Annapoorani Movie Review: Right from the time the titles play out, Annapoorani makes it clear that its titular heroine (Nayanthara) has the gift of cooking; in fact, right from birth, she has an extraordinary sense of taste. Her father Rangarajan (Achyuth Kumar) is so devoted to Lord Ranganathar that he has chosen to serve food to the God rather than take up a job in the railways. This is why when Annapoorani decides to become a chef, the very idea is shot down – can a girl belonging to a family that serves food to the God cook ‘impure’ non-vegetarian food?
Director Nilesh Krishnaa paints this tale in broad brushstrokes, but the film manages to be perfectly agreeable. In a sense, it is the McD of feel-good/inspirational dramas. Nothing exceptional, but very much palatable. In fact, for a film revolving around food, the film hardly has any memorable shots of food or of the cooking process.
The film plays out like two distinct halves pre and post-intermission. If the first half focuses on the diemma of a woman from an orthodox family trying to learn cooking without causing them any hurt, in the second, she has to discover her love for it, following an event that robs her of her gift, and prove herself on a MasterChef-like reality show. The director literalises the challenges that his protagonist has to overcome in the process by way of animated segments in which a young girl climbs peaks that she has to I order to achieve her dream. It is both simplistic and an overkill – just like the film’s attempts at promoting religious harmony, and Thaman’s wall-to-wall background score.
Nayanthara uses her screen presence to make us root for Annapoorani and her superstardom to spell out the messages of women empowerment that the film wants to convey. Like, “Thapukku responsibility eduthukara rights kooda ponnungalukku illa”. But performance-wise, hers, too, is of the fast-food variety – functional, with the stock expressions we have come to expect from her; in fact, in the portions when the character loses her gift, we see her channeling her performance from Netrikann!
The rest of the actors offer solid support – Achyuth Kumar (and Jayaprakash, who has dubbed for him) brings out the conflicted frame of mind of someone who wants to stay true to his values. Sathyaraj, as Chef Anand, a renowned chef who is Annapoorani’s role model, plays the supportive mentor, and gets to even recreate a moment from his Amaidhi Padai. Jai, as Farhan, a childhood friend and lover of Annapoorani, plays the second fiddle to Nayanthara in the same entertaining way as he did in Raja Rani. And Karthik Kumar tries to offer a couple of more layers to the caricaturish villain of the story; he plays a chef who’s envious of the heroine and has to constantly seek validation from his father.
But the inherent inspirational element in the plot ensures that we stay rooted in our seats and the director ensures that there’s something entertaining in the scenes. In fact, the film does give us a high when we see visuals of more women entering classrooms and the kitchens of hotels riding on Annapoorani’s achievement.
