Kanni Rasi movie review: The stars don’t align for this one

I like to categorise films like Kanni Raasi under the ‘ambient film’ genre. These are the films you can catch on, say, a KTV. You can start and stop at any point in the film. You can take breaks, perhaps nod off a little, and resume watching the film without missing a beat. With films like Kanni Raasi, you don’t even need to wait for the intermission to get your snack. You can do this even during the film, and not miss much.

​Cast: Vimal, Varalaxmi, Pandiarajan, Robo Shankar

Director: Muthukumaran 

Thiruvengadam (Pandiarajan) hails from a family, which strongly believes in love marriages. Four (three sons and one daughter) of his children agree with him and opt for ‘love marriages’. By ‘love’, this film means clutching fingers with a titillated smile, and voila, they are married. (The three daughter-in-laws conveniently belong to different ethnic and religious groups, because you know, ‘unity in diversity’). However, the final sibling, the rebel of this family, Gemini Ganesan (Vimal) decides he wants an arranged marriage. He hates ‘love.’ Enters Anjali (Varalaxmi), the daughter of the new DGP in town who wants to teach this family a ‘lesson’. I am sure you can figure out what happens after this.

More troublesome than the predictability of this film is its lack of sensibility. It is one thing to be boring, but to be problematic as well? There is a sequence in which Vimal visits a prospective bride. Of course, there are ‘jokes’ about her dark skin. The whole scene plays out like a hybrid of two scenes: one in Rajakumaran in which Vadivelu makes Goundamani and Senthil meet his onscreen sister, and the other in Perazhagan in which Suriya and Vivek visit a prospective bride. In this film, new characters keep getting introduced in an attempt to push the static story forward. But the quality of jokes never improve. Yogi Babu is brought in, and gets a flaccid track with Shakeela… (Again, it reminded me of another scene, the one in Giri that has Vadivelu narrating how he was beaten.) Not to mention, Yogi Babu’s character still believes that ‘raping a woman is a sure-shot way to marry her’. This is 2020, can we please move on?

The only mild relief is Anjali’s feistiness … but her actions are problematic as well. She gets the part of pursuing the reluctant hero, and emotionally manipulating him into loving her, which involves sitting at a TASMAC wine shop after getting rejected by him. Such scenes are usually reserved for our heroes. And when we say we want equal women representation, this isn’t exactly what we are referring to.

It’s rather ironical that this film shares its release date with Tenet, a film about being able to invert time. As the lights turned on once Kanni Raasi got over, I wished I could turn back the clock to a time when I hadn’t yet seen this film.