Navarasa: neuf émotions

Cinematography is good. Music is good. Acting is fine. Stories are mostly uninspiring, uninteresting and weird.

For all its hype and relentless online marketing, Navarasa definitely scores high for its technical brilliance and production design. In fact almost all of its nine stories, put together has a runtime of 5 hours, and has a very few parallels on the technical side that can match Navarasa head to head, in Kollywood. But the screenplay and writing has more misses than hits, only 3 stories intrigued the viewers minds, while another 3 offers nothing new and 3 more are just boring and a makes a painful watch.

Episode 1: Edhiri, Very Good but not brilliant, Actor Vijay Sethupathi's talents goes under utilised here.

Episode 2: Summer of 1992, Has a few laughs but Director Priyadarshan offers nothing new.

Episode 3: Project Agni, Brilliant concept but director Karthik Naren rushes to tell and do too many things in a very short time.

Episode 4: Payasam, An Authentic 1960s tale, aided by some brilliant production design and costumes. Prakash Raj would have been an better choice than Delhi Ganesh here.

Episode 5: Peace, I never new LTTE spoke with such funny accents and wore makeup, before operations.

Episode 6: Roudram, Brilliant tale that intrigues the viewer minds for its entire run time. Arvind swami stuns us with his caliber as a director.

Episode 7: Inmai, Parvathy shines in this rather insipid folklore, that tries hard.

Episode 8: Thunintha Pin, An outright dud from the screenplay pages of Ravaan or Ravaanan (2007), that didn't make the final cut. Really? Mani sir?

Episode 9: Guitar Kambi Mele Nindru, A Typical Gautham Menon, blah blah blah that I have been watching for 20 years now. Frankly Mr. GVM, don't you have any other ideas? A Brilliant Song by Karthik in a dud within.

Overall, Watch Navarasa for its technical brilliance and a wonderful Toorigha song, when you have absolutely nothing to do, sans higher expectations. 6 out of 10 stars for a promising anthology which goes flat eventually.

Don't watch it with high expectations.

But still you will not be satisfied.

Unbelievable ,many people gathered to make this mediocre webseries.

We shouldn't blame any Actors or technicians.

People who had involved in story and screenplay should take the blame.

Reputation of many good actors in peril.

Except Inmai and roudram ,all are not good.

It really shows the movie has budget constraints and also didn't experiment anything as new.

Overall no emotions or feelings for this webseries.

Navarasa turned out to be a mixed bag given the range of (on-screen / behind-the-screen) talent on board. The Netflix anthology very clearly scores more lows than highs, with just a few segments managing to leave a solid impact. The concept behind it is actually quite unique, and its tasteful packaging (from the minds of Mani Ratnam and Jayendra Panchapakesan) also makes for a great reason to get hyped about it. Is it worth exploring? Let's go segment by segment:

Edhiri (Karuna - Compassion): The performances (Revathy, Vijay Sethupathi, and Prakash Raj) and the score by Govind Vasantha stand out in this one. Plotwise, it was okay.

Summer of '92 (Haasya - Laughter): Priyadarshan's writing is weak, and the only genuine laugh in this one arrives at the very end. The actor who played the younger version of Yogi Babu was impressive.

Project Agni (Adbhutha - Wonder): Karthick Naren's project is an ambitious sci-fi thriller that could easily work as a 2-hour feature film. This is probably the only segment with a definite ending.

Payasam (Bibhatsa - Disgust): While Delhi Ganesh's natural performance is a plus, the rest of the segment felt like a complete miss. It struggled to evoke the emotion it was supposed to.

Peace (Shaantha - Peace): Second time in a row (after the disappointing Jagame Thandhiram) that Karthik Subbaraj tackles the Eelam issue with uninteresting results. The presentation here (also featuring a 13-minute continuous shot) is slightly better in comparison to JT, though from a storytelling standpoint, I expected better.

Rowthiram (Raudra - Anger): Arvind Swami's directorial debut is focused around a basic revenge plot but the way he stages the whole thing (with a fantastic twist!) is awesome. Santosh Sivan's attributes a certain rawness to the visuals which works. A slightly better closing sequence would have helped.

Inmai (Bhayaanaka - Fear): This has an inventive plot but the actual scare factor is zero (more like implied horror!). Performancewise, there isn't much to bicker about. Vishal Bhardwaj's musical score is remarkable.

Thunindha Pinn (Veera - Valour): Difficult to fathom that it was written by Ratnam as the dialogues are all over the place. The segment comes off as the weakest overall, with director Sarjun KM displaying no creative control over the politics it tries to profess or even the characters.

Guitar Kambi Mele Nindru (Shringaara - Romance): GVM's concept of love hasn't aged one bit. It's still superficially at first sight, starts off as platonic before sexy revelations are made, highly expository in nature, set against the backdrop of hummable tunes (by Karthik) and mug-focused expressive visuals (by PC Sreeram). Suriya's screen presence is unquestionable but the plot and its nuances feel like déjà vu.

Overall, Navarasa is an okay effort when it should have been downright amazing!

Forget about navarasa (nine emotions), I couldn't feel even one rasa. Siddarth (bhaya) part is somewhat bearable. My three stars are for awesome cinematography and production values, what purpose they serve when the core emotion is missing.