Spoilers ahead…
To us, these “big events” of the heroine’s life are presented as non-events. They are just part of another day in her life.
New media appears to have given the Tamil art-cinema scene a new push. Sanjay Narayanan’s Maalai Nera Mallipoo is about a sex worker. The woman is named Lakshmi, and she’s played by Vinithra Menon with a spectacular amount of world-weariness. Even her voice seems to bear the weight of the world, which includes her school-going son, a little boy named Karna. The narrative is constructed like a series of non-events. The situations themselves may be big: like when Karna goes missing, or when Lakshmi hits Karna when he uses the word “bastard”, or when the landlord keeps asking Lakshmi for overdue rent and insinuating that he knows what she does for a living. And the biggest of all may be the woman downstairs asking Lakshmi just when her husband will be back. It tells us that Lakshmi has spun a story around herself and it could unravel at any time.
You can read the rest of the review here:
https://www.galatta.com/tamil/movie/review/maalai-nera-mallipoo/
And you can watch the video review here:
Copyright ©2023 GALATTA.