Love Failure

The art and science of failing in love

Did it need the movie mandarins to teach today’s teenyboppers on how does one fail in love? Well, as if everyday enactments and its equally horrifying end-results in real life were not enough, debutant director Balaji Mohan has sought to give some gyaan on the insufferable subject.

Liberally pickling it with witty wisecracks and sumptuously sugar-coating it with syrupy, sentimental scenarios for lumpy throat moments, Mohan concocts a convulted cocktail of a comic, cupid caper to take a shy at the boxoffice.

While Mohan does scale up this aspirational and ambitious ladder with style and chutzpah, where he woefully falters is that he has given the go-by to sense and substance which would gone a long way in making it a meaningful vaudeville.

Saying nothing new nor bringing any novelty to the narrative, Mohan goes about his task of drumming up the dictum Men are from Mars, Women from Venus, in a matter-of-fact manner while driving the homily that there is nothing like Made in Eden cupids.

At the pith of the prosaic plotline is Arun with doting parents and an equally sang-froid existence whose hope for an excitement in his easy-going life he believes is when cupid would come calling. And much to the Adonis’ manna she arrives in the form of a pretty and petite Parvathi, only daughter of parents on the threshold of a messy divorce. Of course, there are other subtexts and subplots to this larger romance of falling and parting in love before that picture frame finish with the whys and wherefores forming the flashbacks.

Siddharth, it being his own home production and Amala Paul share the honours with the right chemistry and complementary acting, while Thaman’s score and Nirav Shah’s visuals embellish and provide the necessary pretty prop to Mohan’s otherwise mediocre calling at the box office. While the discerning will simply shun the familiar fare, Love Failure does not have anything for those accommodative timepass troopers as well. Love Failure is as plastic and polished and urbanesque in its feel and flavour which only popcorn munching multiplex moviegoer would gorge upon.