On the eve of the release of his second Hindi film, “Holiday,” AR Murugadoss talks to Baradwaj Rangan about remakes, violence, and returning to his hometown to watch films with friends and family.

Half an hour isn’t much when you think about it. It’s just thirty minutes. But to AR Murugadoss, this is time he doesn’t have. He doesn’t have thirty minutes to spare during evenings and nights, all the way till dawn, because he’s shooting a schedule of Kaththi, his film with Vijay, at Pushpa Gardens, Valasaravakkam. He doesn’t have thirty minutes to spare during the day because that’s when he’s doing the other things – you know, the things we do when we’re not working, like sleeping. So when I finally wrangled thirty minutes of the director’s time, after almost a fortnight of texts and calls, it felt like a minor victory. It became more minor when he said he’d rather talk on the phone.

There’s something disquieting about interviews on the phone. You don’t see the person. You don’t register the way he looks at you or looks away, so you cannot really decide if you want to push further or move to the next question. You don’t see him doing the things he normally does, the things that add colour to your copy. (“AR Murugadoss removed a wad of chewing gum from his mouth and stuck it under the cup of chamomile tea he picked up…”) It’s just a disembodied voice. But I have to give him this – despite the fact that he’d rather be doing something else, despite the fact that he badly needed to sleep, he was engaged throughout. The word that comes to mind is “sincere.” You know the student who doesn’t want to go to school, but if forced to go, he’ll tell himself that he’s there anyway, and so he may as well pay attention and take notes and raise his hand in class and make an impression? Murugadoss seems to be a little like that. It’s not just about doing something. It’s about doing something well.

This is also how he approaches remakes – not just making the movie all over again, but making it well. His first Hindi film (and the first Hindi film to vault over the Rs. 100-crore barrier at the box office), Ghajini, was the remake of the Tamil film of the same name. But it wasn’t the exact same movie. After a film is released, you listen to what people say. You hear them talk about what worked, what didn’t. Sometimes, you see the film with the audience and see how they respond to each scene, where they cheer, where they groan. Murugadoss did all these things and incorporated all the “feedback,” as he calls it, into the Hindi version, which he thinks is better. Some of the changes are big, broad, instantly visible. The Tamil film had two villains. The Hindi film had only one. Some of the changes are more delicate. The Tamil film had an exuberant duet, Rangola hola hola, towards the end, and a lot of people felt that this didn’t fit in with the doom-filled direction the story was headed. Hence, in Hindi, this song was replaced by an emotional number, Kaise mujhe tum mil gayi, a little earlier in the narrative. It helps the film immeasurably.

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Now, Murugadoss is ready with his second Hindi film, Holiday, which is the remake of the Tamil blockbuster Thuppakki. I asked him if perfecting a product based on feedback – how like manufacturing this sounds! – was what made him take up remakes. He said it was also the excitement that comes when you see how the same scene is transformed by different actors, different locations, a different language. The language is still a problem, but not that big a problem, as he has a good translator and a good assistant on the sets who is alert to modulations in the dialogue delivery. He admitted that he might have a problem if he chose to make a Hindi film that was set in a rural area, because there’d be a dialect you need to get right, and there’d be cultural specifics you need to be attuned to. But Holiday, like Ghajini, is an urban film, and he said that people in all the metros are pretty much alike, give or take a fashion choice here, a live-in relationship there.

His cross-metro team in Holiday kinda-sorta proves this theory. The music director, Pritam, is from Mumbai. Murugadoss chose him after asking around who churned out hit albums most consistently. But the process of making music was the same as in Chennai. You explain the situation. You get a rough tune. You say whether you like it or not. You ask for additions, modifications. Murugadoss sounded happy with the album he got, especially the bouncy Tu hi to hai number, which is the one you’ve been seeing on TV for the last couple of months, the one where Akshay Kumar in cut-offs and orange sneakers keeps hounding Sonakshi Sinha as she tries to prove that she’s the world’s best sporting all-rounder. The number was choreographed by Shobi Master, from Chennai. The Shayarana number, shot in a desert, was choreographed by Sridhar Master, also from Chennai, and the cinematography for this song was by Sukumar, whose credits include Kumki and Maan Karate. Holiday is the first Hindi film for these technicians.

Where the difference between Tamil and Hindi cinema really lies, Murugadoss said, is in the logistics. With Hindi cinema, you get bigger budgets, more prints, more theatres, the opportunity to reach audiences all over the country. I asked him if these audiences come for him or for the stars, for Aamir Khan and Akshay Kumar. I asked if he thought he could make a movie with newcomers, with his name the only known one, the only draw. He said it’ll probably take two or three more films for him to get established as a brand name in Hindi cinema. He works with experienced stars because he makes movies based on heavy subjects and newcomers cannot carry this weight. But he is thinking about a Hindi film that will feature newcomers. Then he said he wants to work with Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan, whom he termed “the two legends of Tamil cinema,” because you cannot claim to have truly arrived unless you’ve worked with them. These were his dream actors. I asked him if he had a dream film. He said something generic at first, that he just wanted to make a “nalla padam,” a good film. Then he said he wanted to make something like Avatar, filled with lavish computer graphics.

He thinks big because the director Shankar is one of his idols. He likes to say that he is not from the city – he likes to use the word “ooru,” to refer to where he’s from – and, as a result, his exposure to international filmmakers like Martin Scorsese came relatively late. During his growing-up years, he grew up venerating Shankar. His second film, Ramana, was practically a Shankar film, with its story of a man suffering a personal tragedy and turning vigilante to bring down corruption in society. What Shankar taught him, Murugadoss said, is to think big – not just in scale, but also in terms of the scope of the issue at hand. The corrupt officials in Ramana, the sleeper cells in Thuppakki – these aren’t specific to a family in the film; they affect us all. There’s something deeper here, something more than just the Shankar influence. There is a YouTube video where Murugadoss says that, in his years at Bishop Heber College in Trichy, he had thoughts of turning into a terrorist or a Naxalite or a politician. He was greatly troubled by the wrongdoings around him, and he did not know what to do. Should he pick up a gun or write a poem or make a movie? He chose the latter, and then he speaks of the power of the image, about how the Vietnam War came to an end after the picture of a naked girl fleeing her napalmed village made its way around the world. Murugadoss told me that some of that anger still burns in him, and that’s why his films are violent. When innocents are killed by a bomb, you don’t want the perpetrator to be arrested by the police and subjected to courtroom interrogation and locked up in jail. You want to break his fingers. You want to make him suffer. That, he said, is more impactful on screen. It’s the whole layman-wish-fulfillment thing. I asked him if the same “more impactful” principle was at work in the gruesome scene in Ghajini where the heroine is killed – not by a bullet, but by a knife stuck into her spine, after which some sort of sledgehammer bashes her brains out. He said yes. Her death needed to have a big impact. The audience should not forget how she died, so that they could root for the hero when he avenges her death.

His other idol is Mani Ratnam, who taught him that it’s important to use all the tools at your disposal – sets, cinematography, costumes, makeup – to create a singular vision, what he called a “class presentation.” He mentioned Nayakan when I asked him to name his favourite films. (The Shawshank Redemption is his favourite Hollywood film.) He saw Nayakan when he was in school, and he said he liked the film because it’s really an action movie but it does what action movies rarely do, which is to make us feel so much for the protagonist, which is why it is so much better than The Godfather. He also loves Pithamagan, and he used a curious word, vibration, to explain why. He said that a film should have a perfect vibration between the characters and the audience. If the characters smile we should smile. If they cry, we should cry. Pithamagan, in his opinion, had this vibration to an amazing degree. If this connection snaps, Murugadoss said, we say we’re bored.

This is how Murugadoss likes to analyse films. He likes to see why films work and why they don’t. He likes to see how audiences respond to films. He likes to get a sense of their taste. But he said he doesn’t believe in following trends, making a movie because a similar movie became a box-office hit. That’s no use, he said. He’d rather make a movie because there hasn’t been a movie of this type or in this genre for a while, which probably explains his affinity to 7aum Arivu, with its mix of sci-fi and thriller and martial arts tropes, all topped with a sprinkling of spirituality. (There’s some unintentional humour too, if you consider the name of its dubbed-in-Hindi version: Chennai v/s China.) That’s his favourite film from his work. Thuppakki comes next. He said that the most important thing while watching a film is that we should not be able to guess what the next scene is. We should be surprised. This is the biggest challenge in writing a screenplay. He spoke of K Bhagyaraj’s screenplays, how they had all this great content and how this content was expressed in great style, and how every single scene was oriented towards the central plot, and how all this was coated with a humorous sheen. He called Darling Darling Darling the equivalent of “a Hollywood film.” He said that if Bhagyaraj had come on the scene today, he’d be world-famous.

Murugadoss keeps thinking about cinema all the time, and he doesn’t have time for what he calls “small things.” One of these things was the pretty big decision he needed to make about how his name would appear in the opening credits of his first film, Dheena. The numerologist who was advising the unit declared that “A. Murugadas” wasn’t right. The period between the initial and the name had to go. There needed to be two initials. And the name had to end with two s’s. And so the period went. An extra letter was borrowed from his father’s name, Arunachalam. And two s’s were slapped on at the end. Murugadoss made light of this incident – he said he was too busy with delivering a good film to be bothered with all this – but with his remarkable hit ratio, he’s become an unwitting poster boy for numerology. But little apart from the name has changed in the boy from Kallakurichi, in Vizhuppuram district. He told me that, as long as he was there, he used to watch movies all the time because there was nothing else to do. There were two theatres, Govindarajan (which no longer exists) and Raja. If you want to meet Murugadoss, you may want to consider heading to Raja theatre on a Sunday evening. Even though other theatres have sprung up in Kallakurichi, he insists that the films he directs or produces should be screened in Raja. He’s in Chennai on the Friday the film is released and on Saturday, to track “feedback,” but on Sunday evening, he’ll be at Raja theatre watching the film with friends and family. What a plot for a movie. The boy who makes it big and doesn’t forget his roots – is there an audience in the world that won’t respond to this vibration?

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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Singeetam Srinivasa Rao remembers ‘Dikkatra Parvathi’, his first film in Tamil, based on Rajaji’s story.

Singeetam Srinivasa Rao’s first film was in Telugu, a 1972 comedy named Neeti Nijayiti. It flopped. For his second film, he wanted to do something different. “At that time, there was this big art-cinema movement,” he told me last week. “We were very inspired by the neorealistic films, and by Satyajit Ray. That’s how Dikkatra Parvathi happened.” Ray’s Pather Panchali had become the touchstone for young filmmakers, and Rao followed its lessons scrupulously. Because Ray’s film was scored by a classical musician (Ravi Shankar), Rao brought in the veena maestro Chitti Babu to compose the soundtrack for his film, which turned 40 this month. And because Ray’s film was based on a classic work of literature (byBibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay), Rao too decided that his film would be based on a literary story that had fascinated him: Fatal Cart.

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That was the English translation of C Rajagopalachari’s Dikkatra Parvathi. “Those days,” Rao told me, “it was easier to get funds from the Film Finance Corporation [the earlier avatar of the National Film Development Corporation] if your film was based on a classic.” He put in fifty thousand of his money, and the rest of the two-lakh budget came from FFC – Dikkatra Parvathi was the first Tamil film financed by the organisation. Seeking further financial assistance, Rao decided to shoot the film someplace a little beyond the Tamil Nadu-Karnataka border, because the Karnataka government was offering subsidies (up to fifty thousand rupees) for films shot in the state. But when they discovered that Rajaji’s birthplace, Thorapalli, was just seven kilometres from Hosur, where the unit was camped, Rao’s wife convinced him that the film had to be shot there. “The village looked exactly like the one described in the story,” Rao said. “Plus, we got the satisfaction of shooting Rajaji’s story in Rajaji’s birthplace.”

Rao was hesitant, at first, to approach the 94-year-old Rajaji and take permission to film his story. “He hated films,” Rao said. “I wanted to make a film from a story of a man who hated films.” Later, Rajaji assured him that he only hated bad films. Rao remembers the day he met Rajaji: 7 December, 1972. “December 10 was his birthday and there would be a constant stream of visitors. So I went earlier.” Rajaji died soon after, on Christmas day, and the permission letter he gave Rao contained his last signature in an official capacity. More than a year later, his children attended the preview of Dikkatra Parvathi, which was “dedicated to the memory of Rajaji.”

The story is about newlyweds Parvathi (Lakshmi) and Karuppan (Srikanth), whose happy – if impoverished – life is ruined when he becomes an alcoholic and is unable to repay his loans. Two stretches stand out. The first occurs when Karuppan, goaded by a cohort, begins to drink. This is his first time. He asks, almost innocently, if drinking isn’t wrong and if you begin to smell if you drink. He takes his first sip and spits out the cheap liquor. The people around him laugh – we don’t see them (the camera stays focused on Karuppan), but we hear their mockery. And as if to prove a point to them, Karuppan drains the bottle. This self-destructive male behaviour is balanced, towards the end, by self-destructive female behaviour. Parvathi is constantly hounded by a moneylender’s son (YG Mahendra) who is panting after her, and at one point, he enters her home when Karuppan is away. What happens next? We are kept in suspense, as the film cuts away to the aftermath: a court case. (Rao shot these scenes in a courthouse in Hosur, corralling local lawyers into the cast.) Over the song Enna kuttram seidheno, we get incremental flashbacks that lead us to the climax, where we learn what really occurred that night. It’s one of the rare times a Tamil-film heroine has been allowed to remain human.

