Varna Review

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    Title : Varna (2013)
    Star Cast : Anushka, Arya
    Director : Selva Raghavan
    Producer : Prasad V Potluri
    Music : Harris Jayaraj
    Released on : Nov 22, 2013.
    Timesofap Rating : 2.5/5

Varna is selvaraghavan's dream project. It appears that Selvaraghavan must have in fact scripted the story in his dream. Selva's courage to bring an out of the world experience for the audience should be applauded; But, the execution falls way short in realizing this vision.

story

Selvaraghavan wanted to portray the concept of how women would be treated in a second world where men have not experienced the feeling of love. The story is all about a man(Arya) from Earth who gets transported to the second world due to mysterious circumstances and ends up infusing love in the air and makes the flowers bloom. Varna falters throughout its laborious running time of 2 hours 40 minute.It is odd that a movie about "pure love" doesn't have a single scene that conveys the feeling of love effectively.

Script Screen play direction

Selva's script is unconvincing, characterizations are weak and screenplay is not taut enough. Right when you begin to invest in the characters residing in one world, the director switches to the other world. This is repeated back and forth until the first half draws to a close. The second half is entirely set in the second world where the audience will be subjected to a number of wierd things such as white men speak fluently in Tamil. There is a healing character in the second world who has some magical powers.

Cast and acting

Almost all of the actors on the screen have acted amateurishly and do not lend any sort of credibility to the incredulous story. Arya's lack the acting ammunition to salvage the movie. Arya's dialogue delivery brings unintended laughs among audience during inopportune moments. Prior to the movie release, Selvaraghavan went gaga about Anushka's acting skills and how he was able to extract the best out of Anushka while all the film-makers till date have used her only as a glam-doll. One may wonder whether the scenes that Selva is referring to Anushka's acting capabilities got cut at the editor's table. The expressions and voice dubbing for many of the white men don't match at all.The same dubbing artists were used for many of the characters intentionally (e.g., Arya's father character in both the worlds).

Technical points

The computer graphics and post production processing look mostly unimpressive. The scene when Arya fights the wild animal is decently well done even though it doesn't bring out the emotions among audience. The overall output is still a far cry from what our audience may have already experienced in scores of Hollywood movies. It is important that our Tamil movie-makers should know by now that audience will not give any additional credits or appreciate sub-standard graphics just because it is shown in a lower-budget Tamil movie.

The camerawork is uniformly good whenever the scenes are devoid of obtrusive post production works. It is evident in a number of daylight scenes were converted to night effect scenes to accommodate post production graphics.

Songs and back ground

This is not an easy movie to do background score due to complicated emotions.Anirudh's background score is a let-down and sound dissonant during many of the scenes. It was clear that Anirudh struggled to understand Selva's cryptic vision of what he was trying to accomplish.

Some of the songs  were not picturized well and did not do justice to Vairamuthu's lyrics.Harris Jayaraj's decision to not score the background music may not be the most ethical thing to do. In the hindsight, this is a smart escape for Harris who would have been severely criticized if he had done the background score.

Final word

Creative people have courage and conviction. It is no doubt that Selvaraghavan has got it in loads. Let's hope that he gets his execution right in his future movies. For now, Varna is just an expensive experiment with unintended consequences.