Parimala And Co Movie Review: Pandiraj's Polish Lifts a Familiar Comedy
Pandiraj has made enough films like this to know the territory cold, and Parimala and Co keeps him squarely in it. It is a family comedy dressed as a murder mystery, built on money worries, household bickering and the small frictions of people living on top of each other. Very little here is new. What makes it watchable is the ease of the making, a director who knows exactly how to keep a familiar story moving.
Parimala (Jayaram) runs the home with his wife Suthandhira (Urvashi) and daughters Madhumitha (Ananthika) and Parasakthi (Sanjana). Their peace is disturbed by Varghese (Sandy Master), a coarse local goon who pesters the girls and tells Parimala outright that he means to marry one of them. The family half-jokes about getting rid of him, then lets it go. Soon enough, he turns up dead anyway. Enter Emperuman (Mysskin), a cop who pays more attention to the bajji and pani puri than to the evidence, circling them while they play innocent.
A Mystery That Takes a Backseat
The mystery is mostly an excuse to play with how characters in these stories usually behave. The sharpest idea is that Varghese was not as unwelcome as everyone makes out: one of the daughters actually wanted him but is too embarrassed by how uncouth he is to admit it. It is a neat inversion, and the film draws its best comedy from it. When it leans on twists like this, it works. When it falls back on tired comic set-pieces, which is often, the energy dips.
Tone and Technical Aspects
The tone sits somewhere between light and faintly dark without settling on either. A bigger issue is how restless it all looks. George C. Williams' camerawork is clean and unfussy, but the cutting works against it, chopping straightforward scenes into needless jumps and forever nudging you to look here and then there for no real reason. The story, too, keeps circling back to the same house and the same question until it begins to feel thin.
Performances That Shine
Much of the pleasure is in the company. The Jayaram and Urvashi reunion has an easy, lived-in warmth, and Jayaram in particular holds the film together without ever overplaying a beat. Emperuman is shaped so closely to Mysskin's deadpan that he barely looks like he is acting, and the running gag about his endless eating mostly lands. Yogi Babu, in a smaller part, does his usual dry routine with the jokes often at his own expense. Nobody is stretched, and nobody falters.
Nothing here lingers, but very little grates either, and that balance is reason enough to turn up.