Lakshmi was cast because Rao was impressed by the mobility in her face. “She was acting in a lot of ‘glamour roles’ then,” Rao said. “I saw her without makeup one day, and knew she was right for the role.” As for Srikanth, he was cast because he was not “the regular hero.” Dikkatra Parvathi was shot in 22 days by the cinematographer Ravi Varma, who had just finished work on a Malayalam film named Swayamvaram, made by a first-time filmmaker named Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Rao said, “Adoor used to come by for the rerecording sessions of Dikkatra Parvathi.” The score, though, hasn’t aged well. Over the opening credits alone, we hear the veena, mridangam, morsing, tabla, shehnai, sarangi, flute – the resulting symphony, today, sounds too ostentatious for such a small, intimate film.

Dikkatra Parvathi was censored on December 31, 1973, but the film couldn’t be released due to an impasse. The FFC demanded repayment of their loan before they would issue the release letter, and the distributors insisted on the release letter before they coughed up the funds that would allow Rao to repay his loan to the FFC. When the director ran into MG Ramachandran, the Chief Minister, and spoke about his predicament, the latter instructed his secretary to buy the film. This was the first time in the Indian film industry that a film was procured by a state – though MGR wasn’t exactly looking at it as a work of art. He had in mind other, more practical uses – as a propaganda film to further the cause of prohibition. Still, Dikkatra Parvathi was back in Rao’s hands. It was released in one theatre in Chennai, Little Anand. It would be almost a decade before he made his next Tamil feature, Rajapaarvai.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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Baradwaj Rangan spends an afternoon discussing sound with the team of ‘Jigarthanda’, which uses Dolby Atmos technology.

Before we go any further, we need to listen to a Creation story, the Dolby version. In the beginning, man created the screen and the sights. And then he said, Let there be sound. And there was, at first, mono – a single speaker, in the middle of the theatre, behind the screen. Then we moved to Stereo, with a dedicated channel for dialogue, and two additional speakers to the left and the right, which created a better spread of sound. Then came Dolby Surround– as the name suggests, the sound surrounded us.

With the next upgrade, called 5.1, the theatre was split into two “sound zones,” if you will. If a helicopter travelled from right to left on screen, its sound was first heard from the speakers in the right half of the theatre, and then it moved to the speakers on the left. For the first time, there was movement of sound across the audience. Then came 7.1, with even more definition, as the theatre was now split into four zones – the sound travelled from the speakers on the left side to the speakers on the back wall (left) to the speakers on the back wall(right) to the speakers on the right side.

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And now, there’s Dolby Atmos, which was first experienced in the Pixar animated feature Brave, in 2012. This isn’t about channels anymore, but about sound emanating from specific speakers. The sound of the helicopter isn’t just in the left side of the theatre or the right side – it’s now heard in Speaker 1, then Speaker 2, then Speaker 3… And for the first time, there are speakers above the audience. So the helicopter can also be heard over your head. Or think rain. With earlier technologies, we used to hear the sound of rain from the sides of the theatre. Now, because the “rain sound” can be restricted to the overhead speakers, we can hear the rain fall over us, the way it does in life. Karthik Subbaraj, the director of Pizza (the first south Indian movie mixed in 7.1), has used this technology in his second film, Jigarthanda, which he described as a gangster movie that unfolds in Madurai.

I met Subbaraj, last week, with his team – sound designers Vishnu Govind and Sreesankar, sound mixer Rajakrishnan, and Dolby consultant Dwarak Warrier. S Venkatraghavan, Cinema Sales Manager – South at Dolby Laboratories, was also present. We sat in a “mix theatre,” before a large screen and an L-shaped console with a million buttons. Speakers jutted out from the walls. Imagine a theatre with no seats. This is where these “sound guys” do the things they do to make the silent visuals come to life. This is where the wind begins to sound like wind, the rain like rain, a gunshot like a gunshot. They also work on the dialogue tracks, raising and lowering volumes according to how close to the camera a character is in relation to others. Subbaraj told me that many scenes in Jigarthanda were shot in old-style houses in Madurai, which had high ceilings. So, after the shooting was completed (not during, because of the noise levels on the sets), the sound guys went to those locations and captured the ambient sound – for instance, the street sounds heard from inside the house – and also got an idea of how voices would sound, with echoes or reverberations, when spoken from various corners of a room. They then used this knowledge while tweaking the dialogue tracks.

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Warrier said, “Apart from dialogue-mixing, most of our film makers don’t give enough thought to the possibilities of sound in storytelling at the scripting stage or during the filming process, and in most cases, what you get to hear in the theatre could be the ‘first draft’ as far as the ‘sound track’ is concerned. The sound guys need to be consulted during the scripting stage itself.” That’s what Subbaraj did. He wrote a draft of the script with the plot and the characters and then handed it to the sound guys. They looked at the script and suggested that the film be mixed in Dolby Atmos. Rajakrishnan told me, “If you know the movie is going to be mixed in Atmos, you can add more elements to give more detailing.”

Rajakrishnan designed the sound for Thalaivaa, which was the first Tamil movie that was mixed in Dolby Atmos. That wasn’t a “native” mix, though – in the sense that the sound mixing wasn’t done from scratch in this technology. The sound was converted to Dolby Atmos after the final mix was done, much like how a film is shot in 2D and later converted to 3D. Villa, the sequel to Pizza, was the first film in Tamil to be natively mixed in Dolby Atmos. Now, there’s Jigarthanda. After the inputs from the sound guys, Subbaraj “tweaked the script.” He said, “If I’m convinced, if it’s not going to change or spoil the script, then I’ll add these elements.”

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One scene in the original script had a single-take shot that begins in a motel and ends as a character walks into a restroom. Vishnu Govind told me, “In a long, unbroken shot like that, we can show the passage of sound.” And so the script was rewritten. Now the character begins walking from the kitchen of a restaurant, goes through a theatre and then ends up in the theatre’s restroom. Sounds from all these locations ended up in the mix. The sound guys also suggested that the scene would be enhanced by rain, so that was worked in too. I asked them how this was different from the tracking shot that opened Guna, where the camera takes in – without a cut – the sights and sounds around a Hyderabad whorehouse. Venkatraghavan said, “Earlier, with a film like Guna, you could just fade in and fade out the sound [in accordance with the movement of the camera]. Now, when this character is walking through the passage in the theatre, you’ll hear a song from the film that’s playing inside on just one of the speakers around you.”

Some of these inputs influenced the props in the film. For a scene that involved a motorcycle, the sound guys suggested that instead of using a modern-day Pulsar, an eighties-style Kawasaki RTZ would give a more “interesting” sound. And some of the inputs happened during the mixing, after the film was shot. In another scene set in a theatre, the sound guys suggested using different fans for different speakers – so on one speaker, you have a fan that runs smoothly, on another speaker you have a fan that’s making a noise. “There’s a portion where all the fans are switched off,” Rajakrishnan said. And you hear, from each speaker, the distinct sound of a particular fan coming to a stop. “You can never get this kind of effect in 5.1.”

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I asked them if the viewer was going to be able to absorb all this information. Warrier said, “The first time you see the film, the sound is not supposed to take you out of it. But at a subconscious level, you will absorb all these inputs.” That is, of course, how cinema is supposed to work in theory – as a confluence of invisible effects. But technicians, inevitably, see films differently – everything, to them, is visible. Rajakrishnan told me how thrilling it was to watch 300: Rise of an Empire. “The first 20 minutes of the film was a literal demonstration of what Dolby Atmos is capable of.” Subbaraj recalled watching Three Monkeys (the Turkish film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan) in a festival. “It’s an intimate family drama. The film has no music at all, except over the end credits. Otherwise, it’s just the sound effects. I could see how they enhanced the emotional quotient of the film.”

I asked him if the increasing awareness of what sound can do might reduce the dependence on background music to shape the viewer’s response. He said that after the sound guys were done with the mixing for that kitchen-theatre-restroom scene, they sent the audio files to the music director Santhosh Narayanan. When Subbaraj and Narayanan saw the scene with the sound, they decided to leave the scene without any background music. “So yes,” he said. “The dependence on background music will decrease as directors use real sound to project emotion.” Rajakrishnan said, “But even with the score, you can add a number of tracks. You can have more clarity – not just left speaker and right speaker. If it’s a song, it can be everywhere.”

I asked Subbaraj if he’d go for Dolby Atmos if he made a smaller movie, say a rom-com, next. He said he would, because the impact is greater. But then, so is the work. “Initially, I thought Jigarthanda would not involve as much work as Pizza, because that was a horror film. We wanted to scare the audience with the effects. This is just an action-drama. But slowly I found that there was much more work to be done here. Pizza was an indoor movie, but here there were many live locations and we even shot candid in some places. We needed to recreate all that ambience.” Rajakrishnan said that he took 15 days to do the sound mixing for Pizza, whereas Jigarthanda took a month. I told him I hoped he got paid more. He laughed.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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Why is Hollywood crap so much more watchable than the crap we make? The answer: professionalism.

About the time the first Transformers movie was released, if you’d asked me what I thought of Optimus Prime, I’d have thought you were referring to a mathematical variable. A few movies in, I was slightly more clued in. About Transformers – Dark of the Moon, I wrote, “After the third installment in the Transformers series, I think I’m a little clearer about the mythos. There’s a red car and a yellow car which transform into good robots with blue eyes and wage war with bad robots which are made from black cars and which have red eyes.” Now, I’ve seen the fourth film (it’s called Age of Extinction, but there’s no prospect of that for this super-profitable series), and I’m still wondering how anyone can summon up any affection for all this metal-clanging mayhem, which goes on for nearly three hours. In the screening I attended, the audience hooted and whistled when the Mark Wahlberg character, an amateur scientist, walked into an old movie house and found a truck. See, they knew this was no truck. They knew it was Optimus Prime. It was like watching a Rajinikanth movie.

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Of all the actors out there, would you pick Wahlberg to play a scientist? (He says earnestly, “One day I’m going to build something that matters.” Maybe he’s talking about his muscles.) But then again, why not – especially in a movie like this, which can be measured in BTUs (Blowing Things Up)? That’s all these films are about, but here’s the thing: you cannot deny the Hollywood professionalism on display. When they say they’ll make a movie filled with (and fuelled by) technology, then they make one exactly the way they said they’ll make it. Even I – so not a fan of the series – found myself saluting the special-effects team. A lot of smart men have worked on this dumb movie. Why don’t we find the same professionalism in our dumb movies? Why is generic Hollywood crap always so much better than generic Bollywood/ Kollywood/ Tollywood crap?

I know what you’re going to say. They have more money. That they do – but this isn’t about the special effects alone. I agree that the really cool stuff – the cars that, in motion, transform into robots; the ferry boats that fall from the sky and crack open on the roads like coconuts – cost the kind of money we just don’t have. Plus, we don’t make that many sci-fi films anyway, the kind of films that need these kinds of effects. But we do make action movies, don’t we? The action scenes in Hollywood films are staged by choreographers who think beyond fisticuffs, and these stunts are shot by cinematographers who know precisely which angle to use so that the viewer feels the adrenalin rush, and they’re painstakingly staged in fresh locations. Towards the end of the new Transformers movie, there’s a fun face-off that occurs amidst one of those vertiginous Hong Kong tenements. I say “fun” instead of “thrilling” because the stretch doesn’t carry any emotional heft, where we care about what happens to whom. Still, when was the last time you saw an action scene in one of our films that felt this well-choreographed, well-staged, well-shot?

Okay, forget action. Let’s just look at the cinematography. Even the random shots are done so well. When the Mark Wahlberg character talks to his daughter, they’re silhouetted against the setting sun, which is a giant ball of orange, sizzling just so in the summer breeze. As written, it’s a terrible scene – the lines are creaky, the relationship dynamics are clichéd, laughable. And yet, there’s at least something that salvages the scene, and that’s the moody image. This is what professionalism is – when something’s not great art, but you still manage to aim for (and attain) a basic level of competence. Some of our films, especially when made by the big filmmakers, do have this professionalism, but most of them rely only on the writing, and if the writing fails, there’s nothing else – no cinematography to gape at, no action to be entertained by, no production design to be impressed by, and not even much by way of locations. (The only time our filmmakers seem to care about location is when this question comes up: “Where can we shoot this song?”) The script is the most important part of the film, yes, but isn’t it time we realised that it’s not the only thing that matters?

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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On “Jigarthanda.” On the current state of Tamil cinema. On criticism, and why it’s important to not just praise a film because it’s… “different.”

