Tamil star-actor Dhanush plays a young culturally conflicted son of a rustic Idli maker who returns to his roots after his father’s death. This is the one very pertinent one-line summary of what Idli Kadai is all about. It is the same story we saw in a recent MX Player series Mitti Ek Nayi Pehchaan and earlier on the Shah Rukh Khan starrer Swades.
We can go back to innumerable back-to-roots sagas on television and in cinema. Idli Kadai makes no pretence of being an original or pathbreaking film. Its extraordinariness resides in its ordinariness. At least in the first-half, when Murugan (Dhanush) walks the path of his father Sivanesan (the excellent Rajkiran)’s simplicity and work ethics.
That entire interlude with the father and son (and after the patriarch’s death the holy ghost) is heartwarming and suffused with golden moment. The sequence where Murugan’s mother revisits her past with her husband,is unforgettable.
This pristine passage lasts until midpoint when a tragedy forces Murugan to give up his life in Hong Kong as a tycoon Vishnu Vardhan (Sathyaraj)’s future son-in-law to return to his father’s village.
This is where cool turns to tacky, classic to kitsch. The second-half is about settling scores, getting even, losing the core of emotion in the process of trying to be “one of the boys”. In fact, the second-half is so stacked with trite plot points, it feels like creative hara-kiri.
Every action sequence, every bit of the dialogue feels like it has been plonked on the screenplay after the makers realized the product isn’t seeming spicy enough.
Dhanush remains consistently in character even when the world around him collapses in a heap of calamitous compromises. As the director, Dhanush is unable to preserve a strong hold over all his characters. Some of them, like the village creep Marisamy (P. Samuthirakani) and more importantly the bratty villain Ashwin (Arun Vijay) feel like cardboard cutouts in a departmental store.
The vivacious Nithya Menen had earlier created magic with Dhanush in Thiruchitrambalam. Here she is the archetypal bucolic girl nextdoor Kayal who feeds, pampers, berates, and humours the conflicted hero and still doesn’t feel like his mother.
Poor Shalini Pandey as the posh bride in waiting is saddled with the thankless part of a privileged woman who is rich but not a… you know the word that rhymes with rich.
Two of the film’s richest scenes feature Shalini Pandey: when she asks her assistant Ramarajan (Ilavarasu) to make sure Murugan doesn’t shave his head after his father’s death and when Ramarajan gently berates her for thinking only about her wedding when her fiancé has lost both his parents.
Idli Kadai had a lot going for itself. But then it decided to throw it all away.
