that (though that is problematic in itself). Just at an aesthetic level, there is a dissonance since on the one hand the setting, our familiarity with the characters, and the music makes me want to feel nostalgic and aaromaley. But the reality of what is happening is creepy and uncomfortable to digest. I’m not saying any of this is unrealistic. Of course there exist obsessed losers like Karthik, and conflicted/manipulative bitches (their word, not mine) like Jessie. But if GVM makes a VTV sequel featuring Karthik still pining for Jessie, it shouldn’t be packaged as a romance, but as a DevD or Arjun Reddy. No “inga enna solludhu”, ECR/Kerala, trains or ARRahman.
When I think about it, VTV as a story wasn’t any amara kadhal kaaviyam if you strip away all the alangarams (cinematography, locations, music). Jessie was humorless and constantly in a state of unease, while Karthik was more in love with an image of her in his head. There was hardly any discernible sense of comfort while they were together. Just Jessie being perpetually judgmental/conflicted/constipated, while Karthik thala-la thukivechufies her and sings hosanna. No casual conversations, shared experiences, jokes, silly fights or any kind of bonding that could convince us that they are a real couple worth rooting for.
Its a shame since GVM is excellent at writing romance. Just that he reserves his best for his cop movies. Surya-Jyothika in Kaaka Kaaka, Kamal-Jyothika in Vettaiyadu Vilayadu, Ajith-Trisha in Yennai Arindhaal. All of these were dignified and sublime. But in his full-fledged romances, the line is always uncomfortably blurred between courting and stalking, or passion and obsession.
@abhishekspeare:
Thats an interesting take that relates to another meme I saw. So the theory is that Karthik is GVM and Jessie is VTV. He’s still attached to that movie, his work since then has been sub-par, and he’s just not able to move on 🙂
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KayKay
May 23, 2020
Was in 2 minds about this: To Watch or Not to watch? Loved VTV, it’s dissection of a messy relationship which left me exhilarated and fucked up all at once, and did I really want to revisit this world?
Am glad i did.
It has 2 things going for it: It’s on YouTube and it’s 12 mins long, which is the appropriate run-time to drive home the message that Karthik hasn’t moved on but Jessie has.
Kudos to GVM for not taking the easy way out, and exploring this 10 years later episode with honesty and staying true to the characters.
Karthik is the prototypical Man-Child and these calls to Jessie, proclaiming her as his Muse and Life-Line is yet another mythical turret he adds to his mythical castle suspended way up in the clouds.
Like a lot of guys, he refused to acknowledge the troubled sign-posts in their relationship:
His love for movies while she’s barely watched 1. I’m not saying he need to do a Quentin Tarantino who declared he’ll screen Rio Bravo for his prospective GF and she better like it else he’ll show her the door, but can you imagine the conversations they’d have? He’d wax lyrical about a scene and she’d nod vacantly. He’d extrapolate a character and she’d wonder what the big deal was.
His immersion in the movie business and it’s erratic schedules means he probably wouldn’t be there when she needs him.
Like most women, she recognized these incompatibilities as major obstacles and moved on to save them more heartbreak.
Also, like most women, she’s smart enough to know her desirability to Karthik hinges on her being unavailable.
They Work so long as they’re not together.
So, she’ll toss him a life-line when he needs it. He’ll cling to it and continue to dream.
It’s true that girls need only wait to become women while boys have to claw like fuck to become men.
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H. Prasanna
May 23, 2020
I wonder if Karthik and Jessie alluding to Jessie as a bitch is a nod to 500 days of summer.
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abishekspeare
May 23, 2020
An AskBR on VTV and Karthick Dial Seitha Yenn would be so damn good right now
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Daisy
May 23, 2020
Why, oh, why, even for a 10 min performance, we need a dubbing artist for Trisha? Why actresses undermine the value of dubbing for themselves. Reminds of me an interview by Amala Paul, where she said something to the effect that the South Indian movie Industry is probably the only place where actresses can get away with not dubbing and how she had to get her diction right when she auditioned for a role for a Hindi movie.
