The trailer for P Arumuga Kumar’s upcoming Tamil comedy Oru Nalla Naal Paathu Solren (I’ll pick an auspicious date and tell you) starring Vijay Sethupathi, Gautam Karthik, Niharika Konidela, Gayathrie and Ramesh Thilak, had promised a journey into a zany world. A scene from the movie released by the makers on Monday comes as further proof. The movie will be released on February 2.
In the preview, Vijay Sethupathi’s character is waiting for an update from his two assistants on a task he gave them: to find out about a woman named Abhayalakshmi. The two assistants – one of whom is a little too earnest – tell him they checked the registers but could not find anyone by that name. They even stole the registers for their boss to cross-check.
“Did you check the room too?” asks Sethupathi’s character.
“But how could we do that without your permission?” retorts the earnest assistant. When Sethupathi’s character points out that conducting a thorough check was the obvious thing to do, the assistant offers an explanation about the importance of a boss’s word for an employee.
“Here’s a car – can it function on its own?,” he says as Sethupathi fumes. “No, right? Only if you plug the keys in, it will run. We are like this car and you are the keys.”
A frustrated Sethupathi hits him with the registers. But assistant is nonplussed. “Is boss angry?,” he asks.
The plot of Kumar’s debut film has been kept closely guarded but in an interview to Firstpost, the director described it as a comedy that meshes a “variety of sub-genres”. Sethupathi has eight looks in the film.
“The movie is set in two backdrops including a tribal village in the forest and a college in the city,” he told the publication. “Vijay Sethupathi plays the role of Yeman, the headman of the tribal community. But there is no mythological connection to his character name. The tribal village is located in Andhra Pradesh according to the story, but the people will be speaking in Tamil. Once you watch the film, you will understand the reason behind it.”