Silk loses Sheen...

It was difficult to catch "Kanchivaram" in a theatre but Priyadarshan had spoken so much about it that I had made up my mind to watch it with a live audience. The audience (totalling to max 20) were anything but live and I would not blame them completely for what Priyadarshan ends up delivering is a pseudo- intellectual movie and a Shyam Benegal or a Govind Nihlani would have made this one truly intellectual!

The problem with Priyan is that he tries too hard to make it different from his normal film making styles and he fails miserably. It is good to have innovative lighting techniques, unique camera angles, beautiful set designs and picture postcard frames- but the damage that these do to Kanchivaram is that they take the authenticity out of the narrative. At no point of time you feel for Vedangam (Prakash Raj mostly under control but goes overboard at least in a couple of scenes) or his poor, non descript existence. You fail to empathise with him when he declares that he would wrap his daughter in a silk saree when he marries her off. The characters and the situations get alienated from the audience, precisely because Priyadarshan is more interested in technique than the soul of his script!

Shriya Reddy puts in an interesting cameo and manages to connect with the audience. M G Sreekumar's background score is pedestrian. The film scores high technically but feels a tad too long even at a running time of just 112 minutes. The script has in it to be a classic but Priyadarshan fails miserably in making one!