Sometime last month, in the sify.com coverage of an interaction that had something to do with the teaser of the Suriya film Anjaan, the star was thus quoted: “Expectation about every film of mine is getting bigger and I have to satisfy the classes, masses, families and kids. My kids, wife and parents have to watch and enjoy my films. The business of my films is big and it has a market in Kerala, Andhra, Hindi and overseas. So the content and presentation has to match the sensibilities of all these audiences. So my responsibility is huge.” This is easily among the more depressing things I’ve read lately. I’d be thrilled by Suriya’s criterion for choosing films if I were a distributor, but as a viewer, as a fan of cinema, I’m left wondering: “Does he only care about ‘satisfying’ these various audience segments? What about ‘satisfying’ his creative urge? How about, once in a while, using his stardom to prop up an offbeat venture? Or is that not allowed to happen anymore, once you become a huge star?

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And yet, at some level, I understand why someone like Suriya, who’s easily one of our better actors, doesn’t experiment as much as he used to. As his stardom has increased, his films have become unsurprising – they’re just well-oiled machines. But these machines make money, and that’s important – for his career, certainly, but also for the industry, if only because some of the profits may end up financing a smaller, edgier film, which cannot hope to have the kind of audience a Suriya film has. In the same report, he was quoted as saying, “Working with [the director] Lingusamy was a pleasure and there was no pressure at all. It was happiness from day-one to last day of shoot and when it was pack-up time, I felt like the last day in college. He knows how to satisfy the audiences and hence I was relaxed.” If that’s what Suriya wants from his on-set experiences – no pressure, happiness, relaxation – then that’s his choice, and he’s only voicing what most people want, once inside the theatre.

But if Suriya and the other big stars are taking care of the fun side of cinema, who’s looking after the serious side, the artistic side? Who’s making the kind of films that are more than just about satisfying kids and wives and parents? Who’s making the kind of films that we can be proud of, that sticks in the mind long after we’ve left the theatre, that we can sit down and discuss and analyse and lose our minds over?

Let’s backtrack a bit and consider something else, the tax levied by the state government (30 per cent in Chennai city; less elsewhere in the state). I spoke to a prominent trade analyst to get a sense of this, and discovered that there is a special committee set up by the state government that reviews films that are (a) certified “U” by the Censor Board, and (b) have a Tamil title, and decide whether or not to exempt this film from tax. In other words, a film like Jigarthanda, which was certified “UA”, will not even be considered by this committee. Plus, unlike in other metros, there is a government-mandated cap on the ticket price: Rs. 120. So Jigarthanda, when it plays in Mumbai or Delhi, will earn two, three, four times the amount per viewer than what it will earn in its primary market, Tamil Nadu.

Then there’s the question of profit sharing between the distributor and the theatre owner. In the first week, usually, it’s a 55-45 model – 55 per cent of each ticket sold (with or without entertainment tax) goes to the distributor, and 45 per cent to the theatre owner. In the second week, it’s usually 45-55, and in the third week, 30-70. With every successive week, the theatre owners get more, the distributors less – so it’s a cause for celebration for theatre owners when a tax-exempted film like Dhanush’s Velai Illa Pattadhari (VIP) becomes a blockbuster. This also explains why, despite that film being two weeks old and despite the enormous buzz around Jigarthanda, the latter wasn’t able to get the biggest theatres in the multiplexes last week, when it was released. It’s UA-rated, and so theatres stand to make less from it (in its first week) than they would from VIP (in its third week). And if this is the case in Chennai, which is the only major market for offbeat films – unlike Hindi films by filmmakers like Anurag Kashyap, that play in metros across the country – then one can only imagine what it’s like elsewhere in the state, in the B and C centres.

The system, thus, is loaded against any filmmaker who does not want to make the kind of films that Suriya wants to make. So, in this climate, the very existence of a film like Jigarthanda is a miracle. The chorus of praise for the film is understandable, perhaps even necessary – if social-media hype can get more audiences to theatres to see such a film, then so be it. This film must become a hit – if only as a sign of encouragement to others who want to make such films. And yet, there is the feeling (maybe only to me) that this is the sole reason for the film’s near-hysterical critical raves – namely, the miracle that it was made in the first place. And this piece is about the need to celebrate films like Jigarthanda, while also remembering to evaluate them based on the bar they set for themselves. It is difficult, yes. We feel churlish and nitpicky while talking about the things that don’t work in these films when even with these “flaws” they’re far superior to ninety per cent of the films we see. But to not do so would be unfair to the film, and unfair to the filmmaker.

(to be concluded next week)

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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Kamal Haasan talks about how music came into his life. And dance. And everything else. Baradwaj Rangan listens.

Forget the actor. That was the brief. After fifty years of acting, that’s the only facet of Kamal Haasan people think about. Sometimes, maybe, they think of Kamal Haasan the writer or Kamal Haasan the director. But it’s almost always the actor. So one evening this April, in Bangalore, I asked him about the other things: the singing, the poetry, the photography, and the dancing, especially the dancing. He was in the city filming Uthama Villain, but it was the day of the elections, so there was no shooting across the state. Dressed in a white linen ensemble and looking extremely relaxed, he told me, “This kind of exposure to the arts you can get only in two places – either a Brahmin household or a community dedicated to art. I didn’t have a choice. I was born into this Brahmin atmosphere.”

He spoke about a house in Paramakudi filled with music. His mother played the violin. Elder brothers Charuhasan and Chandrahasan were singers. “So it was an environment of music,” he said. “Like others hum cinema songs, classical music would be running through my mind.” But as far as the others in the family were concerned, he was about as talented as his father, who couldn’t sing at all and, therefore, had decided to become a patron of the arts. The house was on a two-acre tract of land, and half of it became a sort of open-air auditorium where artists would be invited to perform. MLV. Madurai Somu. A young Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan.

Kamal Haasan spoke about his sister, the family’s only daughter, who was sent off to train in classical dance in a gurukulam in Tanjore when she was five. “When she was eight, she returned to find a surprise, a very late-born brother. That was me. I was not planned. Everything else in the family was planned. The eldest son would be a lawyer. The second son would also be a lawyer. The daughter was going to be a classical dancer.” They even named her Mrinalini, because his father was a great fan of Mrinalini Sarabhai.

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Listening to Kamal Haasan speak is like sitting down for a screenplay narration. The tone is steady. The tale is dramatic. Then, when you least expect it, there’s a splash of comic relief. He narrated the stretch where he – we should probably name this character in the flashback; let’s call him by the diminutive Kamal – was cut off from art for a while when his mother was diagnosed as a chronic diabetic and had to be sent to Chennai, where her elder brother lived. Kamal accompanied her. “I was about three. They enrolled me in Holy Angels. I had this uncanny knack of running away. I’d pick up a taxi and come back home.”

Kamal turned five. He became an actor. And music and dance returned to his life when his sister came to Chennai. He used to escort her on the bus for veena classes, and there, to keep him out of mischief, he’d be given a small veena to play. “In a way,” Kamal Haasan said, “I could say that music is my sister’s strong influence.” He said that he was not a keen learner of the arts. He just picked things up by ear, karna parampara, rather than actual practice. But he used to talk like he was going to perform at Music Academy the next day. “All that was leaning towards acting, not playing the veena,” he laughed.

***

The story Kamal Haasan told that evening kept going back and forth in time, a jumble of memories – like this one from when Kamal was seven or eight. One of his friends from Hindu High School was Palghat Mani Iyer’s son, Rajaram – they formed a mutual admiration society. Kamal thought that Rajaram was a brilliant violinist. Rajaram regarded Kamal as a budding veena genius. “He took me around saying that this guy is a genius, he knows everything. But I couldn’t play. I could only talk about it. I didn’t know how to get out of it.” So Kamal had this fear. There was disdain too. “What you cannot do, you tend to dislike. It was too much hard work.”

When I spoke to Rajaram, he recalled an incident from when they were eleven and asked to perform for the District Educational Officer. Rajaram played the violin. Kamal performed mimicry, imitating the sound of a frog and other creatures, like he would do one day in Aval Oru Thodarkadhai. Rajaram also remembered Kamal’s fascination for a Hollywood actor whose name eluded him. Kamal used to pretend to be the actor who, on screen, went about catching a butterfly. “He would perform so beautifully, it was like there was really a butterfly in the room.”

Then, this anecdote, from when Kamal was ten or twelve. He joined TK Shanmugam’s theatre troupe – Kamal Haasan respectfully called him “Annachi” – where he was trained in swordfight and stunts and even dance. “That’s where I suddenly thought: Maybe I can shake a leg.” This is possibly the understatement of the century.

***

“I think I discovered myself as a singer in TKS Nataka Sabha,” Kamal Haasan said. But it was an arduous, and somewhat accidental, discovery. The troupe was staging a play named Appavin Aasai. There were songs in it, but because no one knew if Kamal could sing they played these songs on a Grundig spool-type tape recorder and asked him to lip-sync them on stage. Then, one evening, the tape snapped. This was the scene on stage: the mother is dying, and she wants her son (played by Kamal) to sing one last song for her. Shanmugam Annachi, never one to let the show not go on, urged Kamal from the wings: “Go on! You know the words. Sing!” And Kamal sang Uzhaithu pizhaikka vendum, which seems a rather odd song to sing in this situation. Anyway, as scripted, the mother died. The unscripted coda to the scene: a singer was born.

“That’s when I realised I could boldly sing before an audience,” Kamal Haasan said. “And it’s not like playback singing, where the mike is in front of you. The mike is at a distance.” In a play named Avvaiyaar, Kamal played the young Murugan, singing folk songs while perched on a tree.

A number of names, famous and otherwise, popped up as supporting characters in Kamal Haasan’s flashback. SG Kasi Iyer, SG Kittappa’s brother who composed the music for a dance drama on Lord Muruga’s Arupadai Veedu; he would compose perfect swarams for sound effects, to mimic, say, the opening of a door. Madurai Venkatesan, who taught Kamal the basics of Carnatic music. KB Sundarambal, who lived in the house behind Kamal’s and would make aappams and sing songs for him when he jumped over the wall to visit his classmate Ganapathy Subramaniam, her adopted son. (“In my naiveté, I used to sing Pazham nee appa to her. And she tolerated my singing.”) And Mylapore Gowri Ammal. “I had the great honour of lying on her lap, in the Ranganatha pose, as I watched my sister learn dance. She would sometimes play the thaalam on my shoulder or cheek.”

***

Another famous name played a bigger part in Kamal’s musical education, and for that story, we must cut to the early 1980s. Kamal is a very busy actor. It’s been some ten years since he sat in Madurai Venkatesan’s class. It’s been ten years since he learnt any new music. He’s shooting in Bombay for Karishma, the Hindi remake of Tik Tik Tik. He has an accident. He breaks a leg. He has to buy two tickets to fly to Chennai, the extra one for the seat in front that has to be folded down so he can stretch that broken leg. The man in the adjacent seat observes his plight and asks him: “What are you going to do in the months it’s going to take for this to heal?”

That was M. Balamuralikrishna. Kamal said he didn’t know. Balamuralikrishna asked Kamal if he liked music. Kamal nodded. Balamuralikrishna said, “Instead of wasting time, why don’t you learn something from me?” Kamal thought he was joking – until Balamuralikrishna landed up at Kamal’s house the next day. Classes began with the shishya’s foot in the air. “My guru found me,” Kamal Haasan said.

Balamuralikrishna asked Kamal what he’d learnt. Kamal said he knew some 30-odd keerthanais. Balamuralikrishna asked him to sing. Kamal sang. Balamuralikrishna said, gently, “Let’s start at the beginning, with a geetham.” Kamal Haasan laughed at the memory. “So I knew what he thought of me. He wanted me to be good enough to give a public performance, but I wasn’t there yet. He still keeps asking me when I am going to sing on stage.”

When Kamal’s leg got better, Balamuralikrishna said, “We can shift the classes to my house.” Kamal began to hobble over to his guru’s house, where he’d sit on a sofa and learn music. Eventually, Balamuralikrishna asked him, “Is your leg okay? Can you walk?” Kamal said yes. Balamuralikrishna said, “Then you can sit on the floor and continue.”

Classes went on for about one-and-a-half years. I asked Kamal Haasan to name something he learnt. He thought for a minute and then launched into the Karnataka Kapi geetham, Shree Raghurama samara bheema. I thought he’d stop there, with this opening line of the pallavi, but he continued… Sasi mouli vinuta seeta ramana… mukendu lalitha hasa pariyathi… And then he sang the swarams… pa dha ni pa ma ri ri ga ma ri sa / pa dha pa sa ni pa dha ni pa ma ri ga ma… He stopped dramatically, after negotiating the sharp, colourful turn at ramana… ri ga ma.

