Spoilers ahead…

The conceit is gold. A meteor is headed towards earth. It’s the end of the world. At least, it’s the end of Tamil Nadu. The localization isn’t a surprise. Had the same scenario played out in a Hollywood movie, the events would be set in Anycity, America, with the occasional TV shot convincing us that the rest of humanity is in peril too. In Appuchi Gramam, directed by Vi Anand, we take stock of what’s happening through the residents of the titular village. There’s something awesomely subversive about a sci-fi story unfolding in the back of beyond, where men walk around in loincloths and where people carry around lanterns at night. Meanwhile, in cities, scientists gather around hi-tech equipment and fret about impending doom. A conventional disaster movie would use this as the dramatic lynchpin – how these men plan to avert this disaster. We’d be ushered through roomfuls of people making highfalutin plans, their every line punctuated with techno-geekery. The atmosphere would be thick with portent. Appuchi Gramam wants none of that.

Instead, this is what’s in store – feuding families; sickle-wielding hotheads from a neighboring village; a widowed mother yearning to hear from her son in the US; skirmishes around the local deity; lots and lots of boozing; a driver who’s in love with his master’s daughter; a second love story, occasioning a couple of duets; men with the hots for the local item girl; a scene with a thaali; a scene where someone proclaims his love for this land. It’s Tamil-cinema business as usual, less Bradbury than Bharathiraja. But the director never lingers too long on a single narrative strand, and the sci-fi backdrop makes the clichés seem not so clichéd. I mean, it isn’t just another rich-girl-meets-poor-boy track when a tender moment is interrupted by a ball of fire hurtling over their heads.

I wish more had been done with the premise, though. While it’s a relief not to have to pretend everything’s going to go up in smoke until disaster is averted at the last minute – and no, this isn’t a spoiler; whether here or in Hollywood, disaster is always averted, always at the last minute – there are a few too many detours into maudlin and messagey territory, enough to make you wish that the meteor wipes out, if not this village, then at least the “village sentiment” that plagues these films. (Wouldn’t you know it, the meteor is but a deus ex machina to cure the various ills, social and otherwise, infecting these people.) The funny bits, like the portion where a meteorite is worshipped as aatha, could have been funnier. The final stretch – lots of fireworks – could have been tenser. But I’m not complaining… too much. The low-keyness is part of the charm. It’s nice to have a movie where the prospect of annihilation induces in a local youth little more than the concern that he’s going to die a virgin. It’s a kick to see this “world crisis” being handled not by the POTUS but by the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu (Nasser, one of the few recognizable faces). And the reason people aren’t too concerned about what’s going to happen made me laugh out loud. Our weathermen never get anything right.

KEY:

* aatha = goddess

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.

Spoilers ahead…

If they made T-shirts for down-on-their-luck villagers who inhabit a certain tract of Tamil cinema, this is what the slogan would read: “Life’s a bitch. Then you end up in Chennai.” Eleyadevan’s Gnanakirukkan begins with a harrowing scene of childbirth in a nondescript village, and then the father (Ganesan, played by Daniel Balaji), who appears possessed, uproots a trident from the local shrine and holds it over the infant. Given what’s to come, this is the happy-days flashback. For a while, we seem to be in a story about the travails of the mother (I thought it was Meenal, but it’s her sister Senthi). Her elder daughter runs away. Then she’s excommunicated by the village. Then the son Perumal – the infant from earlier, now grown up and played by Jega – runs away. And there’s the husband, who just lies there, doing nothing. What’s with him, we wonder. Is he really possessed, or is he just an eccentric?

