Maalai Pozhudhin Mayakkathiley aspires to go indie style. It is shot minimally and directed with realism. For a while, it seems a bit too rough; carrying the feel of an extended short film. When things begin to even out, there's loud music introduced. The music is nice in its own right, but it doesn't suit the filmmaking style that has been adopted by director Narayan Nagendra Rao.
With the exception of the superfluous music numbers, all of it takes place in a confined space. Set in a coffee shop and covering a short span of a few hours, the film begins as a rainy evening in the life of a few characters. There's an unhappy couple with a fat kid, a boy and a girl sitting opposite one another not knowing what to say, a middle-aged miser who uses the coffee shop as his workplace - he buys one coffee and sits there all day working on his laptop, two waiters and the manager of the coffee shop. Honest and ambitious as it might have started out, it ends up being an uninteresting seminar on love and life, all aimed at the audience. Anyone above the age of twenty has probably already heard all of what this film has to say.
Like this year's Good night Good morning, this is experimental film-making. But it's easily forgettable. While the actors might be at it like naturals, they carry a stigma of being neophytes. And the film as a whole doesn't equal the sum of its parts. It just didn't work for me.
Critic: Rohit Ramachandran
(2 / 5) : Average