Kamal Haasan said he still remembered the song because he learnt it when he was going to New Delhi to receive the National Award for Best Actor for Moondram Pirai. “My guru asked me to learn a new geetham for the occasion.” When the leg healed and Kamal resumed shooting, he continued with classes whenever he found the time. He’d call Balamuralikrishna and go over. Then, during a shooting, Kamal misplaced a notebook filled with song notations. “I think he was a little upset about this. Then I got busy, and we gradually lost touch – otherwise, I would have been his student for 22 years now.” I asked him about his guru’s dream, that Kamal Haasan should sing on stage. He laughed. “Balamuralikrishna saying that I can do this is like ‘Sivaji’ Ganesan saying, “Nadippu romba easy pa.’ You shouldn’t take it seriously.”

***

I had one last question about theatre when I met Kamal Haasan again in June, at his office in Chennai. Did he miss it? Doesn’t he feel like doing the odd play between films, the way Richard Burton did, the way Denzel Washington does? “Yes,” he said. “But even if I am performing on stage, I’d still like it to be televised. I want more people to see it. The bane of a theatre artist is that he can’t get his art across to a large audience. I have gotten used to technology, to that audience.” He compared this to running, and then suddenly slowing down to walk. “I am refusing to walk… unless it’s for health reasons.” He does this often. He’ll think up a metaphor on the spot, and then he’ll put a spin on it that sounds like a non sequitur but perhaps really isn’t.

***

We then began to talk about the movies, about his singing for them, beginning with the number Gnayiru oli mazhayil. The film was Andharangam, where Kamal played the manager of a “beauty clinic” that’s frequented exclusively by young women who want to get into shape and often find themselves entwined in the tape measure in his hands. Between takes, he would keep humming on the sets, and one day ‘Muktha’ Srinivasan, the director, caught him singing a keerthanai. A surprised Srinivasan decided to make Kamal sing a number for the film and took him to the music director G Devarajan – or “Devarajan Master,” as he was called. Devarajan Master was very close to Thangappan Master, the choreographer under whom Kamal had worked for a while as an assistant, and he knew Kamal. During the recording, he stood near the new playback singer, moving his hands the way conductors do. “I was very scared of him,” Kamal Haasan said. “You can feel that fear in the song.”

The same year, 1975, Kamal spent seven months learning to play the mridangam when K Balachander told him that his character in Aboorva Raagangal was required to play the instrument. “That’s why I play so convincingly in the film,” he said. Music was all around him. He spoke of his co-stars – the Malayalam actress Srilalitha who was a student of the composer Dakshinamurthy, and Srividya, who, of course, was the daughter of ML Vasanthakumari. “We were all very close and I would keep asking them to sing.”

Sometimes, they would perform at music nights helmed by Gangai Amaran. “Film stars singing light music was a new thing then,” Kamal Haasan said. They used to sing Tamil songs, Hindi songs, and then, one day, they were invited to perform at a function organized by Cinema Express magazine. Kamal suggested that they sing One, a song written by Harry Nilsson and later popularised by Three Dog Night. Someone asked him if the audience would understand. He said if they could “understand” a Sanskrit shloka then they could understand this. “It’s the same. It’s all music.”

This is not a new anecdote (and people familiar with the Kamal Haasan mythology will know where this is headed), but it was something to hear it in person. The Harry Nilsson original is a mid-range song, and the Three Dog Night cover touches a few higher notes, but when Kamal Haasan launched into the number, he leaped over an octave and hit a stunning falsetto note – it isn’t there in either of the earlier versions. This is probably how he sang the song that night, at the function, and the audience applauded. Seated in the audience, and listening very carefully to the way Kamal caught that pitch, was Ilayaraja.

***

And that’s how Kamal Haasan got to sing Ninaivo oru paravai, in Sigappu Rojakkal. Ilayaraja said he liked the way Kamal handled those high notes, and he asked Kamal to sing the song again. Kamal went, One is the loneliest number… Ilayaraja was mentally translating this to pa pa pa pa pa pa pa…, the humming that oozes through the interstices of the pallavi of Ninaivo oru paravai. “He used what I could give him,” Kamal Haasan told me, gently altering the sometimes-held image of the Isaignani as an iron-fisted dictator whose only inputs come from inside his head.

He narrated how Ilayaraja, during a recording rehearsal, heard a nadaswaram player prepare for playing by blowing on the seevali, the reed mouthpiece at the top of the tube. This was incorporated into a musical stretch in Hey Ram, as the Vasundhara Das character’s rendition of Vaishnava janato segues into Vaaranam aayiram. “I doubt the sound of the seevali being blown has been heard in cinema music,” Kamal Haasan said. “He’ll take what people can give him and produce these uncanny moments.”

Anyway, back to the recording session of Ninaivo oru paravai. Afterwards, Ilayaraja told Kamal, “Hey, nalla irukku ya. Madhyanam paattayum neengale paadidunga.” [Hey, that’s great. Why don’t you sing the song we’re recording in the afternoon too?”] And that song turned out to be Panneer pushpangale, from Aval Appadithaan, a revelation that left me slightly weak-kneed. Considering Ilayaraja’s prolificity, logic dictates that this was something that happened all the time, that several songs would be recorded during the course of a day. But to imagine two… (there’s no other word for it) classics like these casually being tossed off without a huge amount of pre-planning… After all, the singer himself seems to have been roped in only after he sang the morning’s song…

I asked Kamal Haasan about the small gamakam, the melisma rather, in the first line of Panneer pushpangale, at raagam paadu. I was curious whether it was the result of his improvising (based on his classical training) or whether it was how Ilayaraja had composed it. He said, “Raja knows how much will work. He’ll say, ‘Avvalavu vendam, konjam koraichukkunga.’ [That’s too much. Tone it down a bit.] And that makes it different from the usual gamakam. Sundari neeyum, he left it to me.” Kamal Haasan hummed, perfectly, the downward slide of akaras that leads back to the pallavi. Ilayaraja told Kamal, “Ahn, sari, sari. Jamaai.” [Okay. Have fun.]

Kamal Haasan said that he considered Ilayaraja one of his gurus. “As with acting, there can be posturing in singing. He doesn’t like that. He’ll say, ‘Do what suits your voice. Don’t try to sing like others.’ Above all, he taught me how to sing with abandon. ‘Just relax,’ he’ll say. He taught me how to relax over the about 50 recordings I’ve done for him.” Kamal Haasan pointed to Sanyasa mantram in Hey Ram where his voice is, as he put it, held back. “It’s not about performing to an audience,” he said. “It’s a very personal thing.” Because of the camaraderie and the casualness with which these lessons were imparted, he didn’t realise then that they were lessons. “And that was a lesson as well,” he said, “the way it was taught in a very pedestrian manner, without major technical terms, very simply.”

***

“After ’77 or so, I cannot recall going to another music director,” Kamal Haasan told me. The “I” threw me off, because he wasn’t exactly making movies then, merely acting in them – and the task of “going to a music director,” one assumes, falls on the person making the movie: the director. But he’s probably talking of a time when one could get as involved with the filmmaking process as one wished, when even an actor who’s only required to show up on the sets would show up at music sittings, with the director and the composer. Kamal was present at a lot of music sittings with K Balachander, in whose films he’d come to resemble a stock company actor. These sessions, Kamal Haasan said, helped him when he began directing films and began to tell the music director that this wasn’t quite what he was looking for, or that he wanted a tweak there. “My sessions with KB and Raja gave me that confidence.”

So when he’s talking about not going to another music director after ’77 or so, he’s probably referring to 16 Vayadhinile, which was the first film that had Kamal as the leading man and Ilayaraja as the composer. It’s an association that flourished up to the mid-1990s, roughly — till which point the non-Ilayaraja films were relatively rare.* The high points are too numerous to recount. Aattu kutti muttayittu in ’77, Orey naal unai naan in ’78, Ninaithaal inikkum in ’79, Azhagu aayiram in ’80, Andhi mazhai pozhigiradhu in ’81… Kamal Haasan spoke about the composing session for the latter, from Rajapaarvai, which he produced and which Singeetham Srinivasa Rao directed. “Singeetham kept asking Raja for more tunes. Those days, Raja would come up with many options. He made nine tunes, but I knew that the first one was the best and we eventually came back to it.”

And then he began to talk about what seems to have become his favourite anecdote to illustrate his working relationship with Ilayaraja. “The way Inji iduppazhaga came about is itself an exercise in knowing how an artist’s mind works,” he said. Ilayaraja kept asking Kamal what he wanted… exactly. Kamal said he couldn’t say… exactly. “I said, ‘You have to be the paediatrician. The child does not know how to say what’s happening. You have to find out.’ ” Kamal explained that it had to be a monotonous tune, a simple melody that kept looping back, like something that would air on Pappa Malar, the All India Radio show conducted by “Vanoli Anna” where children sang, often breathlessly. Ilayaraja said, “That’s a good idea, but how do you make a populist song out of it? It will be a funny song, but how do you make a populist song?” And Kamal began to sing Yeh dil deewana hai, the SD Burman number from Ishq Par Zor Nahin.

And, in front of me, Kamal Haasan launched into the Hindi song. This, I’m beginning to realise, was the best part of these interviews, his impromptu launches into song – and he sounds exactly like how he does in the recordings, exactly. After he finished, he said, “If it had been any other music director, Raja might not have listened. But he has a special respect for SD.” Ilayaraja began to tap out a thaalam on the harmonium, and within ten minutes, he had a variation on the SD Burman tune, and the composing was done. Kamal Haasan told me, “It’s not like he was taking from the tune. He was taking from my need.”

For Michael Madana Kamarajan, Kamal wanted a song like Maargazhi thingal, a verse from the Thirupaavai. “And he came up with Sundari neeyum. Again, it became his own composition because of the changes he made.” Yesudas was supposed to sing the song. Kamal used to “sing track” a lot those days, the equivalent of a temp track which would then be dubbed over by a Yesudas or an SPB – and because Kamal couldn’t always wait for their dates in order to have the finished song available during the shooting, he’d sing track and take the song along. So Kamal told Ilayaraja that he’d sing track for Sundari neeyum, but Ilayaraja insisted that he sing the final song.

Then there was this time they were watching the Oscars, and a group (or maybe an individual; Kamal Haasan didn’t seem too sure about this) gave this performance where they beat their chests and sang. Kamal said he wanted something like that for Aboorva Sagotharargal. He got it. Bababa… Bababari… Pudhu maapillaikku…

I asked him if he could single out a song he had to sing that was tough, more challenging than the others. But he refused to bite. He simply said, “The truth is that they all gave me easy songs. All my music directors have been kind to me. Raja especially saw to it that his songs were crafted around my capability.”

To be continued

***

* Correction: This sentence has been amended. Earlier, it read: “It’s an association that lasted up to the mid-1990s, roughly, till which point the non-Ilayaraja films were relatively rare.”

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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On “Jigarthanda.” On the current state of Tamil cinema. On criticism, and why it’s important to not just praise a film because it’s… “different.”

Last week, I wrote about how the very existence of a film like Jigarthanda in the current Tamil-cinema climate is a miracle – but while we should celebrate films like Jigarthanda, we should also remember to evaluate them based on the bar they set for themselves. This is not “criticism.” Well, yes, it is criticism, seen one way – but not in the sense of… well, criticising. “Critic” is a horrible, horrible word because it is the root of negative-sounding constructions like “criticise” and “being critical” – and that’s really not what being critical about a film is about. When we speak of films like Jigarthanda from the vantage point of a critic, what we are really doing, as a reader wrote on my blog, is “conscious and meticulous noticing and cataloguing.” Also analysing. How much happier I’d be if I were known as a film “analyser.”

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Anyway, coming back to Jigarthanda and films like it – Soodhu Kavvum, Pizza, Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kaanom, and so on – these are the works of filmmakers who aren’t just toying with the content (i.e. the “story,” the WHAT) but also the form (the “style,” the HOW). Earlier filmmakers, when they wanted to be different, contended themselves with telling a new story, but now, the style has become important too. From having everything explained to us through dialogue, for instance, we’ve come to a point – at least in this handful of films – where things are so subtly welded to the narrative that these films reward multiple viewings. So if you like cinema – not just as a popcorn-munching pastime, but as art – you could label any criticism against these films as the equivalent of a thirsty traveller lost in a desert who finds a puddle of water and, instead of just being grateful, begins to “criticise” the quality of the water.

