You know, I really, really dug the first half of Enna Vilai. I enjoyed how lived-in everything feels, how its characters seem to have lived long before the movie began and will continue to live long after it ends. We just happen to catch them during a particular time in their lives… especially Thavasi (Karunas), who has dug out a gem-studded pendant from the sea and lucked out… or has he?

I enjoyed how this film shows such love for detail. Take Thavasi’s life, for instance. You see so much about him. The hen he can barely contain. The conversation with his wife where he whispers that caste is outdated. The conscience that forces him to hand over the pendant to the cop (Mohan Raman, who I really liked in this role). Come to think of it, I liked pretty much everyone in this film, including Thavasi’s wife (Vijayalakshmi), his boy, the broker, and his lawyer, Kanchana (Nimisha Sajayan, who’s impossible to look away from, as always).

I like how gracefully this film accelerates too. One minute, it’s languid, with Thavasi going about his work, chilling at home, living his unremarkable but peaceful life. But before you know it, things happen, then escalate, and it’s scarily realistic how quickly a life, and a family, can be thrown into despair. The film continues its love for detail inside the police station: the hierarchies, the way lower-ranking cops become thick as thieves, the way an SI becomes complicit even without fully knowing what’s going on. Once the story shifts into the courtroom, even a passing choice, like capturing a power cut and showing an attendant rushing to the judge with a fan, makes you feel like this is a real court, hearing a real case, concerning a real victim.

Even with less melodrama, less emphasis, less underlining of Thavasi’s plight, I would have got all of it, and most importantly, I would have cared. But slowly, the film loses trust in its own subtleties. This means that you get a song of lament that cries more than you are allowed to. During one particularly touching moment, Thavasi is frightened by the possibility that he might be arrested. It’s moving enough already, as his voice shakes in fear at what’s about to happen. But the film wants more. So it has him crawling, bawling, throws in some emo flute music, and has his whole family crying with him. It really feels like a lot, and leaves little room for us to join in.

The entire second half, in fact, feels like the film has suddenly decided to make grand advertisements for itself. The court case was important earlier because we cared about Thavasi. And now, that’s not enough. So, the film turns it into a “rarest of rare” case. I guess you see this transformation coming when a lawyer, a tad unexpectedly, quotes Parasakthi: “Indha needhimandram pala vichithramaana vazhakkugalai sandhithirukkiradhu.” Before you know it, the film stops being a gripping emotional drama. In place of these real people you already care about, you get news videos, Shankaresque public outbursts, media invasions of privacy…

Somewhere along the way, the film lands on this attractive phrase: “Maanathukku enna vilai?” It seems so impressed with the line that it won’t stop repeating it. It gets repeated in court. It becomes a hashtag. It appears on placards. And where I was once right there with Thavasi, watching his life and worrying about him and his family, I now found myself at a distance, watching his plight get converted into a ‘special’ case and headline news, into attractive captions, into a catchy one-liner for the film.

Someone talks about Madurai Kannagi. Someone else says, “Uyir udamaiyai vida perusu maanam.” And I have a problem when ‘maanam’ gets elevated as this unshakeable idea, considering that it comes tangled in all kinds of baggage, including caste purity, family honour… A lot of that isn’t quite the context here, of course, but just this notion that honour is somehow more important than life itself has always felt disagreeable to me. And in any case, what I think Thavasi truly loses is his dignity. He knows who he is. He knows he has done nothing wrong. And yet, this innocent man cannot freely move through society with head held high now. What price could possibly compensate him for that?

But by this point, Enna Vilai becomes much bigger than Thavasi, even though it originally seemed so interested in him and his life. Eventually, he becomes a placeholder from which to mount a ‘rarest of rare case’ film. Lawyers have changed, judges have changed, the scale has changed, but the film’s chest-thumping melodramatic excess hasn’t. So when the judgment finally arrives, favourably for Thavasi, I found myself thinking, “How come there isn’t an entire courtroom standing up in applause?” For isn’t that how these films end?

And then, one woman stands up and claps. Nobody else joins her. “Interesting,” I thought, but then, everybody does. Of course everybody does. When the film came to an end shortly, I dimly realised that it had been a long time since I had really thought about Thavasi or his family. And that’s such a pity because Enna Vilai had done such a lovely job of making me care about them in the first place.