Before Karthik called Jessie — Anbil Avan.

The sheer happiness you get when ‘Anbil Avan’ starts playing every time you watch VTV is something you don’t see with a lot of films. I remember being thrilled, yelling “YES!” in my head watching Karthik and Jessie embrace in the middle of Central Park. You enjoy the ups and downs they go through like it’s your own. You connect with Karthik’s anger, with Jessie’s pain. In terms of getting together and splitting apart, VTV is an emotional roller coaster and it manages to get to you on many different layers. When an emotionally exhausted and distraught Karthik says “It was a one-way ticket to heartbreak city”(which is actually one of my most favorite lines, ever), you feel like you’re a part of the journey to the said ‘heartbreak city’ with him. Which is why Anbil Avan hit me hard, and continues to, despite me knowing the ending. It’s Karthik’s unfulfilled dream of being with the woman he loved materializing on screen, and it’s our dream too. We root for them. We gasp when Jessie decides to leave. And we feel a volcano of emotions when we see her on screen as the strains of Aaromale take the sequence to a different level. We see the heartfelt exchange between the two. And then, ARR comes in to weave his magic with a beautiful, upbeat song that is beautifully picturised. The church and the temple wedding-the transition from the church organs to the nadhaswaram gets me every single time, not to mention Trisha walking in looking drop dead gorgeous in that saree. The glances they exchange make it a visual poem, the shenanigans across the beautiful city of New York, the celebration of their love, it gets to us. One of my favorite moments is Jessie messing with Karthik’s hair when he’s trying to eat, and a close second is when they’re dancing on the stairs in Times Square. The film, for me, has always ended with Anbil Avan solely for the kind of happiness it made me feel. The optimism that it gave me, that if you do desire and believe in something, it will eventually reach you. The film as a whole is beautiful, but just this song does it for me, for the hope it instills is beautiful. “Unnai thaandi edhayum,
Ennal yosanai seiya,
Mudiyadhe, mudiyadhe”