But then, bizarrely, we begin to follow Perumal’s story, after he flees to Trichy. These scenes are actually promising. We see the young boy unflinching in the face of hardship, and there’s a genuine sense of triumph when he makes some sort of life for himself. But he cannot be allowed to remain happy for too long – otherwise there’d be no movie, at least this kind of movie. So he loses his job. He loses the girl he loves. He buys a one-way ticket to Hell Chennai, and there he finds a fellow-sufferer, Sumathi (Archana Kavi). (Thambi Ramaiah is also in there somewhere, because you cannot make a movie these days where Thambi Ramaiah isn’t there somewhere.) Thereon, it’s one thing after another – there’s an attack by drunks; there’s a gang-rape; there’s a lecherous old man; Sumathi almost ends up in a brothel; she falls ill; and then we discover that her mother, back in the village, is blind. At this point, back-to-back screenings of Mahanadhi and Naan Kadavul began to look like a pick-me-up. The director strives for the lyricism of Kadhal, but someone should tell him you can’t write poetry with a battering ram.

KEY:

* Mahanadhi = see here
* Naan Kadavul = 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.

Spoilers ahead…

Tamil cinema has always sought shelter in the amma sentiment, and at some point, the appa sentiment pitched a tent and set up camp as well. But when, exactly? Sure, there were the Sivaji Ganesan dramas where he kept screaming at his son (usually played by Srikanth), but those films were about ideological differences. And those were also moneyed houses, more or less. So when did Tamil cinema get its first taste of the lower-middle-class father-son dynamic, the kind institutionalised in the Selvaraghavan movies, where the father is constantly aggravated by the no-good son? I kept thinking about this while watching Caarthick Raju’s Thirudan Police, which begins like one of those films – this time, the father is played by Rajesh, and the son (named Vishwa) by Dinesh.

But soon, the father dies and it turns out we aren’t in for that kind of movie after all. What we seem to be in for is some sort of revenge drama – but with a difference. With a big star at the centre, this story becomes excessively heroic. Think Singam. But with not-yet-star, some interesting dimensions come into play. Dinesh is at a point in his career where he can still afford to get slapped around by a superior, and where he can embody what, according to the film, is the equivalent of pond scum in the IPS: a constable. We see him humiliated quite a bit, and we see what it must be like to be a constable. I’m not saying we get docu-realism. But it is nice, sometimes – even if only in the air-conditioned comfort of theatres – to slip into the shoes of the people on the street we rarely give a second glance to.

And the film’s biggest (and nicest) surprise is that this revenge drama is treated like a comedy. It’s turned out to be a pretty subversive week at the cinemas. If Appuchi Gramam transplanted the sci-fi disaster genre into a village, Thirudan Police pees all over that most hallowed of tropes: the love for a parent. Vishwa’s teary-eyed memories of his father become the object of a running gag, where people begin to fear his sentimental outbursts. Bala Saravan is priceless as Vishwa’s friend, and his explanation about the perceived power of the police is a riot. Even the climax is treated like a farce. The upshot is that the narrative has no real emotional charge – but that’s fine. We get enough of those films.

The trouble is that this one-note gag (about Vishwa’s father) is stretched out too long. Also, there are tonal issues. The flavourless romantic track (with Iyshwarya Rajesh) we accept as inevitable, but the real problem is when the film gets all serious on us, as when we have to endure an appa-is-awesome dirge or when a senior cop delivers a lecture about what it means to be part of the police force. But the climax is such fun that we forget what came earlier. It isn’t everyday that we encounter a film whose villains (Rajendran, John Vijay) are mostly in drag. What a sari fate.

KEY:

* Sivaji Ganesan drama = 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.

Spoilers ahead…

After watching Soodhu Kavvum, I wrote, “Vijay Sethupathi, the poster boy of this cinema, was welcomed in his first scene with cheers and claps usually reserved for mass heroes making their entry. It’s the sweetest sound I’ve heard in years.” But then, those are just A-centre cheers and claps, and if we know anything about our heroes, it’s that they like the rest of the alphabet too. The B-centres. The C-centres. And as you cannot lure those audiences with films like Soodhu Kavvum, you clamber on board an MRTS (‘Mass’ Route To Success) vehicle and head to the sickle-wielding hinterlands. It isn’t surprising – just a little sad. There have been actors before Vijay Sethupathi who’ve bought a one-way ticket for this journey, and there will be actors down the line who’ll do the same thing. But with him, there’s a wee sense of betrayal, that’s all. You act in back-to-back films (Pizza, Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kaanom, Soodhu Kavvum) that make us think you’re part of the counterculture. You’re part of a revolution. You’re Che Guevara. And then, you do a Vanmam and tell us we’re fools for even believing there was a cause, that it’s better to be a face on a giant cutout than a face on a college kid’s T-shirt. Lesson learnt.

