Mundasupatti

Gopi is a photographer and travels village to village with his assistant Azhagu taking pictures. They come to a village called Mundasupatti. There is a belief there: whoever is photographed dies. So nobody has their picture taken and the village head is absolutely against it. Gopi takes a photograph at a wedding and the person in it happens to die. The belief counts as confirmed. After that Gopi can neither leave the village nor defend himself, and on top of it he is in love with the head man's daughter. Ram Kumar directs. Vishnu Vishal plays Gopi. It is in Tamil. The film was expanded to a feature from a short the same director had made earlier. The humour is built on coincidence; each time the character tries to correct the situation he makes it worse. The matter it treats is the relation between belief and proof; the villagers confirm a false inference by repeating it. The narrative does not make the village stupid; it shows how fear works and carries that without mockery. It is set in the eighties, which brings the impossibility of communication into the narrative. Its limit is the second half; the plot begins to repeat and the romantic strand is weak. Who it is for: viewers who like Tamil comedy and narratives set in villages. Who it is not for: the humour is local, the pace uneven, and the characters thinly written.