Ladies Only!

It took 7 good years for Priyadarshan's "Rakkillippattu" (Song of the Nightingale) to see the light of the day. The ace director made this all- women affair in languages as varied as Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi. Unfortunately, he suffers from this issue of making a multi-lingual out of South India. The film completely lacks in nativity. The girls are drawn from all over the country- you have Jothika , a Parsee teamed up with Sharbani Mukherji, a Bengali; Tabu who is from Andhra; Mita Vasisht from Maharashtra and so on and so forth. When all these pretty women converse in Malayalam on your screen with frightening lip movements, you feel sorry for the script and the producer. If things had fallen properly into place, Rakkillippattu could have been a well made thriller but the over ambitious Priyadarshan spoils it in the name of making a multi- lingual.

The plot revolves around the murder of a man that takes place on a college campus during the annual day and how 2 innocent girls are trapped in the whole affair. You have a tough she cop on the trail of the accused and a tougher she cop in disguise following the first mentioned she cop. At the end of it all, you have the first mentioned she cop being declared the murderer on the ground that she was taking revenge on the guy for having molested her sister who is now paralysed.

Priyadarshan starts it simple with your regular college and hostel fair- the masti by the girls gang at the hostel and the college, the strict and unfriendly warden, the gang wars between the girls and some real good songs tuned by Vidyasagar- all these play pretty well. But the movie as such loses much of its steam as it progresses towards the second half. The girls are all around the city still no one manages to catch them. There are no television or print ads issued by the police to catch the girls. And the whole sequence involving the escapade of the girls from the police station is sheer silliness!

Priyadarshan has managed to rope in actresses who know their jobs well- Tabu is good, so are Jothika, Sharbani, Ishita, Shweta Menon, Mita Vasisht, Lakshmy, Sukumari and KPAC Lalitha. But one cannot help wondering at the sheer amateurish treatment meted out to a plot that could have been fodder for some real good thriller. The cleverness of Priyadarshan, the director is evident in that one scene where Tabu tells the crowd of girls as to how women in India forgo their friendship when they enter into that rut of family life! Priyan deserves a pat on his shoulder for having conceived that one scene...the rest is very, very ordinary!