Still, there’s a difference between “going commercial” and doing a Vanmam (directed by Jai Krishna), which is just about the vilest thing I’ve sat through in recent times. Consider the scene where one of the hero’s friends is murdered by a rival gang. The man is biking down a road near the train tracks, and he sees goons on bikes coming in the opposite direction. One of them kicks the man, who goes flying and hits a train and ends up a blood-spattered heap. The goons walk up to him to make sure he’s dead. He’s drawing his least breaths, and he asks for water. One of the goons pees on him. The scene isn’t funny. It isn’t shocking. It isn’t cruel. It’s – like the rest of the film – nothing. We feel nothing, not even revulsion. Vanmam is that indifferently made.

But how do these films get made, in the first place? I think it’s because the “one-line,” as the simple summary is called, sounds good. The one-line, here, is that two friends (Vijay Sethupathi and Kreshna) become enemies after a killing, and one of them is left with a heavy burden on his conscience. Not bad. But what about the second line? And the third line? And the rest of the lines that go on to make the screenplay? The emotional beats are buried so deep they’re hardly discernible, and what’s on the surface is a generic mix of love (Sunaina plays the love interest) and drama and sentiment and action. There’s not a thing that’s new. You’ve heard of the phrase “going through the motions.” Now you can see it. Just one request, though. It’s inevitable, in these films, that you have all these men with hoicked-up dhotis, but can we not shoot them from low angles? Watching something like this is punishment enough without making it seem like a two-and-a-half hour underwear commercial.

KEY:

* vanmam = vengeance

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.

REVIEWS IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA

• A review by Sudhir Srinivasan, in The Hindu, is here. An excerpt:

While it may seem like a fairly plain statement to make, you catch yourself going back to it during the infrequent times that you disagree with his points. Whether you agree with the reviews or not, there’s little doubt that they are a whole lot of fun to read. He is the reviewer equivalent of that school teacher you loved, the one who taught you without ever making the art of instruction seem onerous.

Why did C Rudraiah’s career never take off after his dazzling debut film? The film industry’s answer: “Avar Appadithan.”

This is your first film, and even the way you refer to this first film in the acknowledgements at the beginning is different – not as “mudhal padam,” which is the literal translation, but as “kanni muyarchi,” your virgin attempt. Padam signifies a tangible product – a film. Muyarchi, on the other hand, is shrouded with vagueness – it suggests flailing about, it suggests a search, it suggests an experiment. Aval Appadithan (loose translation: She Is the Way She Is; in other words, her own person, not too concerned about blending in with the rest of society, all of which, gender-reversed, seems to apply to the director C Rudraiah as well) was all of these things, especially an experiment. The film, which was released in October 1978, remains one of a kind, an “art film” made with huge commercial-cinema stars (Kamal Haasan, Rajinikanth, Sripriya).

PC Sreeram, who was Rudraiah’s junior at the Adyar Film Institute (Rudraiah graduated in 1975), told me, “We were all totally zapped by the movie. This is the kind of world cinema we had been exposed to, the kind of cinema we believed in, and to see one of your own make this kind of movie, in your mother tongue, was amazing.” Imagine what the audience must have made of it. You go to the theatre seeing the faces on the posters, the stars who were last seen together in Ilamai Oonjalaadugiradhu, Sridhar’s superhit which was released just that June, and you expect a story-driven melodrama along similar lines, with probably a trendy “item number” like Yennadi Meenatchi, and instead you get… this, this moody dissection of a woman’s psyche. And, at first look, this isn’t even a very likeable woman, someone you feel sorry for, someone whose plight makes your eyes swim in tears, but a woman who’s to her gender what cacti are to the plant kingdom. She’s filled with thorns, and she does her darnedest to keep you away.

