Oru Naal Koothu

Oru Naal Koothu revolves around a few characters who are all connected by one thing — marriage. There is Raj Kumar (Dinesh, unconvincing), whose colleague and lover, Kavya (Nivetha Pethuraj, impressive in her debut), is about to get married to another guy. She still loves him, but he wants her to wait because he has a family (which he admits he doesn't love, but has a responsibility towards) to take care of. Her family is well off and her father, who is practical and believes their relationship will anyway not work in the long run because of their social differences, has gone ahead and arranged the match.

We have Lakshmi (Miya George, effective), a timid small-town girl, who is facing the prospect of living her entire life as a spinster because her father (Nagineedu) has been turning down every prospective groom, citing one reason or another, for seven years! She has been doing the girl-seeing thing for so many times, that she laments that she doesn't even feel shy any more to stand like an object for inspection before a man.

For Susheela (Riythvika, good), an RJ, the man she is engaged to, Bhaskar, has decided to call off their marriage for a flimsy reason (he thinks she isn't a looker), but is too much of a coward to tell that to her family. In the meantime, she begins a relationship with her colleague Sathish (Ramesh Thilak, OK), who is ready to marry her, but fate has different plans.

Last week, we had Iraivi that told us that women, most often, do not have any freedom when it comes to shaping up their lives, and Oru Naal Koothu seems to add that even men, too, do not have much say in their lives, especially when it comes to choosing a life partner (there is even a male character who gets bundled into a car for trying to have his way). And the film gives its women more agency than Iraivi. For better or worse, all the three women keep trying to make their own decisions. In fact, in one scene, Lakshmi's friend, a divorcee, jokingly tells her to leave h...