Kannagi Review - An interesting idea, an important message and a surprising climax in a not so convincing film!

Bharath Vijayakumar

Kannagi follows the lives of four different women (Or does it?) who are faced with challenges from society. One of them is desperately looking to get married. Another one is trying to stick to her marriage opposing an ask for divorce. Another is against marriage and then there is someone who is dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. Debutant Yashwant Kishore tries to tie up these stories in knots before untying them in the climax to give us the exact picture of what he was doing all this while.

The issue with Kannagi is that all the interesting ideas don’t really add up on screen. The climax works and saves the film to a large extent but the lead up to this, at best, has a few affecting scenes. Lot of the film feels like stitched together with an idea to convey messages. But this almost always comes across as dialogues that pop out of nowhere. They never feel like real characters conversing. Only the scenes of Maylisami and Mounica feel like it involves lived in characters. This hardly happens in scenes involving other actors.

The core is certainly an important one. It exposes how women are constantly judged and dictated how to live, no matter what. If you think that a woman being a certain way is the issue, the film shows that isn’t true. It is being a woman that is the issue. There are some real topics discussed. A woman tells a guy that his widowed mother has been sacrificing her sexual needs for more than 20 years. But this impactful statement remains a statement and doesn’t do much to the characters or in other words, the impact isn’t translated effectively on screen.

Bottomline

Kannagi has an interesting idea and this comes together in a rather surprising climax. But saving a few affecting scenes, the path to this climax isn’t entirely convincing.