Vaaranam Ayiram

Vaaranam Ayiram is Gautham Vasudev Menon's tribute movie to his late father. VA is a heartfelt, emotional movie about how a father plays an important role in each phase of his son's life.

Watching VA one would tend to feel that GVM's aim would have been similar to Cheran's Thavamaai Thavamirundhu. While TT portrayed the hardships faced by a father to provide the best for his children in a typical Cheran style, VA depicts daddy's emotional contribution and guidance in different stages of his son's life.

TT adopts an unrelenting attack of slow, silent and subtle sentiments with strong holds of reality. VA has these sentiments but takes a melodramatic route (military operations, kidnap & rescue) which deviates from the movie's main subject/purpose - daddy, thus lessening the impact. It may be argued that this deviation plays a turning point in 'son' Surya's outlook on life, but I feel GVM could have scripted it better. Overall, VA does manage to pass on the intended message which I think can be best described by a quote - 'Any man can be a father, it takes someone special to be a dad(dy)' .

Dialogues in English - I guess GVM was trying to bring in reality of everyday speech. Yes, we all speak Tanglish these days but there should be a limit to which English is used. I am not asking for thooya (pure) thamizh here, just strike the right balance!

Great performance by Surya in both roles. GVM has brought the best out of Surya again. Simran does well as Surya's mom and shares a good onscreen rapport with 'dad' Surya - reminding me of their onscreen chemistry in Nerukku Ner. Sameera Reddy was adequate and Divya Spandana sleepwalks through her role.

Harris Jayaraj, once again, has given some awesome songs - 'Adiye Kolludhey', 'Nenjukul Peithidum' and 'Mundhinam'. My favourite song is 'Nenjukul Peithidum' - a soft melody with an acoustic guitar background sung beautifully by Hariharan.

Worth watching. Avoid the theatre, watch it on DVD.