What happens when something risque is masqueraded as arthouse?
Parthiban’s Koditta Idangalai Nirappuga is not risque in the traditional sense, though. There’s no real obscenity that you’d find, nothing on the face, anyway – even the sole sex scene in the movie is vetted for the family audience, the camera politely rising above the bodies to focus on rippling water, with a Kathakali sequence to follow – but there’s quite some titillation vaguely reminiscent of an SJ Suryah movie.
Come to think of it, Parthiban and Suryah perhaps inspire each other – they like to think that they aren’t boxed in but they oh so woefully are. In a kind of perverse filmmaking, which, while definitely not run-of-the-mill, is hardly watchable either.
In Koditta… Parthiban (Rangaraj) is an on call driver married to woman (Parvathy Nair) much younger than he is and she is beautiful as he’s not. What happens when Raj invites a potential client (Shanthanu Bhagyaraj) to board up at the apartment where he works with his wife?
A client who is young, handsome and everything that he isn’t? The script goes out of its way to set them up – and when they are finally together (which takes an awful lot of time) we have to listen to their moral quandary. That takes some significant screen time by itself; that and a dramatic Kathakali sequence when they have sex, set to some bassy music.
Recommended
Finally, when we really get to know the truth behind all this, there’s some genuine amusement. But those final minutes still aren’t reason enough to sit through a movie that just cannot make up its mind about what it really wants to be: romance, comedy, romcom or just something risque masquerading as arthouse.
*****
The Koditta Idangalai Nirappuga review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the movie. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have any commercial relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.