Kaadhaalukku Mariyadai is one of the best romantic movies made in Tamil and arguably the best movie of actor Vijay. The film helped Vijay to move to the top of Tamil actors list and was a career making movie for actress Shalinie. The six scores, including the title song were big musical hits of the year. The movie is soft and doesn't contain many spurious artifacts of an average Tamil movie - including elaborate stunt sequences, over-sentimalist melodrama and dream sequences in foreign lands.
The film is about how a young boy and girl fall in deep romance, but are constrained in taking the relationship further as they place their romance in the context of their family bonds. The boy and girl belong to different religions and such an inter-faith marriage is still not very common in India and can bring communal violence in few remote parts of the country and the director has amazingly handled this. A good movie for non-Indians to take a peek at a few quirks and culture of Indian families.