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krishikari
May 24, 2020
“It’s true that girls need only wait to become women while boys have to claw like fuck to become men.”
This sounds like another lame excuse for men not growing. Also pretty insulting to women.
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KayKay
May 24, 2020
“This sounds like another lame excuse for men not growing. ”
Neither lame nor an excuse. Fact in most cases, we just mature slower emotionally. The fact that you interpreted it as a defense of men is your problem, not mine. Read what I wrote again.
“Also pretty insulting to women”
Wrong again. If anything it was an acknowledgement that women are usually far more attuned to the nuances in a relationship.
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vivaciously_yours
May 25, 2020
To me, GVM has retained consistency in his characterization of Jessie and Karthik- Karthik as a 23 year old was unrealistically in love with Jessie, “un kaladi thadathil, naan kidappen” type, always had a burning passion towards Jessie, he is a guy who wouldn’t give up, “en idhayam udaithai norungavey, en maru idhayam tharuven nee udaikkavey”. Jessie was, well Jessie, oscillating forever, but somehow knew that it would never work between the two and pulled the plug. Karthik as a 33 year old is still the same, how different was his conversation with today’s Jessie any different than the coffee shop conversation when they were single?
Jessie never objected to how Karthik openly spoke to her(in language or actions) or his way of expressing love to her while she was single, and her marriage doesn’t stop her from asking outside the movie theater at the end of part 1, “ why do you like me so much?”, and today listening to Karthik saying, “I need you as any man would need a woman” she remains totally un-moved.
The way the phone conversation unfolded, just made me realize Karthik is still a man-child, in love with an ‘image of Jessie’ to the extent of obsession in the name of passion, and Jessie entertaining the conversation, is GVM alluding to us, that Jessie still likes the “idea of Karthik”, the guy who is madly in love with her, its her un-attainable status is perhaps the only thing that keeps their relationship going and makes her desirable to Karthik?
While Karthik is on the phone with Jessie, a rack of books are shown- from How the Secret changed my life, Robert E. Svoboda’s Aghora I, Aghora II book, Heal Yourself, Sensemaking, Seventh Sense, DMT the spirit molecule, ego is the enemy and so on, just gives a glimpse that he has been engaging in self-discovery and self-help all these 10 years, struggling for a spiritual awakening and inner peace and yet is truly helpless and needs Jessie to throw him a life line. We see a guy who is self-absorbed.
I couldn’t help but think of the opening scene of Super Delux with Samantha. Not much different there too, an ex is still sulking about Samantha, and calls her, and she is married but is guilt-ridden about her ex’s status, asks him to come over, and the rest is shown. But I do not recall Samantha or that character who called her getting trolled, instead, the audience started rooting for Samantha at the climax when the police officer was about to abuse her- it is as easy to call Samantha a whore for that opening scene for cheating on her husband, but the audience seemed forgiving. So why are Karthik and Jessie getting trolled so much? Is the “TELL” – the dialogue of Karthik bothering them much more than the “SHOW” of the Super Delux? Partly yes, but more so because the audiences have emotionally invested in Jessie and Karthik. Many of the 20 somethings who watched VTV back then saw themselves on celluloid in the form of Jessie and Karthik, and it is unsettling, creepy to see their favorite characters take a different shade and cross boundaries.
The uncertain look on Jessie’s face at the end of the call just shows the pain due to ‘lack of closure’ and the messiness it creates that just stalls one’s life and goes around in a loop and we audience along with Jessie know clearly that we are back again with square one on this Ferris Wheel. Throughout VTV, all Jessie needed was one conversation with Karthik and she would start oscillating. The short film was an extension of VTV in showcasing the dynamics of an ended-yet not so ended type of a relationship and there is no full stop for this, until the characters Move on!
