The story has something to do with Vanaroja fleeing a villain who’s after her and taking refuge in Chinna Vandu’s home, where his older brothers fall for her as well. Nobody wants to see, on screen, the mechanics of love as it unfolds in real life, but shouldn’t there be at least a semblance of how things really work? The situations in Naiyaandi are so contrived – the one about a missing ring has to be seen to be disbelieved – that you have to wonder if our filmmakers cannot be bothered to think up plausible falling-in-love scenarios anymore. If this had been the real world, both of them would have been committed, very quickly, to an institution where they could have scribbled love notes on the walls happily ever after. Now Chinna Vandu begins to think that if he jumps from this tall tree to that one, then Vanaroja is really in love with him.

And if she manages to race to a tree before a firecracker explodes in the air, then that will happen. She reasons that if the number of electricity poles between now and the time the train stops at the station is in the single digits, then this will happen in her life. Vanaroja’s thought processes are in the same vein. When that doesn’t work, he guesses that girls like funny guys, and so he dresses up like a circus clown and lands up in front of her house. He guesses that girls like traditional-minded guys, and so he dresses up like a kaavadi-carrying devotee and lands up in front of her house. And so Chinna Vandu sets about stalking her. An instant decision is made that she’s life-mate material. The girl – Vanaroja (Nazriya Nazim) – is pretty. In Naiyaandi, it’s the usual love at sight. Watching these films together is to see all the ways a love story can be done wrong and right.

At least for a while, it’s a low-key bliss-out. (It’s the classic construct: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.) This film, too, is pure formula, but made with taste and understatement and a genuine understanding of how opposites attract. Kiruthiga Udhayanidhi’s Vanakkam Chennai, on the other hand, is a rom-com in the truest sense, the way rom-coms are made in Hollywood. Mainly, though, I suppose it just sounded cool to have him do this.) The film is a vile mess. (Why? So that he wins the right to “correct” a girl that he and his idling friends have their eyes on. Sarkunam’s Naiyaandi slavishly follows the Kollywood formula, with thoroughly exaggerated characters whom we see only on screen – like the mother, at the beginning, who’s so desperate to marry off her older sons that she accosts unsuspecting “eligible” girls with a list of questions, including one about caste, and from there it’s just a small leap to the hero-introduction scene that has Chinna Vandu (Dhanush) vaulting across an open well.

The two love stories this week are worlds apart – at least movie worlds apart.

Vanakkam chennai movie subtitles