When a film is in the spotlight – due to, say, its director’s demise, as in this case – there is a tendency to shove other films into the darkness, and if we are to be really fair to the other directors of the time, we should take note of K Balachander’s Thappu Thalangal, which was released in 1977. That film, too, had Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan (in a special appearance), and it, too, had an “adult” storyline that was unusual for Tamil cinema, something about a thug who meets a prostitute. That same year also saw the release of avant-garde filmmaker John Abraham’s Agraharathil Kazhudhai. So you could say there was something in the air.

Still, Aval Appadithan was different. The shadowy black-and-white cinematography was different. The dialogues, which were more about revealing character than advancing plot, were different. The frank handling of sex and profanity (“she is a self-pitying, sex-starved bitch!”) was different. The documentary-like detours were different. The painfully sensitive, feminist hero was different. Rudraiah was different. If nothing else, no Tamil film, before or since, has had the hero and heroine kissing in the loo, right next to the flush toilet. K Hariharan, the filmmaker and a close friend of Rudraiah, told me, “He was very radical. His thinking was very [French] New Wave – he was a big fan of Godard. Like Godard, he was into anti-narrative cinema, without traditional beginnings and ends. He wanted to change the conventions of cinema.”

The director (seated behind the camera) during the shooting of ‘Gramathu Athiyayam’

Seen from today’s vantage, then, it’s not surprising at all that someone like Rudraiah had such an abbreviated (one might even say aborted) career – he made just one other film, Gramathu Athiyayam, which was released in 1980. That same year, Rajinkanth became a superstar with the release of Murattu Kaalai, and two years later, with Sakalakalavallavan, Kamal Haasan was officially launched into the stratosphere. It wouldn’t be feasible for these stars to do small films again, especially if the director wanted things that the box office did not want. Hariharan pointed to Mani Ratnam, too, as a “major game changer.” He said, “His was a consumerist kind of cinema. He looked at frames as commodities in themselves. And this was anathema to Rudraiah, whose cinema was a pure, radical, anarchic world that could not be seen subscribing to anything called ‘standard culture’. Between the native folk art of Murattu Kaalai and Sakalakalavallavan and the urban city art of Mani Ratnam, Rudraiah lost out.”

But not for lack of trying. Among the people I spoke to was S Arunmozhi, who was one of Rudraiah’s associates on Aval Appadithan and Gramathu Athiyayam, and a director in his own right. (He made films like Kaani Nilam.) Arunmozhi, actually, was more than just a professional cohort. He spoke of the “ashram”-like atmosphere in Rudraiah’s Kumar Arts office at Raja Annamalaipuram, where, between 1978 and ’86, many like-minded and creatively inclined individuals used to gather. He spoke of a library there that housed Tamil translations of Jnanpith Award-winning novels, along with the scripts of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel and Polanski’s Cul-de-sac. Arunmozhi met Rudraiah at the Film Institute – the story of Rudraiah, then, is also a chronicle of people who’ve been trained to look at cinema purely as art, and what happens when they step into the Tamil film industry, which is among the country’s most commercial – and assisted him in his diploma film based on the Jayakanthan short story Siluvai, which is about a nun’s struggles with celibacy. The script was not approved by the HOD, who was Christian, but somehow the film was made and it impressed the examiner, K Balachander, so much that he awarded Rudraiah a gold medal. (At least this part, to some of us, isn’t very surprising. A nun’s struggles with celibacy? How could this story not end up fascinating KB?)

