Jinju S

#Poomaram is an insipid montage of clips of rehearsals/actual performances of various competition items at a University Youth Festival with absolutely no script-- I repeat, NO SCRIPT--that drags on monotonously for 2.5 hours to test the limits of the viewer's patience. What would have been an average documentary with a realistic depiction of the​ sights, sounds and emotions of a University Youth Festival becomes an utter failure when it comes before you in the guise of a commercial film. All the actors in the movie are horribly under-utilized including Kalidasan, the hero, who has nothing more to do than strut up and down the corridors and grounds holding one end of his 'mundu' in his hand with a perennial look of long-suffering on his face-- well, what more can you expect from actors in a movie which hardly has a script or dialogues! I earnestly wish Kalidasan had chosen a better script for his debut. I simply fail to understand the hype this film has been generating, though I myself was a regular at University Youth Festivals during my college days-- having gone all the way up to the South Zone and National Youth Festivals-- and those memories are undoubtedly the happiest, the most vibrant and the most precious of my recollections of college life. Far from evoking nostalgia, the film got on my nerves with its artsy-fartsy pretense (poetry recitals cannot redeem a film that seems to have no idea what it's trying to say or where it's heading, and when inserted with no real sense of artistic purpose, even Neruda's "Tonight I can write the saddest lines"-- which I first read as a teenager, studied as a literature major and now have the fortune to teach-- an eternal favourite all these years, can make you gnash your teeth and pull your hair in frustration!) and I had to rush off for a second show of another movie just to wash off the bitter aftertaste of this film which turned out to be a humongous disappointment. The ending alone holds forth a glimmer of promise but gets snuffed out by the overwhelming ennui of the rest of the film.