But that is what criticism is really about – and it isn’t the act of criticising so much as that of appraising, evaluating. There are many things we could say about a film like Jigarthanda that exempts it from any kind of criticism. We could say: “This is just the director’s second film. Many filmmakers go through their whole careers without coming anywhere close to such an ambitious, technically proficient work…” We could say: “When the rest of Tamil cinema is so star-dominated and bent on mere spectacle, this film actually moves closer to the ‘world cinema’ ethos everyone likes to talk about but few have the guts to emulate…” We could say: “Look at the writing, Look at how the love triangle is resolved in the film’s second half, not through the actions of the people actually constituting this triangle, but by an unexpected appearance by a random character who is also some kind of homage to an earlier film…” We could say: “Look at the symmetry in the don character – he begins his career as a don when an audience laughs at him, and he ends his career as a don when an audience laughs at him…” And we could say: “Look at how much there is to laugh at – even for us, the audience outside the film – say, in the scene where the acting coach massacres the ‘Behold, I have a weapon’ passage from Othello…”

But we must also say (if we end up feeling this way): “The film’s first half was excellent, but the second half is less than the sum of its parts…” We must say: “The film’s problems aren’t in the WHAT but, especially in the second half, the HOW, the way too much happens too quickly, without quite convincing us about things like character transformations…” We must say: “Despite a lot of entertainment value, the ‘big picture’ doesn’t quite cohere on screen the way it probably did in the filmmaker’s mind…” We must say: “Let’s laugh, but once we’re done laughing, let’s see if these jokes are an organic part of the film, and let’s examine if the film would lose anything (other than the jokes) if the acting coach scenes weren’t there at all…” We must say: “Some scenes were tonally off…”

None of this means that Karthik Subbaraj is a bad filmmaker. On the contrary, this kind of “critical” engagement is needed because he’s a good filmmaker, and if he’s attempting to give us a world-class Tamil film, then we must return the favour by evaluating his film not according to the standards of Tamil cinema but according to world-cinema standards. (In other words, returning to the point already made, we should engage with a film on its own terms, and see if it clears the bar it sets for itself.) I suppose this kind of involved engagement is a little difficult in this social-media age, where a film is either terrific or terrible, “it sucks” or “it rocks,” when most films fall somewhere in between. But this is how we must “criticise” a film, by engaging with it at a micro level – not just sitting back and saying we had a great time. If the filmmaker sets his sights on an international standard of filmmaking, surely as viewers we must set our sights on an international standard of critiquing, evaluating, appraising, noticing, cataloguing.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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So we know now the censor board is corrupt. But how necessary is it in the first place?

About the recent fuss around the censor board chief caught taking bribes, I have just this to add: I am not surprised. This was bound to happen. Over the years, censorship has become some sort of minor annoyance, something that has to be done or else your film won’t get released. It’s like making prints or booking theatres or putting up posters and banners. It’s just another bit of logistics in the long chain of events leading to a film’s release – and it’s an utterly unimportant step. Once the censor certificate is obtained, no one cares about it. Filmmakers don’t care to showcase the rating in any meaningful way. Theatres don’t take care to implement this rating. And we don’t seem to care whether our children end up seeing films they shouldn’t be seeing.

So who, really, is being benefited through this rating? At least in Tamil Nadu, there seems to be some sort of financial gain from obtaining a “U” certificate, some sort of tax exemption. But elsewhere? The system is broken because the people on the censor panels are often people who have no real relationship to films except as viewers. They seem to be unable to differentiate, among other things, between implied and overt sexuality, between psychological and physical violence. The minute there’s a lovemaking scene, the censors get uncomfortable and reach for a more adult rating, but they routinely let pass dance sequences where the suggestive, rain-soaked choreography is pretty much like lovemaking, except the participants have a bare minimum of clothes on. And let’s not even get to the bleeping out of “offensive” words, with scant regard to context.

Someone who wants to bypass this system can easily do it. Many skilled dialogue writers and lyricists have gotten away with double-meaning lines or lyrics that seem to have flown over the heads of the censor committee. And we’ve all heard of filmmakers who include a lot more blood and gore (or swear words, or sexual content) in the print they submit to the censors. The censors cut a bit of all this and feel they’ve done their job. The filmmaker comes away smiling because he still has the adult content he wants. And now, with the Internet, this sort of censoring is even more suspect. At least in earlier days, you could justify these cuts saying that you are protecting young viewers (or whatever), but now, when the most hard-core material is just a mouse click away, what is really being achieved? I am not saying that censorship is unimportant or unnecessary. I’m saying that we need to have a long, hard look at what it aims to do and whether these aims are being achieved.

Instead of focusing only on censorship, do we need a campaign to target parents and tell them that this ratings thing is a serious business and they have to be careful about what they expose their kids to? Let’s consider violence. When I was in school, I routinely watched action sequences, but the action choreography then was just a bunch of karate or kung fu moves – what used to be called dishoom-dishoom – and no one took any of it seriously. Even the blood looked fake. It looked like the red paint it was. So there was no question of being traumatised or becoming immune to violence – because it was all so clearly make-believe. But now, stunt choreographers take more trouble to ensure that the fights look real, the blood looks real. Is it okay, then, for kids to watch the endless shootouts in Singham Returns or the scenes in Anjaan where one bad guy is shot in the forehead and another one’s head is smashed in by a rock?

Perhaps the best kind of censorship is no censorship at all. I realise this sounds extreme, but when little children on TV end up doing the kind of dance moves that were once the prerogative of cabaret dancers in the movies (and with proud parents approving), and – of course – with the Internet all around us, do we really need a panel to decide what’s good for us and what isn’t? How many parents ask their children to change the channel when one of those lewd Govinda-Karisma Kapoor dances come on? Without censorship, at least the adult-skewing foreign films would come to us intact, without being butchered because, say, a demure housewife on the panel couldn’t handle Quentin Tarantino’s brand of violence. This, to my mind, is a worse crime than taking bribes.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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In light of the upcoming ‘Haider’, a look at a 60-year-old Hindi version of ‘Hamlet’. Plus, ‘Sivaji’ Ganesan and Uttam Kumar as Othello.

When we think of non-Western (and non-Vishal Bhardwaj) adaptations of Shakespeare, the mind settles, instantly, on Kursosawa. Throne of Blood. Ran. But a quick Google search reveals some fascinating Indian productions. A partial listing here – from Hamlet (Khoon-E-Nahak, 1928, Silent; Khoon Ka Khoon, 1935, Hindi); from Twelfth Night (Kanniyin Kaadhali, 1949, Tamil); from The Merchant Of Venice (Savkari Pash, 1925, Marathi; Shylock, 1940, Tamil; Zalim Saudagar, 1941, Hindi); from (of all plays!) Cymbeline (Katakam, 1947, Tamil); from King Lear (Gunasundari Katha, 1949, Telugu). Then, we have the more recent (and to me, more familiar) films: the two Tamil versions of The Taming of the Shrew, both with ‘Sivaji’ Ganesan (Arivaali, 1963, and Pattikaadaa Pattanama, 1972); the two Hindi adaptations of The Comedy of Errors (Do Dooni Chaar, 1968, and Angoor, 1982, both preceded by the Bengali Bhrantibilas, in 1963); Kaliyattam, the 1997 Malayalam take on Othello; and, of course, the numerous iterations of Romeo and Juliet, from the 1948 Hindi version with Nargis and Sapru (called Romeo and Juliet) to last year’s Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela.

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Shakespeare is also found in tracts of his plays performed within films, and it’s oddly coincidental that two superstars of the 1960s, ‘Sivaji’ Ganesan and Uttam Kumar, both played Othello, and both played the scene in which Othello murders Desdemona, and both played the scene in English, “that whiter skin of hers than snow and smooth as monumental alabaster” and so forth. This may have resulted from the Tamil film (Ratha Thilagam, 1963) being adapted from the Bengali one (Saptapadi, 1961). I haven’t seen the latter, so I can’t say for sure, but the two films do share similarities – the backdrop of war, the star-crossed lovers, and, of course, the staging of Othello, which, in both films, appears to have been dubbed by the same voices (Jennifer Kapoor, Utpal Dutt). The Tamil film makes way for a bit of comedy before the play. Nagesh is supposed to play Othello, but he gets the jitters and is replaced by ‘Sivaji’ Ganesan. Now that would have been something, seeing Nagesh tackle Othello.

On to Hamlet, which was made by Kishore Sahu in 1954 – 60 years ago. (He called it “a free adaptation.”) You may remember Sahu as the actor in a number of films featuring Dev Anand, most notably Guide, where he played the archaeologist Marco. But he was also a filmmaker, whose most well-known works are probably Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai and Hare Kanch Ki Chooriyan. This Hamlet isn’t, like the Vishal Bhardwaj films, a localised adaptation – Hamlet is called Hamlet, Denmark is Denmark. Seen today, this, inevitably, leads to some snickering. The ghost of Hamlet’s father – who wears some sort of gauzy veil, like a bride – is referred to as “shahenshah-e-Denmark,” and Ophelia’s (Mala Sinha, in one of her early lead roles) father is called “vazir-e-azam Polonius.” Hamlet hails his friend thus: “Khushamdeed Horatio!” Queen Gertrude coos, “Hamlet, mere laal.” More dialogues arrive on these lines: “Humne apni bhabhijaan ko apna malika bana liya.” “Laertes, tum humse kuch arz karna chahte thhe.” Best of all, Ophelia wails, “Hamlet, maine tumko dil diya, tumne mujhko rusvaa kiya.”

These lines don’t need translation. The meaning isn’t as important as the juxtaposition of these very “Hindi film”-sounding lines with those very Shakespearean names. (This was a problem in the Dilip Kumar-starring Yahudi too, which was set in ancient Rome, and which had lines like “Theek kehti ho, Octavia” and “Rome kabhi tumhara daaman nahin chhodega.”) We snicker because we find it odd that these Shakespearean characters speak in this style, and because “O zaalim chacha” sounds so… well, filmy, whereas “O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!” (the equivalent in the play) sounds appropriately dramatic. So too with “sanyas le le, jogan ban jao” and ‘Get thee to a nunnery.” And when Ophelia cries, “Ya Allah, yeh kaisi qayamat hai,” it’s most weird, because the line invokes a religion that’s not to be found in this palace, in these clothes, in these names. Now you see why Vishal Bhardwaj transforms Macbeth into Maqbool, Othello into Omkara, Hamlet into Haider.

But once we get used to this apparent dissonance, once we settle into the film (to extent that a modern-day viewer can settle into a film where the acting is so flagrantly silent-film-ready), the lines do begin to make sense. In the scene after the one where Hamlet kills Polonius, Gertrude says, “Hamlet ki deewangi samundar ki toofani ki tarah roz ba roz badhti jaa rahi hai.” But if the line appears overwrought and excessively… well, theatrical, that’s because the source is itself theatrical, and, by today’s standards, wrought very differently. Shakespeare’s equivalent line pitches wildly on the same metaphor. Gertrude: “Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend which is the mightier.”

Some of the equivalencies are quite exquisite, with the dialogues rendered in verse, the way they were in Chetan Anand’s Heer Ranjha. (The “to be or not to be” speech, though, is done fairly straight: “Zindagi ya maut, kisko apnaaoon…”) Here’s the rendering of Hamlet’s “frailty, thy name is woman” soliloquy: Tu woh jaam hai jo sharab-e-makr aur daga se bhara hai / Tu woh chaman hai jo hawa-e-fareb se bhara hai / Bewafaai… tera naam aurat hai / Afsos… mere baap ki maut ko muddat mein guzarne ko aai / Ke tuney shaadi rachaai / Khushi manaai / Aur woh bhi kisse, jo mere baap ka bhai / Ae aurat, ae harjaee / Tujhe yeh surat kyon pasand aai… The dialogues are by Prof. BD Verma and Amanat Hilal, and if Shakespeare had lived and plied his trade in Lucknow, you can imagine him lapsing into these locutions.

Some parts of this Hamlet are stunningly faithful to the original text. You’d think that the inevitable songs (the music is by Ramesh Naidu) would kill the mood or look out of place, but they’ don’t. The female solos go to Ophelia, and they’re structured around the typical situations we encounter in Hindi cinema (a flashback to a couple’s happier times, a he-doesn’t-love-me dirge), but this is actually as per Shakespeare’s vision, because, in the play, the only woman who sings is Ophelia, after she loses her mind. And the only song with male voices goes to the gravediggers, who sing in the play too. (Hamlet wonders, “Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?”) Other aspects of the film take liberties with the text (hence, I guess, the note about this being “a free adaptation”) – most puzzlingly, in the placement of the play-within-the-play. While Shakespeare intended this to occur midway, here it takes place after Ophelia dies, and segues into Hamlet’s climactic swordfight with Laertes. Still, watching this film only reaffirms that Shakespeare is made for Indian cinema. Hamlet alone has the rich-boy-poor-girl angle (prince Hamlet and commoner Ophelia), the I’ll-avenge-my-father angle (in the case of Hamlet), the I’ll-avenge-my-family angle (in the case of Laertes), the girl-going-mad-after-being-spurned angle (in the case of Ophelia). There are songs, swordfights, low comedy with the gravediggers, a loyal best friend (Horatio) – the Bard, it appears, was one heck of a Bollywood screenwriter.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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The reviews for the Tamil film ‘Madras’ suggest that most English-language writers are divorced from a certain kind of reality.

Pa Ranjith’s Madras is the work of a good, thoughtful filmmaker. It’s a supremely well-made film, but not especially well-written. The narrative superstructure is derivative, and Ranjith doesn’t do enough to make his film different. Or so I thought till I posted my review and began to receive comments. The context is this: I saw the film as one of those many films about the nameless, faceless masses that make up the poorer parts of Madras (given this film, it wouldn’t do to call the city Chennai). But where I – and, apparently, almost every other English-language reviewer – saw a generic group of lower-income-group people, commenters have been pointing out instances from the film to make a case that these characters are from a specific community. They’re Dalits.

