‘Bachelor’ movie review: A labyrinthine romantic tale that tries to delineate love from lust

Filmmaker Sathish Selvakumar’s debut is promising on several aspects, but is let down by a slightly-haphazard second half

Sathish Selvakumar’s debut, Bachelor, begins with a laugh riot. We see a guy, living in a typically-messy bachelor pad, giving an online interview in formal shirt and boxers. It is night. He sits outside, perhaps not to disturb his sleeping roommates. But one of them, sloshed, wakes up, opens the door and starts unzipping his pants, thinking it is the restroom. The interviewee helplessly tries to send him away. But the roommate continues to unzip, with the shocked friend still watching, and pees on the laptop. This roommate is our protagonist, Darling (GV Prakash Kumar).

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Idle and irresponsible youth is not new to Tamil cinema. But instead of employing a lazy narrator’s voice-over that says something along the lines of “Ivar dhaanga namma kadhai oda hero; onna number somberi (this is our story’s hero; he’s a number one sloth)” that we have heard in many comedies, Sathish prefers to show Darling’s idleness and irresponsibility. When his friend laments to the rest of the gang about how he ruined his interview, Darling lazily takes a tumbler of tea and soaks in four biscuits, stirs it with a spoon and slowly eats it as the wet Macbook from the previous night hangs on the clothesline. The laughs are not just in the lines, they are in the visuals as well.