Kaatru Veliyidai is a gorgeous film about love uniting opposites, such as that of a man and a woman or a solider and a doctor. It’s a film that tells it’s story with a remarkable subtlety and grace but painfully falters into a conventional resolve that doesn’t do justice to what was set up before it. The beauty, depth and craftsmanship of this film; however, more than make up for it’s faults and will assuredly keep drawing me back.

It takes place during the Kargil War (1999), alternating between the trials endured by VC (Karthik), an Indian Fighter Pilot, captured and held captive in a Pakistani POW camp, and flashbacks to his relationship with Leela (Aditi Rao Hydari), a medical doctor stationed in Kashmir not far from his Air Base.

 VC and Leela are polar opposites, personalities not meant to mesh, very often they publicly clash; but from the first time they look deeply into each others eye’s and a force greater than those repulsions compels them to never let go of each other. What ensues is a kind of love story that we rarely see in commercial cinema. Both VC and Leela are fleshed out with great detail and watching their relationship develop is at the core of what makes this film great. The perspective of each of these characters are clearly laid out, their actions are justified, and as they try, each in their own way, to hold onto each other, we begin to care a great deal. 

The cinematography, by the great Rajiv Menon, alone makes this film a must watch, some of the scenes in this film are awe-inspiringly beautiful, all this aided by one of A.R Rahman’s best musicals to date.

The scenes that take place in the present, with VC in the POW camp and so on, were the ones that didn’t work for me, largely because they just seemed to function as a flashback mechanism to convey the romance that had previously ensued between VC and Leela, not really adding anything to that romance. One of the biggest faults of the present scenes is that much of the information is conveyed through a voiceover; all the changes in heart, the revelations and development of VC and so on is just plainly said without much else to back it up, and I just didn’t buy it in the end. All of this cumulates into a car chase in the dessert, that seems to throw sense out of the window and feels extremely out of place, and the ending sequence isn’t as powerful as it should be due to all this. Nevertheless, these scenes are few and didn’t greatly hinder the magic of the rest of the film. 

At the end of the day, this is a film that is greater than its shortcomings. When it works, it’s among the most beautiful films I have seen, among Ratnam’s best, it draws me in with breathless beauty, investing me in great characters that come alive.