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I reproduce (with some editorial intervention, for clarity) what a commenter called masilan said, because I think it needs to be heard: “Madras is a film which speaks about contemporary Dalit politics in TN. The character Anbu personifies that section of the Dalit youth who wanted to uplift Dalit society by achieving political power whereas the character Kali stands for that section of Dalits who have used the affirmative policies of the Indian constitution and remain aloof about the condition and empowerment of Dalits. What Kali wants/is concerned about is his happiness alone.”

“Conversations between Anbu and Kali are very important as they send out the message to the audience (Dalits in particular) that what is needed to bring a real change in the conditions of this community is political awareness along with education. Only a person with political awareness (Anbu) will be able to fight against the oppression/injustice the society has done to the Dalits… There are enough instances of scenes and dialogues which scream out loudly that this film is all about Dalits and their politics and how they are kept suppressed eternally. This is also about the betrayal of their own men towards their community… In India, Ambedkar is now reduced to being only a Dalit leader and his photo is seen in Anbu’s house… Anbu’s wife is named Mary and Anbu is shown placing a document before the photo of Mother Mary, suggesting they are Dalit Christians (large numbers of Dalits converted to Christianity to escape the oppression of Hinduism)… Kali is shown reading a book on the atrocities committed on Dalits living in Andhra… Even Thirumavalavan’s (leader of a Dalit-based political party) poster finds its way into the movie.” And so forth.

The question he asked me was: “While all this was so clear, why wasn’t there any reference to this in your review?” The answer is simply that I drew a blank. (And I suppose most other reviewers did too.) We saw and responded to a generic story, but missed out the specifics. These specifics don’t change the film, exactly – at least in the larger sense. The narrative problems remain. The story arc is still derivative. The ending still looks gracelessly tacked on. A couple of songs still feel redundant. And even the Dalit pointers don’t seem to have been integrated all that well – for instance, if the point is to send a signal to the audience, wouldn’t it have made more sense to show the well-meaning Anbu (rather than the self-serving Kali) reading that book about atrocities committed on Dalits? But seen through this reading, how much more interesting the characters become. I see Anbu and Kali in a new light. I see Kali’s engagement ceremony in a new light. I even see why this ending needed to be there, whereas earlier I had casually dismissed it as “a disaster, the result of one of those do-gooder impulses that strikes filmmakers on occasion, when they feel they have to not just make a movie but remake a society.”

Hopefully, the director can be persuaded, at some point, to expand on all this, but what struck me, after this discussion, was how we see the things we’ve been conditioned to see. You can learn to appreciate cinema by watching films made by great directors and poring over sites about cinematography and writing and editing – but that can only tell you how the film is made. And while that is very important, it’s still only half the story. The other half is what the film is about, and picking up on that, as Madras proves, depends on a great many cultural and social factors. A reader on Facebook pointed out that my body of work remains incomplete as none of my writing involves either social or political commentary. I agree with one part of this, that I don’t really talk about these aspects – but I disagree that this makes a review “incomplete,” because there are many ways through which one can approach a film, and screenwriting/aesthetics is my prism, just as someone who speaks about the political and social aspects may not necessarily talk about the filmmaking as such. It’s all these people, with all these concerns and all these viewpoints, that will bring about a corpus of writing that comprehensively represents the film. No single review/reviewer can hope to do that. Commenters have to chip in.

The other cultural factor is that most English-language writers (and therefore reviewers) are divorced from a certain kind of ground reality. They are schooled in English, and they take their cues from English sources – by which I mean, for instance, that a “well-read person” from this milieu is more likely to have read Anna Karenina than Silappadikaram. Socially, too, his milieu is similarly chalked out. Most of the kids in school are like him. Most of the people at his white-collar office are like him. Ideally, it would be both – we would have the best of worlds, bits from here and there. But this rarely happens. I am reminded of an anecdote from my book Conversations with Mani Ratnam, when we were talking about Roja and he recalled the time he narrated the story to the producer K Balachander. KB liked the story but didn’t like the title, which reminded him of a brand of paakku thool, crushed betel nut. “I was amazed,” Ratnam said. “I thought the title represented Kashmir because the rose is something beautiful but with thorns… But he said [it’s like paakku thool]. Trust a pure Tamilian to come up with that.” I asked Ratnam, “Don’t you consider yourself a pure Tamilian?” He smiled and said, “Tamil medium-la padichaa dhaan pure Tamilian.” (“You’re a Tamilian only if you’ve studied in a Tamil-medium school.”) He was being somewhat facetious, but then again, maybe not. Sometimes we become so global that we forget the local.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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Spoilers ahead…

Some films take an eternity to find a footing. Burma hits the ground running. From the first frame, we know we are in sure hands. The director, Dharanidharan, is a genuine filmmaker – not just because he has the craft, but because he loves the medium. And this love is evident throughout. Take the early scene where Guna (Sampath Raj) is released from Puzhal prison. It’s easy to imagine how this could have played out. Guna steps out from behind bars. He picks up his belongings. He strolls out. But that’s just the what. It’s the how that sets apart the filmmaker from the hack. The how is in Guna’s swagger. It’s in his printed shirt, which looks like the morning sickness after a Persian carpet made love to a greenhouse of orchids. It’s in the music that accompanies him – the twangy guitar, the congas, the castanets.

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Burma is about a series of car thefts (the film prefers the term “seizing”), and it’s a heck of a ride. In the driver’s seat is Burma (Michael Thangadurai), who gets into serious trouble when he makes off with a Benz and runs afoul of Bothra Seth (Atul Kulkarni). Thrown into the crazy-noir mix are a mystery man who travels by auto and takes pictures, a violin-playing female gangster, two low-level goons called Bruce Lee and Jet Li (who argue about the name of the heroine of the semi-porn film Khajuraho Ilavarasi), and a beautician who’s really a thief and who’s hawking something that looks like a Fabergé Easter egg. Then there are Boomer (the excellent Karthik Sabesh, as Burma’s pal and accomplice), and Kalpana (Reshmi Menon), Burma’s happily amoral girlfriend who also becomes his partner in crime. The slice of pizza in her hand, after a getaway, is just one of the many glorious incidental details the film keeps throwing at us.

Burma is put together exquisitely. In a montage set to music (by Sudharshan M Kumar, completely in sync with the overall vision), we keep hopping between cross-hatched events. In another scene involving a couple of phone calls, we keep panning between split screens. In the midst of a heist being planned, we cut away to the gang leader’s drug use – this has got to be the most economical bit of character delineation I’ve seen this year. And – apart from that Fabergé – Easter eggs abound. If this film finds half the audience that the similarly fashioned Jigarthanda did – here too, we have ample rug pulling, the reveling in pop culture, plus vivid nods to Western filmmaking – then we’re going to be discussing why Burma’s ring tone is set to a Kamal Haasan line from Kurudhipunal, why so many of the songs heard in the background seem to be from films about crime (Shree 420, Arangetra Velai, Don), and why a key scene is cut in tandem with a key scene from Pudhiya Paravai.

There’s so much attitude, atmosphere, flavor and wry comedy in Burma that I readily forgave the minor sins (the film is a tad too art-directed; Burma’s terrace quarters is done up in the kind of shabby-chic that finds space for lanterns) as well as the major one – after a while, the story takes a detour into a race-against-time thriller, and there isn’t really all that much tension. But Dharanidharan doesn’t try to pump in life artificially – everything is beautifully organic, one of a piece. This is the kind of film that isolates a character by shooting him in lurid neon lights, and, elsewhere, intercuts between a liplock and a bottle of cola being slurped down. The writing is wonderful. I loved how we learn Burma’s given name, during the course of a romantic moment. I loved how Bothra Seth is introduced – his violence makes the water in a glass ripple, as in the scene with the T-rex in Jurassic Park. I loved the little echoes, how Guna completes Burma’s line about dogs and planes in the sky. I loved the joyous sting at the check point – it made me chortle. And I loved, most of all, the last scene – a superb twist, the kind we never get because of our insistence on happily-ever-after. Burma made me so high on how crime can entertain that I almost forgot it doesn’t pay.

KEY:

* Persian = see here
* Jet Li = see here
* Fabergé egg = see here
* Kamal Haasan line from Kurudhipunal = see here
* Pudhiya Paravai = see here
* liplock = see here

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Spoilers ahead…

With last year’s Aadhalal Kadhal Seiveer, the director Suseenthiran took a major step forward, towards the smallish pantheon we have, but with Jeeva, it’s two steps back. The film narrates the story of the eponymous cricketer (Vishnu Vishal), and it begins well enough, with a flashback of kids in a playground. Can anyone resist these scenes? They take us back to days we want to relive in our minds, over and over, and yet not necessarily live through again. I thought I caught a glimpse of myself in the chubby kid that no team wanted. The horror, the horror. But Jeeva has no such problems. He’s a natural. (Perhaps too much so. Throughout the film, he keeps hitting fours and sixes. He doesn’t seem to have had a bad batting day, like, ever.) His father (Marimuthu), however, doesn’t care for cricket, which he labels “panakkaaranga vilayaattu,” a rich man’s game. His employment at the EB isn’t going to pay for all the fancy equipment his son needs. He orders Jeeva to stop playing. It’s the end of the world.

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Only, it isn’t. Jeeva isn’t affected all that much because he has Jenny (Sri Divya), the girl next door who – in an amusing reversal of the young-love comedy trope – first called him anna and has now fallen for him. Where a lesser filmmaker would milk Jeeva’s separation from his passion for audience-baiting drama, Suseenthiran understands that life goes on – and these early falling-in-love scenes (one of them involving a groin guard) are lovely. There’s nothing new, exactly. Their love is furtive, they’re found out, the parents scream, her father packs her off to live with a faraway uncle… But the leads work well together and Suseenthiran – as he demonstrated in Aadhalal Kadhal Seiveer – is good at deflating clichés with a fly-on-the-wall filmmaking style, with found moments and unfussy cinematography and an editing rhythm that snatches us away from scenes at just the right instant. We are never allowed to linger. It’s commercial-cinema verité.

The world around Jeeva is detailed with quick brushstrokes. We meet the Maths teacher who looks at him as just another candidate for tuitions. We meet Preeti, who declares her love to Jeeva (who knows that his best friend Ranjith is in love with her), and just as we fear a full-blown love triangle, the mess is resolved with breathtaking directness. (At that moment, I realised that half our plots wouldn’t exist if the characters simply talked things out.) Things happen slowly, organically, through characters we have come to know and understand. If Jenny is instrumental in Jeeva getting back to cricket, then Preeti is responsible for Jeeva finding his way back to Jenny. And Jeeva’s long-departed mother is the one who makes Jenny interested in Jeeva. Even the dead people in this film end up doing something that justifies their… well, existence in the scheme of things.

I liked being around these people, even if nothing they did came as a surprise. I liked Preeti for moving on, for not shedding a single tear after being rejected by Jeeva. I liked her even more when she chose to remain friends with him. I liked Ranjith when, after hearing that Jeeva’s been approached by a cricket club more prestigious than the one they play for, he advises Jeeva to not become sentimental and to consider the offer seriously. I liked Jeeva’s easy relationship with his neighbour’s (Charlie) family, and the way Jeeva’s father deals with this neighbour whom Jeeva addresses as appa. Suseenthiran has it both ways. He gets to keep the “father sentiment,” the “friend sentiment” and so forth, and yet, at least for a while, these don’t feel like tired tropes – they feel fresh. He even manages to put a spin on the old unity-in-diversity trope, something that our mainstream movies rarely have much use for anymore. Jeeva’s girlfriend is Christian, as is his second appa. And the local sports shop owner and the cricket-team captain who recognises Jeeva’s talent are Muslim. None of this is fodder for drama. It just is.

Around interval point, we get one of those staged-for-effect scenes with a garden and bright blooms and the whiff of impending romance. The shot comes as a shock because the film, this far, has looked utterly real. The only exceptions are the songs (by D Imman, whose Oru rosa makes good use of trumpets) and the odd scene like the one where Jeeva and Jenny meet after they’ve been told not to – the element of secrecy is enhanced by their silhouettes, though I was distracted by a tree behind them that was lit a tad too prettily. But this shot, now, is all out of proportion in this small story – it’s out of a Shankar movie. (There’s a fountain.) The film, taking a cue, switches tracks and never recovers. The emotions become overblown as well. We get a mood-killing I’ll-stalk-you-till-you-say-you-love-me song, with ballerinas in the background. We get Soori, whose ultra-broad comedy belongs not just in another movie but a different universe. And everything that was subtle gets hammily melodramatic. Jeeva’s father has never seen his son play, and the day he chooses to watch a match is the day Jeeva is on the bench, called only to take drinks to the team. That sort of thing. Jenny’s father wants Jeeva to convert to Christianity. It’s a terrific idea to talk about the domination of Tam-Brahms in Tamil Nadu cricket, but these men are dreadful caricatures, and their scenes are painfully obvious. We begin to wonder if Suseenthiran is bipolar. How could the filmmaker from the earlier portions stoop to this? Worst is the scene around a funeral pyre where we’re asked to take in not just the grains of rice strewn around the lips but the last cake of dung that covers the face. From found moments we end up with moments we never want to find again.

