Haricharan Pudipeddi
Chennai, 12 Feb 2021 12:55 IST
The film, which has a few gut-wrenching moments, rewards your patience and leaves you smiling.
The charming C/O Kaadhal, a faithful Tamil remake of the heartwarming Telugu film C/O Kancharapalem (2018), comprises four tales of love and longing.
These stories, which are set in a small town, are quite familiar, but what makes them salient is the manner in which they are resolved. C/O Kaadhal rewards your patience and its denouement is moving.
One of the stories deals with a 49-year-old unmarried peon and a 42-year-old widowed officer. An unlikely bond develops between them and they start to develop feelings for each other. But at their age, what they seek is companionship and not love. The second tale is centred on Velu, a school kid who goes out of the way to impress his classmate and love interest Sunitha; while the third and fourth are about an upper-class girl in her 20s, Bhargavi, who falls head over heels for Joseph, the henchman for the local goon-cum-councillor; and a liquor store employee Dhaadi, who falls in love with a sex worker named Salima respectively.
C/O Kaadhal cuts back and forth between these characters and it’s filled with both heartwarming and gut-wrenching moments. The film has a lighthearted tone except for a few scenes that hit us like a ton of bricks. In one such scene, Dhaadi, without judging his girlfriend for being a sex worker, silently places a packet of condoms in her hand and asks her to take care. The film talks about love having no age barriers and it makes this point beautifully through the story of the peon and the widow. The segment featuring Bhargavi and Joseph is slightly contrived as it talks about religion being the villain in their relationship.
Unlike the original film, C/O Kaadhal is set in Madurai, which is a bigger city than Kancharapalem. In C/O Kancharapalem, the city itself was a character but it isn’t the case in the remake. Another aspect where the remake fails to match up to the original is in the casting. The original introduced 86 newcomers and each character looked authentic. Apart from these minor grouses, C/O Kaadhal works as effectively as the original and leaves you smiling.
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