Friday Review: Vanamagan, the Son of Nature

After the success of Tamil horror comedy flick Devi, director AL Vijay is back on his path of unusual he left with Madrasapattinam and Deiva Thirumagal. Though Vanamagan isn’t impressive as the former ones did, I really want to appreciate him for taking different subjects and experience things. For a tribal role Jayam Ravi isn’t new, as he already done one in Peranmai but what makes difference was he comes from remote and expresses emote instead of dialogues.

Vanamagan (Tamil movie) is about how modernisation and industries destroys the forest and disrupt the tribes who adopt nature as their belonging… but wished the movie adjoin this subject strongly rather moving around cities for first half of the film.

Plot:

Kaviya is a very rich girl and orphan, growing under guardian of her uncle, is carefree and enjoys life on her wish. During a holiday in Andaman Island with friends, she broke into a protected area and accidently hit a tribe by the car. Seeing him bleed, they took him to hospital and later brought to Chennai for further treatment without let know anybody. Back to conscious, the tribe Vaasi got into violence and she was force to take him home, where she learns about the tribe’s behaviour and try to control him. At a moment things went wrong, Vaasi was caught by police and shifted to Andaman where they tried to kill him, but Kavya interrupt and they both escape into forest. And what remain answer everything.

Features:

You can’t keep away the thought of Tarzan or George of the jungle even looking at the poster or trailer, where Jayam Ravi hanging from a root. For Ravi, his body, look and height are apt to the role of Vaasi (Kattu Vaasi), an indigenous tribe unexposed to outside world. But his role as tribe there isn’t much action for him to do or we to feel adventure or we lack interest to watch it as we have seen similar movies earlier… the humour isn’t that much fun or interesting.

Sayyehaa as Kavya is beautiful and captured my attention through her dancing skill than her acting! Perhaps the songs were choreographed by Prabu Deva who’s also called as Indian Michael Jackson. She tried to be beautiful with her expressions and being shown as senseless on things   and turning positive all of sudden doesn’t suit her well or she did about. Thambi Ramaya did little bit comedy and his eagle map line is good.

The film captures the beauty of caressing here and there and the feeling of touch, the real one, which has almost lost in the gadget world, is perceived well. Stroke arrows on animals on television, watching through car sunroof and the tiger fighting like Captain (Vijayakanth) and the tribe on-board to Chennai all makes senseless and boring. Feels the director has approached the movie from a common perspective rather studying well about tribes of Andaman, to give more emotional detail to the subject.

Music is by Harish Jayaraj and Vanamagan was his 50^th composition… the songs were good to listen and the cinematography is wonderful and captured the beauty of forest and waterfalls so well. But the BGM is a bit old charm and is tuned for African forest instead of Asia, which I feel has a distant tone. While I appreciate the effort put by the team to give a different experience and explore a world at its brim, could have scored an interesting screenplay rather applying Hollywood shades.

I feel Pulimurugan is better than Vanamagan!