Arunmozhi told me about the other films, the could-have-beens, and though he wasn’t exactly clear about the dates, the chronology, it’s at least instructive to see that even when he was not making cinema, Rudraiah was thinking, constantly, about making cinema. In the 1982 timeframe, give or take a few months or years, there was Raja Ennai Mannithuvidu, with Kamal Haasan playing younger brother to Chandra Haasan. Sujatha was cast as the latter’s wife and Sumalatha was to play Kamal’s heroine. The story dealt with the conflict between the peacenik older brother and the Naxal leanings of the Kamal character. The film was shot simultaneously in Telugu – it was to be a bilingual; Rudraiah’s mother tongue was Telugu – and one of the locations was the set that served as the blind protagonist’s house in Rajapaarvai. Shooting went on for about 15 days, and the film was about 40% was complete (“Those days, you shot very quickly,” Arunmozhi said) when things ground to a halt. Hariharan told me that one of the reasons was probably that Kamal Haasan, at the time, was advised by SP Muthuraman – who had always been a sounding board, since the days of Kalathur Kannamma, on which SPM worked as an assistant director – to change tracks, to make more mainstream movies and not keep making films like Moondram Pirai (released in February 1982). The result of this advice was, of course, the as-mainstream-as-mainstream-can-be Sakalakalavallavan (released in August 1982). So Raja Ennai Mannithuvidu possibly collapsed under the pull of a big star, on one side, and, on the other, a director who worshipped Godard. A couple of songs that Ilayaraja had composed for the film – including Ponvaanile ezhil venmegame – ended up in a 1985 Manivannan flop named Anbin Mugavari.

But Kamal Haasan remained a well-wisher, and he tried to put together a project – this was sometime after Moondram Pirai – that Rudraiah would produce and Balu Mahendra would direct. “But Rudraiah, at that point, wanted complete control over a project,” said Arunmozhi. “He wanted to produce the project. He wanted to direct the project.” But after a point, things came to a halt – and these words will be seen a lot over the next few paragraphs.

There was something called Unmayai Thedi, which was announced in the papers with an ad – but after a point, things came to a halt. Then, around 1988, there was something called TXT7, a road movie inspired by Taxi Driver. (Arunmozhi’s synopsis: “The taxi driver is a good man and society makes him a criminal.) This was to have L Vaidyanathan’s music. Raghuvaran was to be the hero. The story was by the writer Sujatha, who wrote the lyrics for a song as well. Two songs were recorded. But after a point, probably due to a financial problem, things came to a halt.

From some accounts, though, Rudraiah doesn’t seem to have been all that averse to merely producing a movie – and there are projects he floated where his role was just that. Among the more interesting-sounding of these projects is Bhishmar, which would tell a story of the legendary figure incorporating portions from myth as well as the modern day. Rudraiah was to produce, with his Film Institute classmate Kothandaraman providing the finances, and ‘Billa’ Krishnamurthy was to direct. Sivaji Ganesan was to play the leading role, and as a story goes, he landed up on the sets at 5 am, waited till 8:30 am, grumbled about the “lack of planning” by these “new Film Institute boys,” and left. When I asked Kothandaraman about the film, he said that he had distributed two hits from April 1984, Thambikku Endha Ooru and Vaazhkai – and the latter had propped up Sivaji Ganesan’s sagging market. When his classmate came by and spoke about his non-happening career, he decided to help. Vaazhkai had made him a familiar face in the Sivaji Ganesan camp, and he went along with Rudraiah to give the actor an advance for Bhishmar. But after a point, things came to a halt.

The director (in a dhoti) during the shooting of ‘Gramathu Athiyayam’

Why did Rudraiah begin to toy with the idea of producing? Arunmozhi told me the story of how he, along with a few other technicians who were supposed to work on Raja Ennai Mannithuvidu, resigned their jobs at Doordarshan, New Delhi, when the film was announced because they couldn’t be shuttling back and forth. “We resigned a government job,” Arunmozhi said, and when the film never really took off after that, Rudraiah probably felt guilty. Turning producer for films made by other directors was possibly a way to help out the disciples from his “ashram.”

