Katradhu Tamil - a review

"Drink hot coffee, drink hot tea - and remember the people that remember you."

Prabha drinks only hot coffee and tea. He likes to have his lips scorched just so that he can picture once again his Anandhi urging him to drink scalding hot water on a hot day.

This is an eloquent conversation between intellectuals - leaving the general masses as stupified as Karunas in the movie. But why worry about general masses when you have a piece of art as precious as this?

"That imaginary tiger was dreaming about the imaginary desert. Thus was our love begun at the age of 7."

Writer-director Ram has not only scorned a few of the existing stereotypes, but has also displayed Prabha's inherent hypocrisy beautifully. Prabha's battle with his inner demons depicts itself externally with horrifying results. The camera pans and zooms with the landscape as Prabhakar wanders like a nomad, the view skewing with his own loss of perception and his intoxication. It is not a single man's battle against the society's evils but the tale of a man whose dreams turn into obsessions; whose ideas turn into ideologies; whose inevitable hypocrisy persecutes him harder than any known law.

When Prabha commits his first murder, the blood spurts onto his arm. The warm blood. Jeeva, as Prabha, is chilling with his reaction at the gush of blood. The background score by Yuvan Shankar Raja is haunting throughout the movie. Jeeva is brilliant in this movie - something that goes to show what a good actor in the hands of a good director can do. And the girl that does the role of Anandhi (I am terrible with names) is like a sudden strumming of a sitar in the middle of a eulogy.

Watch the movie. If not for anything, watch it for the screenplay. The story unfolds like a badly unfurled carpet. Each bend is a new pattern.