During this pandemic, the advice from psychiatrists, therapists, psychoanalysts all across the world was, “please reconnect with family, mend with your friends, but do not be tempted to call you ex :-)”. There was a valid reason a person becomes your ex, and dare not revisit that messy place. GVM along with his characters broke that 1 cardinal rule about ex-es and break ups. First love is something that should be reminisced once in a while, but never to be revisited and returned. The final words on Karthik’ screen are beautiful and true, “Some women and some people just don’t go away from you and your soul” but it is also a valid statement to say, “Mind the GAP!” and don’t confuse love and lust.
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N Madhusudhan
May 25, 2020
It baffles me that people who can’t digest Jessie calling Karthik a baby (she says he’s like her 3rd child) are somehow fine with our heroes (the saviors of our tamizh kalaacharam) wanting to see their mother in their girlfriends/wives. In fact they find it strangely romantic. Most of the negative comments online target this “baby” part of the conversation.
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sridharraman
May 26, 2020
Began to watch this with a lot of trepidation. But I liked it. It was the best GVM has been since … VTV, I guess. I wonder if it was also due to the absolute lack of voice-overs, apart from a few “talking to himself” comments by Simbu.
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JPhil
May 28, 2020
@Daisy : yeah a per peeve of mine too . Shobana , Urvashi , Trisha , Nayan .. have made a career out of not using their own voices to flesh out the stories they are part of ….
that said , for this short , Jessie needed to sound like Jessie (? Chinmayee )and not Trisha so a bit of a catch 22 for the director ..
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brangan
June 10, 2020
Thanks to Gautham Menon’s #KarthikDialSeythaYenn, we have a name for men who form the third wheel in their partner’s iconic love stories: “ROY” 🙂
@Vishal1Menon makes a list of iconic “ROY”s in our cinema
https://www.filmcompanion.in/features/tamil-features/meet-the-roys-the-husband-archetype-we-love-to-hate-salman-khan-str-ajay-devgn-premam-96/
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Isai
June 10, 2020
That guy in the middle photo is definitely not Jessie’s husband. A man and a woman are shown walking together and talking with each other on a public road and that alone makes him her husband?? They are not even alone! There are two white guys walking with them which makes it most likely that they are all co-workers. Besides, that guy is of the same height as Jessie. I don’t think Jessie’s dad would have chosen him for an arranged marriage. Also, that guy is shown talking much more than Jessie. That’s not the trait of a husband, at least a good husband.
Even GVM in his interview with BR says that they didn’t want to show Jessie’s husband.
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Rahini David
June 12, 2020
I loved the list of Roys. Hate 96 even more intensely now though I never thought that was possible.
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tonks
June 12, 2020
I haven’t seen many GVM movies, and inspired by this blog space, I looked at what streaming had to offer, and ended up watching Minnale a couple of days back. For a director who has a reputation here of being very good with his romance scenes, I found myself cringing through most of it. The good looks of the lead pair nonwithstanding, the whole lightening bolt love at first sight, then stalking, then using a wrong identity and lying and fooling to her, never once owning up to the lies before being caught : so familiar from so many other movies, and so, so disappointing. Even the justification for his contemptible behaviour, by saying “I could have done anything with you, but I stayed a gentleman”.
I realise his other movies are probably way better, but this was an apology of a love story. I feel she would have been happier with the other US – guy fiance.
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tonks
June 12, 2020
There was a lot of misogyny and Eve teasing passing off as humour from the characters who played Madhavan’s friends. And some homophobia thrown in for good measure towards one of these “friends”, again in the guise of humour.
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Nathan
June 13, 2020
@Vishal1Menon makes a list of iconic “ROY”s in our cinema
The one character that could have rounded this off would have been Abhishek Bachchan’s ROBBY from Manmarziyan who’s really a ROY with a pair…of Bs, of course
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abishekspeare
June 13, 2020
tonks: Minnale is GVM’s most underwhelming movie, a senseless romance will great music and nothing else(you could compare it to Kadhalan). I have never been able to watch either of them completely, though they’re celebrated by fans. Pre-AYM, in my opinion GVM movies are either really horrible or really great.
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