Around the late 1980s, Rudraiah decided that he would direct films for other producers – some people might describe this as climbing down from a rather high horse – and in the 1990-91 timeframe, he began work on Kadalpurathil…, which was based on the novel of same name by Vannanilavan, who co-wrote Aval Appadithan (with Somasundareshwar and Rudraiah). It was a tragic love story set in a seaside village, and Archana was supposed to play the lead. After a couple of weeks of shooting, the producer decided to make it a telefilm, and he changed the heroine as well as the director. Kadalpurathil… ended up being telecast on Doordarshan.

Then there was this film whose story was written by Somasundareshwar. PC Sreeram remembers listening to Somasundareshwar’s narration, and being impressed by “this intense love story. It was wild and weird, and still made a lot of sense.” Arunmozhi remembers this film as a modern version of Romeo and Juliet (that, in fact, was the film’s name), to be made with Somasundareshwar’s son as hero. Sreeram was to do the cinematography. AR Rahman was to do the music. “This was supposed to bring Rudraiah back as a director,” Arunmozhi said. But after a point, things came to a halt.

Even during the director’s last days, he was planning a film – it was called Gautam, and the hero would play a triple role, a father and his two sons. The film was to be shot in London and Colombo, and the German filmmaker Martin Repka (whose 2007 film Return of the Storks was Slovakia’s official entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars) was roped in for discussions. But after a point, things came to a halt. There could have been other projects too, Arunmozhi said, and he didn’t know about them because, for a while after 1986, he wasn’t in regular contact with Rudraiah, at least not as much as in the “ashram” days. If some of these projects appear to be overly big in scope, especially considering the filmmaker’s modest (and modestly budgeted) résumé, they seem in line with Rudraiah’s thinking, which was always big. “He’d travel by car, never by auto,” Arunmozhi said. The economic losses from the shelved films didn’t cramp Rudraiah’s style. His wife was employed as a teacher, and there were friends who lent him money. After his divorce, he moved into a Single Person’s Quarter in Royapettah, but he kept wanting to move out. “Even during his last days,” Arunmozhi said, “he was looking at houses that cost something like Rs. 60,000 per month.” And this is a man who hadn’t made a movie in over 30 years.

It’s common for a project or two to get dropped in the course of a filmmaker’s lifetime, but in Rudraiah’s case, it comes off like something chronic – almost as if he couldn’t bear to go ahead with the ideas he had in mind. One of the reasons for the stalling of Rudraiah’s career, Arunmozhi said, was that it was too late by the time he began to consider making films for other producers. The man was also a Marxist, a follower of the French philosopher Louis Althusser, which may mean nothing until you begin to consider the unapologetically capitalistic and class-filled nature of the commercial film industry. (Titbit: Rudraiah’s elder brother Gurulingam considered himself a ‘Marxist Leninist’, and it was this dynamic, reversed, that worked its way into the relationship of the siblings in Raja Ennai Mannithuvidu.) In his last days, though, there appears to have been some disillusionment with the people he put his faith in. When Rudraiah was undergoing treatment for the cancer that finally consumed him, he noticed that most of the patients in the adjacent beds were from Kolkata. “What good is a Marxist party if it cannot build even one good hospital?” he told Gurulingam.

Kothandaraman said that Rudraiah was too sensitive, that he used to take things very personally, that he had “too much self-respect” to function in the film industry, where a bit of boot-licking is the norm. Hariharan said that Rudraiah was a private man who would frequently retreat into a shell. He wouldn’t circulate and meet others. “He was a villager at heart. The three years at the Film Institute changed him. Had he been persistent, he could have been the mascot of a new wave, but he gave up.” But more than anything, it was perhaps the cult success of his first film that left Rudraiah paralysed. “He was frozen with Aval Appadithan,” Hariharan said. “Everyone kept praising the film, and it took years for him to come out of its shadow. And he was not flexible. I said I’d take him to Doordarshan, where he could make a meaningful documentary or some sort of semi-fiction. I was doing TV then. Saeed Mirza and Govind Nihalani were doing TV then. But he said no. For him, that was a big compromise. I used to tell him that the best way to describe him was ‘Avan Appadithan’. He would laugh.” And later, he probably started losing confidence. “I met him last in the mid-1990s. He had forgotten what it was like to make a film. Aval Appadithan was so far back in the past.”

