Written and Directed by: Gautham Vasudev Menon
When Gautham Menon said in an interview with Baradwaj Rangan that he has pushed the use of voice over in ENPT, I was excited about it. After watching the film, I have mixed feelings about it. I like the style of it and the use of it, but I felt he shouldn't have tried this in this film. By this film, I also mean with Dhanush who's strength isn't his voice in my opinion. This film, because it's a film about external conflicts, it's about villains, gangsters and how they enter into a normal guy's life. When everything is external, it was interesting to see the internal side of the protagonist but I thought it'd have worked better had the film been about the internal conflicts of the protagonist. I'd love to see a Vijay Deverakonda in this space, where there is extensive usage of voice over.
This film is entirely not just the voice over, there's a lot more to it. The editing is so innovative, it feels like the editor has a lot of inspiration from the legendary Thelma Schoonmaker, collaborator of Martin Scorsese. Thelma Schoonmaker first creates a world and then she keeps going here and there in it effortlessly. The ease with which they cut from an intense action scene to a love scene, where there's a knife on Lekha's neck and there's the transition done beautifully with a voice over. This sort of editing is done in Fight Club, where the scene is abruptly cut and another scene is introduced but it's done in a way that it doesn't feel abrupt.
The portrayal of love and romance in songs and their picturization, was weaker that his previous works. Here they tried realism, with the handheld shots and using wide lens which I think didn't work for the romanticised world. As I wrote in the Auteurs article, exploring recurring themes in different worlds and different characters is fine but creating similar worlds and similar characters with just different actors and settings is not something the audience looks upto.
The part where they show that Raghu is dead feels desperate to hook the audience. As an audience, you're like okay a GVM could actually do this but then he doesn't. But then it is partially justified with the astrologer reference. The Thiru track didn't somehow work for me, it felt clumsy and all over. It surely had my interest throughout, I was hooked all along but somehow the pay off didn't satisfy me as much. The villain character is written and designed well, there's an excellent scene where they show that he rapes his wife, whom Lekha looks upto, in front of her do to get something that he wants from her. I've never seen and heard of something like that before and it's as bad as physical abuse.
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