Of all the adjectives one could use to describe this film, deplorable would be my top pick. Here’s what, without exaggeration, happens in Bommai: a man with an unnamed mental health condition goes off his medication. He hallucinates his childhood love interest (and ongoing obsession) as an adult woman every time he’s in the vicinity of a particular mannequin – intercut sleazy fantasies under the guise of changing the mannequin’s clothes. Man becomes increasingly murderous and obsessive. A police inspector character calls it “an interesting love story.” The end.
This tortuous excuse for romance, led by SJ Suryah, is unsurprisingly a repulsive watch. The actor plays Raju, a painter at a mannequin factory, with a history of mental health struggles. He keeps a shrine in his house dedicated to his best friend and love interest Nandhini. We learn soon that she was abducted and never found. This incident happened when Raju and Nandhini were in school, and as a child, Nandhini (who is as old as Raju) is shown to mother him and his younger sister in the flashback scenes. That girls and women have to be mother figures to the men in their lives is a point the film takes great pains to establish even as it copiously sexualises a female body that has no autonomy whatsoever.
Priya Bhavani Shankar plays the adult Nandhini whom only Raju can see. She dotes on him and indulges his behaviour as if he’s an irascible toddler rather than a grown man with questionable views on gender roles. She even tells him at one point, “For the first two years of our marriage I have to raise you.” It’s important here to see past the director’s facade of using a mannequin to make such statements when the film actually seems to say that women are little more than dolls for men to project their sexual fantasies onto. If not, their role, regardless of their age, is to mother the men in their lives. Any violation of women’s bodies is told exclusively from the perspective of proprietorial male rage.
As if all this wasn’t bad enough, director Radhamohan, in Kollywood style, throws in a ham-fisted representation of mental health disorders. From a blissful disregard for doctor-patient confidentiality to freely mis-depicting trauma, Bommai follows the Tamil cinema formula of painting mental health disorders as singularly violent. From a director who made films like Mozhi (2007) and Abhiyum Naanum (2009) among others, which had far better nuance and were generally celebrated at the time of their release, Bommai is a disappointing venture.
Meanwhile, SJ Suryah does what he does in many of his films–makes female viewers uncomfortable. This is the actor’s second role in recent times that has his character sexually obsessed with a young adult. The Amazon Prime crime thriller Vadhandhi: The Fable of Veloni (2022) showed his cop character having sexual dreams about a 18-year-old whose murder he’s supposedly in the midst of solving. At what point is the 54-year-old actor planning to stop with the sleazy roles, is a question that begs asking at this point.
Priya Bhavani Shankar doesn’t have much to do except try and as closely as possible resemble a mannequin while displaying an emotional range shorter than that of the plastic doll. It’s hard to blame the actor entirely for this when Tamil cinema routinely writes flimsy roles for women.
The film also fails to establish the supposed plot twists in the narrative. Each twist, staged with the music and theatrics hitting a crescendo, is woefully predictable. Does the director honestly think so little of the audience? Bommai’s music can be summed up by drawing attention to what is supposed to be the pivotal song of the story, ‘Mudhal Muththam’ (first kiss). Whether it's the terrible lyrics or the poor dramatisation of the song or the blatantly fake-looking sets or how it fails to move the viewer, one is forced to the point of disbelief that Yuvan Shankar Raja could have had anything to do with it. Richard M Nathan’s cinematography fails to make an impression, only adding to the overall dismal experience of watching this film.
As harsh as it may sound, Bommai is nothing short of a repelling watch. The film may be dismissed as unintentionally humorous given how laughable most of the events in the story are. But what the film really does is reveal a gender politics that is built on quite literally objectifying female bodies, while granting humanity to women solely on the basis of how good they are at mothering men.