 "Vadhandhi: The Fable Of Velonie: And the mystery deepens")
It is not easy to sustain the mystery of a murdered girl for eight episodes. _Vadhandhi: The Fable Of Velonie_ in Tamil, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, gets the narrative to its finishing line without tugging and pushing too hard. It is a well-crafted murder mystery with the correct doses of red herrings strewn across an arching landscape.
A lot of the episodes are shot in a quaint, pretty lodge run by an ironfisted single mother with a daughter Velonie, who insists on flirting with every male who catches her attention. It could be the smitten boy from her church choir Jones (Vaibhav Murugesan) or the middle-aged writer Sebastian ( Nassar ) who rents a room in the lodge and befriends the over-friendly Velonie.
Velonie, played with butterfly sprint by newcomer Sanjana, is at once an incorrigible flirt and and an innocent gamine. That she tends to react with over-enthusiasm to male attention is Velonie’s one fatal flaw. But does that make her an open target for sexual assault? This disturbing question was raised with ample velocity years ago in the Oscar winning Jonathan Kaplan’s The Accused. If a girl is flirtatious, even promiscuous, does she “invite” rape?
Vadhandhi The Fable Of Velonie goes the other way: Velonie is “innocent”. She has no clue that she challenges the libido of men around her. It is a seriously problematic assumption in today’s day and age of Tinder and sexting. Locked in an Arcadian capsule the series works fine as a tale of oblivious self-assertion.
Andrew Louis’ direction takes the long route to the denouement. Men fascinated by Velonie’s “innocent flirtation” come and go(so does the cop Vivek’s wife who like all cops’ wives on screen feels neglected) while the two investigating cops Vivek(S J Suryah) and Ramar(Vivek Prasannah) follow one lead after another .
Multiple deadends are allowed since this is a sprawling webseries with enough space for misapprehensions. However too many misleading plot points tend to dilute the impact of the murder mystery.Curiously the series begins with a false lead when the body discovered is erroneously said to belong to a well-known actress. From this false beginning Velonie’s tale remains largely airy and innocuous until the final episodes when the going gets irredeemably sordid .
Scenes of sexual violence tinged with blobs of horror and mythology(the flavours of the season) shot in the forests almost seem to belong to another series altogether.
Vadhandhi: The Fable Of Velonie is a strangely arresting crime thriller where the main suspects are eventually cocooned in a shield of blamelessness while the culprits are shown to be depraved primitive types.
There is also a very strange twist in the plot whereby consent is not only about ‘No Means No’ it seems yes can also mean no.
If you promise not to look too closely, this series promises you an interesting, even intriguing time.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. Read all the Latest News , Trending News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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