Nilavuku En Mel Ennadi Kobam: A Fun Rom-Com That Could Have Been Better

THE DHANUSH SIGNATURE is all over Nilavuku En Mel Ennadi Kobam (NEEK). Usually one would find the writer and director’s stamp in their film but, with NEEK, it is a little extra. As an actor and a star, it is not just Dhanush’s artistic preoccupations that show up on the screen but also his favourite themes and persona, pet peeves and theories along with the usual homages that follow every big Tamil star. The writing on the wall is stark because we don’t see Dhanush on screen, but we see it in the writing, we hear it in the sound, we identify it in the intonations, and we get all the references. As people pointed out, the main lead is named Prabhu (Dhanush’s birth name), and he is a chef (what Dhanush wanted to become). In the final scene, just before the writer-director credits appear, Rajesh (a fun Mathew Thomas) is holding a ukulele and playing 'Rowdy Baby'.

NEEK has a lot going for it, especially in the first half. It begins like a pre-2014 Dhanush romantic film or any Tamil romantic film, a soup boy—Pavish as Prabhu—with alcohol in hand, singing about love failure. But his parents soon force him to pursue an arranged marriage. That is when he meets Preethi (Priya Prakash Varrier), his school friend. They begin talking, and most of the film is him telling Preethi about his past relationship and the circumstances of its end. The film does deliver on its promise of a usual love story—it has all the ingredients in the right measure: a solid meet-cute, lovable and flawed good-looking people, hostile behaviour from at least one parent, a wedding and a climax at the airport.

It is unclear if Dhanush wants to subvert the soup boy image or course-correct. But he is clearly more accomplished than filmmakers who wrote meet-cutes for him. Prabhu and Nila (Anikha Surendran) meet through their close friends and garden variety annoying mushy couple Venky (Venkatesh Menon) and Sreya (Rabiya Khatoon). There are no awkward dates, there is no stalking or even any form of pursuit. In fact, there is no attraction in the first instance. The film plays this out in the most mature fashion possible, there is something in each other that clicks. In this case, it is Prabhu’s talent as a chef. Nila is a foodie, and they meet for the first time with her mouth full, chewing away to glory and not a breath in place to say hi to Prabhu. She loves his food and asks him for karuvadu kozhambu at a snazzy-looking party with an open bar and food counter manned by Rajesh and Prabhu. It is easy to only build ahead on this conversation, but the film returns to it by making Prabhu deliver that kozhambu in the unlikely of places, with Nila referencing Muthal Mariyathai’s (1985) Sivaji Ganesan and how he relishes and compliments the same dish in the film. The whole stretch warms us towards Prabhu and Nila as a couple and gives us everything about Nila almost as soon as we meet her. There are playful flirtations and tongue-in-cheek disagreements, like over Ilaiyaraaja and AR Rahman, which is all Dhanush, but the staging and the way the lines resonate are organic which helps in keeping the characters as well as the film real.

When the film’s main conflict arrives, there is déjà vu. The first hint shows up in the form of a throwaway shot of Rajesh bathing his dog. He calls it Harry Potter, the name of Dhanush’s dog in Velaiilla Pattadhari (2014). When we meet Prabhu’s parents, they look and talk like real people even if their home and terrace resemble Raghuvaran’s (Dhanush in VIP) a little too much in addition to the fact that Saranya Ponvannan plays the mother here as well. But when we meet Nila’s father played by Sarath Kumar, Dhanush dials it up. The ostentations are like a live-streamed Ambani wedding. The house is huge with a mini park inside and Prabhu looks at a fountain and asks why it is raining. There is a horse on the lawn outside with about twenty people working. Even when Nila is disheartened, her bed has a dinner plate with what looks like a giant chocolate cake. At this point, it is common knowledge that Dhanush loves interrogating this class difference and he’s been vocal, directly or indirectly, about his gradual climb to the top and how his looks and talents were ridiculed in the early years. These are classic indentions of the Dhanush landscape—a middle-class boy and a royal princess, a boy considered a rogue because of how he looks or where he comes from, and the ensuing heartbreak that bleeds into love life. GV Prakash Kumar’s background score is great for the most part (following his stellar work in Amaran) and we even hear a slight tinge of Velayilla Pattadhaari-like sound. But why play all this in such a heavy-handed fashion when the romance and the story beats are curated but fresh and lovable? Why doesn’t the writing here match the strength of what just a few scenes earlier gave us a great romantic moment in a pub’s restroom stinking of puke?

The film seldom resorts to posturing except for when Dhanush wants to say 'paaka porukki mathiri irukkara pasanga dhan nalla pasangala iruppanga' (boys who look rowdy always turn out to be the good ones). He even gives us a song that details the honeymoon phase of a relationship with the friends growing tired of the new couple. This is economic writing at its best but what brings NEEK down ultimately is the lack of a compelling conceit. It slowly devolves into an idiot plot where if people could just talk, things would be over in no time. Suddenly things don’t seem consistent. A doctor, even if related to Prabhu, reveals the personal information of another patient while in another scene, a hotel receptionist refuses to share a customer’s personal information. It is a strange world. By now, the film is on autopilot, the scenes just exist to progress the plotline. Mathew Thomas is the only one who seems to be enjoying himself as he gets the film’s best scenes and lines as we move to Nila’s destination wedding. The other actors are passable at best and in some scenes featuring Anikha Surendran, Pavish and Preethi, the lip sync and dubbing are off. Sometimes, Tamil cinema struggles to even get the basics right.

Later in the film, we meet Anjali (Ramya Ranganathan) who becomes the perfect foil for Prabhu. An interesting character who could have taken the film in a new, messy but familiar direction, one that leads to adulthood. NEEK is a fine romantic comedy, but it doesn’t want to rise above its popcorn stature and become a complex, grown-up romantic comedy. Dhanush is too adamant here to shake away from his thinly constructed conflict. The soup boy simply refuses to move on.