KEY:

* Aadhalal Kadhal Seiveer = see here
* anna = brother
* Maths teacher = see here
* Charlie = see here
* appa = father
* unity-in-diversity = see here
* ballerinas = see here

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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Spoilers ahead…

It’s probably very reductionist to describe Pa Ranjith’s Madras as Sathya meets Subramaniyapuram – but that’s how I saw the film. From the former, we get a young man’s coming of age against a knavish political backdrop. Like Kamal Haasan’s character, Kaali (Karthi) is a graduate with a merry bunch of friends, and instead of carrom they play football. They live in cramped quarters in Vyasarpadi. The song that takes us through these surroundings – Enga ooru Madrasu – is a younger sibling to Madura kulunga from Subramaniyapuram, and Madras reflects that film’s obsession with chronicling the environs with near-anthropological acuity. The congregation of plastic buckets around a tap. The peeling paint on the walls. The obsessive football games. (A child goes by the name of Ronaldo.) The Ilayaraja hit parade. The ease with which the young take to violence, and the effects on their lives, their loves. (Kaali’s romantic interest is Kalai, played by a wan, miscast Catherine Tresa.) It’s all there.

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And we’ve seen all of this before. The story revolves around the dispute over a wall that hosts the painting of a political leader, and when a character from one side tells the enemy “Idhu enga area, enga suvaru,” we are reminded of Enga area ulla varaadhey, the song from Pudhupettai that also invoked Vyasarpadi as one of their areas. The now-violent-now-tender (and very physical) relationship between Kaali’s friend Anbu (Kalaiarasan) and his wife Mary (Ritwika) is reminiscent of the Madhavan-Meera Jasmine track in Aaydha Ezhuthu. (Kalaiarasan and Ritwika make a far more convincing pair than Karthi and Catherine Tresa.) And the narrative treads a familiar path – scenes of friendship and romance first, and then the heavy stuff. But Ranjith, whose first film was the delightful Attakathi, is a good filmmaker and a thoughtful one. From the beginning, where the screen splits in two to mirror the splitting of a political party into two factions, it’s evident that his technique has become sharper. (This, again, reminded me of the early scene in Pudhupettai, where the right half of the screen is lit in a lurid red, the left in an equally lurid green. Madras goes on to use colours to differentiate the areas in which the two split factions operate.)

The energetic filmmaking dusts the cobwebs off Madras. When Anbu and Kaali are joshing about on the football ground, we see this as a series of alternating long shots and mid shots – we get the sense that something larger is at play, and soon enough, there is. The way the crowds gather around a corpse is equally brilliant – we feel the claustrophobia. (The scene begins brilliantly – some low-level ambient sound, and then a woman’s shriek pierces the air.) It’s a cliché to call scenes sculpted, but that’s what we have here – the presentation of Kalai’s past in vignettes mirroring the narration being given to Kaali; the music-backed montage of happenings, both romantic and violent, in the neighbourhood; the footsie-playing cross-cut with high-level deal-making; the stylised local dancers who show up in happy songs as well as sad numbers. Santhosh Narayanan contributes heavily. The songs are superb and the score is even better, eschewing themes for primal sounds. (An action scene in the first half echoes with drums that sound like a heart hopped up on adrenalin.)

But the writing isn’t up to this level. The domestic scenes are fine – the one where Kaali’s mother (Rama, the Bharathiraja heroine who got to wear the trademark white frocks in Ey rasaathi) keeps rejecting prospective brides is a riot. And I liked the slivers of political philosophy, as when a party worker advises Kaali to get married and have many babies because their strength is in numbers. But beyond a point, it becomes difficult to overlook the familiarity of the material. The romantic track is intrusive, and the songs are badly placed. And it’s a problem when a film made in 2014 is telling us the same things about how politics works as Sathya did – in 1988. The ending is a disaster, the result of one of those do-gooder impulses that strikes filmmakers on occasion, when they feel they have to not just make a movie but remake a society. It’s also hard to buy into Kaali’s character once he transforms into something of an action hero. (The scene where his fight with thugs is cross-cut with his moves on the football field is laughable. At least if this had been his first fight sequence, we might have bought the conceit.)

This is easily one of Karthi’s better roles, but his tendency to oversell an emotion – when compared to the natural-seeming supporting cast, almost everything he does is accompanied by an exaggerated facial expression – doesn’t help the character of Kaali, who also comes off as aloof. We don’t know why he does what he does. He’s an IT graduate, working in a software firm, making decent money. He wears branded stuff – Proline sweatshirts and Adidas track pants. People keep referring to him as something of an outsider, as a “padicha paiyan.” At one point, Anbu says, “Un vaazhkaye vera.” So what keeps him here, and what draws him to the political skirmishes around the wall? Is it a Michael Corleone kind of situation, where an outwardly civilized man finds himself unable to escape the savagery running through his veins?

Or is it something more… sinister? One way to read Madras is as a quasi horror film, with the wall the equivalent of, say, the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, a source of evil that turns everyone in its vicinity. It’s wild, I know – but hear me out. The film begins with what could be termed the “legend” of the wall. After a series of killings, a red stain appears on the wall and it keeps spreading. Thereon it is often filmed in perspective – it looms. The streetlight in front keeps flickering, casting ominous shadows on it. People refer to it as a malefic being: “Adhu bali pottudum.” Sure enough, accidents keep happening around it – also, a suicide. In one stretch, Kaali’s bike breaks down near the wall… and it’s night… and there’s the eerie feeling that he’s being followed… and he keeps getting blank calls… If the point is that this whole culture of worshipping personalities through their likenesses on walls is similar to a horror show, who will disagree?

KEY:

* Sathya = see here
* Subramaniyapuram = see here
* “Idhu enga area, enga suvaru” = This is our area, our wall.
* Pudhupettai = see here
* Aaydha Ezhuthu = see here
* Attakathi = see here
* Ey rasaathi = see here
* “padicha paiyan” = educated youth
* “Un vaazhkaye vera” = your path is different
* Michael Corleone = see here
* The Shining = see here
* “Adhu bali pottudum” = You will be ‘sacrificed’.

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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Spoilers ahead…

You’d think a big budget would automatically make for a better movie – imagine the freedoms of a director who can do anything he wants. He can afford the best writers, the best technicians, the best locations… Why, then, do so many big movies end up so lacking, so unmemorable? Ravi K Chandran is a great cinematographer – of that there is little doubt. But his first outing as writer-director, Yaan, is a major disappointment. It begins well, with a superbly staged shootout followed by Chandru (Jeeva) and Sreela (Thulasi Nair) initiating their romance in the midst of this violence. The visuals are outstanding. The imagination is outstanding. We sit up, expecting more where that came from – but the narrative takes a nosedive. Bad performances. Bad comedy. A forced kind of “cuteness” (a bit with an airborne visiting card goes on and on). Shakily staged scenes. Wretched song placement (though the bubblegummy numbers themselves, by Harris Jayaraj, aren’t bad).

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And most unforgivably, a completely wasted first half. Nothing happens. At least, nothing that couldn’t have been told in twenty-odd minutes. At interval point, we’re not even left with the feeling that the leads are in love. Then, things begin to happen. Chandru lands up in a foreign country and gets into trouble. Chandran seems to be going for harrowing Midnight Express-style drama, but the infusions of Tamil-masala elements just don’t work. Imagine this: instead of scrambling to safety and returning to India when he gets the chance, Chandru sets out on a personal vendetta, exposing himself to the very people who want him dead. Maryan told a similar story with far more feeling. Here, there’s no one to root for – except, maybe, the technical team. The action choreography is pretty good for a Tamil movie, not just the usual gravity-defying fisticuffs but also a nicely choreographed hide-and-seek in the alleys of Morocco. At least for this we have to thank the big budget. Otherwise there’d be nothing.

KEY:

* Ravi K Chandran = see how he captures an intimate moment here
* Midnight Express = see here
* Maryan = see here

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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Spoilers ahead…

On the face of it, Nee Naan Nizhal is fairly far-removed from the concerns of the typical Tamil movie. The young hero (Rohit, played by Arjun Lal) and his Coimbatore-based friends are part of a pop-rock group, and in one of their practice sessions we hear them performing Hum tere bin, the ballad from Aashiqui 2. Clearly, the director, John Robinson, isn’t one to think along the lines of… “But will the B- and C-centres get it?” And he proves this decisively by filling his frames with tech-speak. Facebook. Gmail. Chat. Wikipedia. Orkut (may it rest in peace). I counted only two sops to that nebulous mass we like to call “Tamil film audience.” MS Baskar shows up in a comedy track with very little comedy. (He thinks “amnesia” is a country. After this joke, I wished I had bought a ticket to this country.) And Sarath Kumar, the biggest name in the cast, gets an “entry scene” – on a Harley Davidson that’s less bike, more boat.

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Despite this hero-entry, Sarath Kumar isn’t this film’s hero. He plays a Malaysian cop named Anwar Ali, and he’s investigating a series of murders in Kuala Lumpur – all the victims are Indian males. And yet, the most interesting scene involving this character occurs at home, when he barges into the bedroom of his teenage daughter Mumtaz. She’s sitting in front of her laptop, working on a project, and he just wants to say something like “don’t work too hard,” but he doesn’t get the chance – at least not at once. She’s annoyed because he didn’t knock. So he steps out, knocks and reenters the room. At first, the point of this scene appears to be her Westernised nature – her mother wears the headscarf, she doesn’t. But as the film unfolds and we see what its concerns are – neglected youngsters who seek affection on the Internet, and the predators swirling around them – we look back at this scene differently. Was Mumtaz really working on a project or…?

And we slowly realise that Nee Naan Nizhal isn’t so alienated from the Tamil-film ethos after all. It just updates the older plot device of the leering man licking his lips at the sight of a young girl. Earlier, this sort of scenario needed a “broker”; now, thanks to the Internet, the girls become available a lot more easily. The film, thus, is about the consequences of being in thrall to the Internet. And it isn’t just young girls – Rohit, too, is a fly in the web. He gets a friend request from a Kuala Lumpur-based stranger named Asha (Ishitha) and he accepts, unthinkingly. It’s surely some kind of irony that immense brain power has brought about technology that makes people behave so foolishly. And creepily. He’s 22. She’s 17, maybe younger. Agreed, it’s not as bad as imagining her with someone in his 50s, but still, when she takes her laptop into her bedroom and offers Rohit a glimpse of her bare shoulders…

No wonder he is infatuated. He keeps checking his phone for messages from her – even while driving. He almost runs over a child. At some point, he insists they meet. He says he’ll fly over. Now, she hesitates. For the first time in a Tamil movie, we see a heroine who’s comfortable flirting with the hero virtually, but is hesitant taking this relationship to the real world. But at least she can tell these worlds apart, which is more than can be said about Rohit.

Nee Naan Nizhal, too, exists in two worlds. It’s a weird love story. It’s also a crime thriller. And its big problem is that it can’t find a balance. Too much time is spent on the Rohit-Asha romance, and it’s not very exciting because it’s made up entirely of chat sessions, which are presented as voiceovers with scrolling text. By the third chat session, we’re bored. What’s needed is a David Fincher-like ability to infuse electricity into scenes with lines of text on a computer monitor – but that’s asking for too much with this director, who is better with ideas than with staging them convincingly. The villains needed to be a bigger presence, the character transitions aren’t convincing, and worse, midway into the second half, the film morphs from a whodunit to a howwillhegetcaught, which is never as exciting. Still, the germ of the conceit is infectious. In an airport, Rohit sees, all around him, Smartphone-carrying people, each one a potential predator or prey. That’s the nizhal of the title, the technology that shadows us every second. We can never shake it off.

KEY:

* Nee Naan Nizhal = You, Me and the Shadow

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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Spoilers ahead…

Had Kaththi been a film with loftier ambitions, we might say it begins in medias res – but it does begin with a bang. A prison. An escape. A freeze frame. Then, a flashback, which contains one of those procedural depictions AR Murugadoss is so fond of. (If nothing else, it must be said that his films have some of the smarter masala heroes. There’s at least an attempt to think through a situation instead of just flexing a bicep.) The sequence has a cheeky finish, guaranteed to whip the hero’s (Kathiresan, played by Vijay) fans into a frenzy.

And then, all the air begins to leak out of the narrative. Murugadoss has never been an economical storyteller, but even by his standards, the early portions of Kaththi are remarkably flabby and dull. Instead of surprising us by cutting to scenes directly, he keeps laying them out for us, he keeps explaining them. Consider the stretch where Kathiresan returns to an old-age home and experiences a shock. Why have the lead-in scene where his friend (Sathish) tells him what he’s going to find? How much better if we find out what’s happened along with Kathiresan? The ideas are snappy – the reveal of the person injured in a shootout; the identity of a couple of television reporters – but the staging is shockingly flat. Worse, more time is wasted on what must surely be one of the most uninspired romantic tracks of all time. Samantha plays the heroine… No, scratch that. She plays an emoticon. Happy face. Sad face. That pretty much covers her contribution to the proceedings.

