Review Overview
Performances
Screenplay and Direction
Technical Aspects and BGM
A Pure Cinematic Experience!
Aruvi is a sweetly unconventional, poignant and hard-hitting roller-coaster ride which will tug at your heartstrings in effortless bounds.
Cast: Aditi Balan, Lakshmi Gopalswami, Shwetha Shekar
Cinematography: Shelley Calist
Music: Vedanth Bharadwaj – Bindhu Malini
Editing: Raymond Derrick Casta
Written and Directed by Arun Prabu Purushothaman
Produced by: Dream Warrior Pictures
Release Date: 15-12-2017
Run Time: 141 minutes
Aruvi is a pure cinematic experience which makes you shake with laughter, and cry your heart out at the same time. Its magic lies in the immersive writing of debutant director Arun Prabu, who has crafted the most in-your-face social drama of the year, with mind-boggling realism. It poetically shifts between delivering heart-wrenching emotions on the one hand and kindling heart-warming sympathy on the other.
Aruvi is the aptest title for a film, which talks sincerely about how various external factors (the society) intensely influences a girl who yearns for love, independence, and affection at the most testing times of her life.
Director Arun Prabhu’s school of thought and avant-garde storytelling shatter mainstream cliches so effortlessly. I sincerely hope he gets to direct his second film sooner than later. Arun joins the list of promising new-wave of Tamil filmmakers to watch out for.
The most significant strength of Arun’s narration lies in how he uses humanity and apathy as two essential metaphors to convey his thoughts fluidly. And, it’s conceived around a talk show, which is considered a champion of economically-challenged and depressed people from the lower rung of society. Arun’s recurring motifs in the film strongly indicate the weight of compassion and lack of it.
The music by composer duo Vedanth Bharadwaj and Bindhu Malini is one of the best soundtracks of this year. Their bracing score delightfully accelerates the melancholic moods and rhapsodic expressions of the film.
It is safe to say debutant actress Aditi Balan’s titular role of Aruvi is the most elaborate, heroic, beautifully complex and layered female character ever created in Tamil cinema in a long, long time. Easily, this year’s best performance by a mile. She has lived in the role of Aruvi, and slips into the character so exquisitely.
Toting up, Aruvi is a sweetly unconventional, poignant and hard-hitting roller-coaster ride which will tug at your heartstrings in effortless bounds.