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The story is the old one of a crook who grows a conscience – this happens when Kathiresan is faced with the plight of farmers whose lands (and the water in those lands) are at the point of being usurped by a multinational. (Neil Nitin Mukesh plays the villain… No scratch that. He plays another emoticon. Frown face. Angry face.) And because two heroes are always more fun than one, Kathiresan finds himself assuming the role of Jeeva (Vijay again). This avatar is even smarter – not only does he come with an MSc in Hydrology, he’s able to explain communism with the help of… an idli. Clearly, Marxist philosophies are best digested with a spoonful of sambar. It’s the old Naadodi Mannan template, shaped with a relevant, burning social angle. Along with MNCs, Kaththi indicts the mainstream media that cares more about goosing city viewers with sensation than giving villagers a voice. Jeeva, therefore, is their only voice. “En uyire ponaalum vivasaayatha vidaatheenga,” he tells the villagers, after being beaten up by corrupt cops, MNC stooges. The scene is framed so that we see him as a messiah, a deliverer addressing weeping believers – he carries their cross.

Part of the problem with Kaththi, then, is that its concerns are too heavy, too real, to accommodate Vijay’s lightweight, I’m-too-cool-to-care star persona. (That’s why Thuppakki, the earlier Murugadoss-Vijay collaboration worked as well as it did. Its defining characteristic, even as bombs threatened to obliterate cities, was its pulse-quickening coolness.) The other problem lies in the characterization. Murugadoss doesn’t opt for the path taken by Dhool – another masala movie about villagers and their water problems. There, the hero hailed from the village. He was a son of the soil and when he came to the big, bad city to fix things, the transposition carried a charge – we were never in doubt about the intensity of his feelings, the extent of his indignation. Kathiresan, on the other hand, is a creature of the city, a criminal to boot – and his transformative arc needed to be traced more convincingly. (His background, which is revealed late into the film, could have been used to shape his character more empathetically, but it’s tossed off in a line or two.) And without this anchoring, the film gets into a slightly dangerous (and queasy-making) zone where we begin to feel that it is exploiting the horrifying reality of farmers for the sake of a few masala kicks. A scene in which farmers commit suicide is chilling, but a minute later, we question the validity of our response. This is, after all, the kind of film that has its hero claiming that cell phones are an extravagance in a country whose farmers are dying without basic needs – but not before shaking a leg in a lavishly shot song that goes… Selfie pulla.

But the film gets better as it goes along, mostly because Murugadoss rediscovers, midway, the sound masala instincts that had apparently abandoned him earlier. A fight sequence where Kathiresan uses a bunch of coins is a superb bit of imagination. The impact comes not just from the action choreography, but from the emotional resonance imparted by those coins – they were donated for Jeeva’s cause by displaced farmers who are now laboring as sewage workers and employees in sleazy wine shops. So when Kathiresan uses these coins against the goons employed by the MNC, he’s really drawing from the villagers’ struggles – he’s really fighting their fight. Later, he invokes the names of Periyar, Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi and launches a civil disobedience movement. What a grand idea. And what a grand masala movie might have resulted had these concerns percolated into the story at every level, had this film been as attuned to serving its premise as its hero and his fans.

KEY:

* Kaththi = knife
* En uyire ponaalum vivasaayatha vidaatheenga = Don’t abandon farming even if I die.
* idli = see here

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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Spoilers ahead…

Midway through Poojai, I had a frightening thought. The director Hari is… an auteur. I know what you’re thinking, that this is what happens when you watch way too many of these films – but hear me out. If the definition of an auteur is someone whose distinct fingerprints are all over the film, then isn’t Hari one? Let’s examine Poojai. Scenes where the hero’s (Vasu, played by Vishal) voice becomes louder as he recites dialogue, so that he’s practically screaming by the time he gets to the last word? Check. Large families (with well-regarded actors like Sathyaraj and Radhika), and larger melodrama? Check. A background score that takes its cues from a jackhammer tearing up a road? Check. A swooping camera that captures the action from all angles, all directions, leaving you with the feeling of watching the movie from the inside of a washing machine in the spin cycle? Check. And most crucially, that vague feeling of scenes being fast-forwarded – some of it, sometimes all of it, goes by in a blur.

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Poojai, thus, is very much “a Hari film,” which means it’s near impossible to write about it in any meaningful way. But a critic has a job to do, things to point out – and in that spirit, it must be said that Vasu, who makes a living as a loan shark, isn’t entirely uninteresting. He smokes and drinks, but he’s not a misogynistic creep. Before speeding away in his car, with sickle-wielding villains breathing down his neck, he turns to his girlfriend Divya (Shruti Haasan, whose beauty inspires the Keatsian nickname… Ooty Urilakizhangu) and snaps on her seatbelt. This, clearly, is a principled man. In a film of this sort, it’s inevitable that bodies will end up hurtling through windshields, but at least hers won’t be one of them. If this isn’t true love, then what is? Also, Vasu isn’t a man of the masses. He’s rich… like really rich. He’s the MD of a large concern in Coimbatore. He speaks Hindi effortlessly. He watches English movies. Someone unfamiliar with the Hari… uh, oeuvre could be forgiven for thinking that there’s an attempt here to accommodate a slightly different kind of “Tamil hero” within the confines of the star-driven masala movie.

But of course that’s never going to happen. Vasu may be A-centre in terms of his background, but where it matters most (and to the relief of the film’s distributors), he’s still B- and C-centre. Hence the bar song and the fight sequences that seem to take place in Krypton, given how miniscule a part gravity plays in the proceedings. Hence the “comedy sequence” where Vasu instructs his buddy (Soori) to bring Divya something cool from the fridge and the latter holds out… a bottle of beer. (Soori and Pandi try routines along the lines of the ones by Goundmani and Senthil, including a nod to the now-legendary vaazhapazham bit.) The story is something about Vasu’s family being threatened by a gang of contract killers, but does anyone really care? Poojai is so depressingly generic that it’s best summed up in the scene where the Pandi character refuses to go to a screening of Gravity because he won’t understand a word. And Vasu says, “Summa vandhu AC-la thoongu.” That’s another characteristic of the Hari movie. The movie itself doesn’t matter.

KEY:

* Poojai = worship
* Ooty Urilakizhangu = a potato from Ooty
* vaazhapazham bit = see here

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

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Spoilers ahead…

What would Nerungi Vaa Muthamidaathe look like had it been a star vehicle, with a bigger budget? For one, the protagonist Chandru (Shabeer) would have been bumped up to hero – his journey from Trichy to Karaikal, driving a truck with stolen diesel, would have been the story. Maya (Pia Bajpai), who ends up in that truck after a bike accident, would have been the heroine. It isn’t a stretch to imagine her as an annoyingly chirpy child-woman, who wears down Chandru’s gruff reserve – and thereon, we might have had songs, fights, drama. The film could have even been something like Imtiaz Ali’s Highway. Chandru comes with a troubled past, as does Maya. They talk and discover they are kindred souls. And so forth.

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The most interesting aspect of Lakshmy Ramakrishnan’s second feature (her first was the impressive Aarohanam) is that we aren’t sure whose story it is – or even where the story is headed. At the beginning, a man surfaces from the depths of a river. There’s a hint of cops on his tail. Then we are introduced to a petrol/diesel crisis – the streets are deserted, planes are grounded. And we keep meeting people – a white-clad MLA named Kaali, a lead singer in a band (Viji Chandrashekar), a couple on the run, another couple who seem to be on the run. Who are they and what do they have to do with the plot? At one point, Chandru tells the character played by Thambi Ramaiah, “Enakku therinjathellaam unakku theriyaadhu, unakku therinjathellaam avangalukku theriyaadhu.” (You don’t know what I know, and they don’t know what you know.) This, we slowly realize, isn’t just a line – it’s the film’s philosophy. Ramakrishnan keeps us guessing, right till the end. Throughout the film, we keep piecing together the story, through small, tight flashbacks. (There’s very little flab.) The name of the Thambi Ramaiah character is revealed only after he has appeared a few times (and it’s a funny moment). The identity of the character played by Ambika becomes clear only after a few minutes. Even Chandru’s mission is revealed only near the end.

This sort of thing is possible only in films without stars, and made on low budgets. The big-time filmmaker asks, perhaps inevitably, “How do I make a movie that appeals to all audiences?” The small filmmaker is after something else. “How do I make a good movie?” It’s the Avis principle, applied to movie-making. When, in the 1960s, Avis found itself the No. 2 car-rental company in America, behind Hertz, they came up with a now-legendary slogan: “We try harder.” The idea was to convey to the customer that being the smaller company, they’d have to do more to be in business. That’s what filmmakers like Ramakrishnan do – they try harder. (And this year, we’ve been fortunate that a number of filmmakers have tried harder. Thanks to them, we’ve had Nedunchalai, Thegidi, Burma, Goli Soda, Mundaasupatti, Saivam, Vaayai Moodi Pesavum…) In fact, everyone tries harder. The music in these films is fresher. The cinematography more evocative. It’s amazing how much the quality of a film – of its various departments – can improve once the money ends up in the actual movie rather than in the pockets of its stars. This is the last film where you’d expect to see a well-done action sequence, but there it is – the classic one-man-versus-many scenario choreographed in a way that actually makes us believe that this one man can handle all those other men.

The problem with Nerungi Vaa Muthamidaathe is that all these characters, all these threads (hacking in a power plant!) don’t always cohere convincingly. There are times you wish there had been fewer people on screen, with meatier arcs. I wish Maya’s decision to go along with Chandru had been better established (her cutesy moment at the end is a disgrace). But it’s the sprawl that gives us the lovely non sequiturs – the mother of an infant who earns money by cleaning Chandru’s truck, or the “friend” who vanishes the moment he hears of the police and an FIR, or the man in the auto rickshaw who speaks to his brother-in-law over the phone as his wife holds on to… a goat. What the narrative loses in momentum (it could have used some tension, especially in the closing portions), it gains in texture. These aren’t isolated lives. They’re part of a larger universe, where people come and go, taking their stories with them as we turn our attention to other stories.

Or backstories, I know it’s not politically correct to keep referring to the work of “female” filmmakers – but I wonder if a male filmmaker would have handled a woman’s grisly past with such grace. That this woman, this middle-aged woman, is the lead singer of a pop/rock band is even better. She isn’t made to cower in a corner, bemoaning her fate. She wears stylish clothes and paints her long nails a bright pink. In a pop-culture world ruled by pouting nymphets, she probably knows she has to try harder.

KEY:

* Nerungi Vaa Muthamidathe = Come close, but don’t touch

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Spoilers ahead…

In some parallel dimension we aren’t aware of, there must be theatre chains screening Mysskinin Jai Hind 2 and Mani Ratnamin Jai Hind 2 and Selvaraghavanin Jai Hind 2, and to avoid confusion, star and director Arjun appends his name to his movie: it’s called Arjunin Jai Hind 2. Not that there’s much doubt. There’s a scene featuring the national flag, and the plot itself is a rehash of Gentleman, one of Arjun’s biggest hits. The crux is quality education, which the poor don’t have access to. Also from that film are the two heroines – one nice, one naughty. For a while, I was pleasantly surprised by Nandini (Surveen Chawla), a demure Brahmin girl who isn’t draped in chiffon saris and positioned near industrial fans and asked to sing songs about ants that have invaded her body, the way Ranjitha was in the original Jai Hind. The romance between Nandini and Abhimanyu (Arjun) is mature, and when we first glimpse Nandini, we see a thaali. How wonderful, I thought, for this kind of mass-masala entertainer to telegraph, so early on, the unavailability of its heroine. And then we get the second half where a twenty-something student falls for Abhimanyu and imagines a dream duet where he circles around her in a fancy bike as she sways in a miniskirt. It’s a marvel one of our filmmakers hasn’t yet written that bestseller, How to Have It All.

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Arjunin Jai Hind 2 is the kind of film about which you shrug and say, “Well, if you liked Jai Hind…” This isn’t exactly a sequel (the characters are different), but it’s suffused with the same vibe: how to do your bit for the nation while demonstrating your prowess in the martial arts. Don’t laugh. At least I didn’t during the action sequences, which are pretty well done. Arjun looks amazingly fit, and he actually seems to be executing these gravity-defying moves, without the help of wires. The narrative, too, is spry – at least up to a point – leaping back and forth, thanks to a series of flashbacks used to advance the plot. And then, perhaps realising that his core audience isn’t after education-oriented message-mongering, Arjun unleashes the rocket launchers. The film suddenly (one might say randomly) switches gears – it becomes a prison drama, and then we get a hostage-rescue scenario. But is there any point complaining about coherence or plausibility? If you have to watch a film about a one-man army, you could do worse than watch one with Arjun in it. He totally pulls it off. Of how many fifty-plus leading men can you say that?

KEY:

*  ants that have invaded her body = see here

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