Arunmozhi told me that Rudraiah’s fondness for Kamal Haasan was really why nothing ever happened. “Kamal was intelligent, talented, and he knew so much about world cinema. They were on the same wavelength. Rudraiah always appreciated him and admired him. In fact, I would say he was addicted to him. He wouldn’t settle for less. He could have tried to do something with Rajinikanth as well. Rajini helped him too. He didn’t take any money for Aval Appadithan. But Rudraiah wanted only Kamal. It was like an ‘oru thalai kaadhal’.” This revelation lends another layer to Aval Appadithan, where Kamal Haasan plays an uncompromising, non-commercial filmmaker and can be seen as Rudraiah’s alter ego. In the opening credits sequence, Arun (the Kamal character) – rather his voice, given that we just hear him over a black screen – tells an associate that nothing can be done if “villagers” don’t understand this film, and we hear many other thoughts along these lines, all overlapping, like voices inside the head, until Arun shouts “Silence,” like a director would. Consider these other scenes too. The scene where Arun looks at the audience (us) and says, “Konjam left-la thalli irukkanum,” which Kamal Haasan recently revealed was an injunction for the audience to have leftist (or in Rudraiah’s case, Marxist) leanings; the scene where Manju (Sripriya) enters Arun’s home and finds a huge poster of Mamayev Mound, the statue commemorating the Battle of Stalingrad (speaking of Russia, Arunmozhi told me that The Brothers Karamazov was one of Rudraiah’s favourite books); the scene where Manju asks if there’s lots of money in cinema, and Arun replies, “Adhu mattum ennoda nokkam illai”; the scene where Arun tells someone that he’s going to interview S Janaki and she asks if it’s the Janaki who sang Machaana paatheengala and he says he only knows the Janaki who sang Singaravelane; the scene where a big-name actress says she has no dates to spare for the production company named ‘Kumar Arts’… These appear, today, to be as much about Arun as Rudraiah. Even the character of Manju was based on a woman Rudraiah knew. I asked Arunmozhi if Rudraiah, like Arun, was a bidi smoker. He laughed, and reminded me that Rudraiah liked to live life Kings size. “Even if he had to borrow money, he’d smoke a 555 or a Dunhill.”

The only other actor Rudraiah was interested in was Raghuvaran, whom he had seen in Hariharan’s Ezhavadhu Manidhan. “He considered Raghuvaran an actor of some capability,” Hariharan said. “They shared a similar wavelength.” But then Raghuvaran turned to villainous roles in films like Mr. Bharath, and he acted in a 1987 potboiler called Michael Raj, which became a hit. And Rudraiah lost interest. He dropped Raghuvaran and went back to casting, in his head, Kamal Haasan in his various could-have-been films – like Gautam, or much earlier, an adaptation of Amma Vandhaal, Thi. Janakiraman’s story of a Brahmin boy who discovers that his mother is having an affair. But would such a busy star be able to shave his head and sport a tuft for the duration of the shoot? The question, now, is moot. As always, after a point, things came to a halt.

The only film that fructified after Aval Appadithan, then, was Gramathu Athiyayam, which Arunmozhi said was an attempt to transpose Anna Karenina (another Russian connection!) to a village – but the film, today, apart from the outstanding Ilayaraja songs, looks like a fairly undistinguished love triangle between a man (named Thangavelu), his sullen wife (named Bhavani), and her former lover (named Arun, like the Kamal Haasan character in Aval Appadithan). To Rudraiah’s credit, his film was probably the first to explore this dynamic, which would be seen later that year in Mahendran’s Nenjathai Killadhey, and the next year in K Bhagyaraj’s Andha 7 Naatkal – and it’s interesting that the woman, who is confused about her feelings for both men, doesn’t choose who she ends up with; the end is more the result of a deus ex machina. And there are touches that remind us of the filmmaker Rudraiah wanted to be. After Bhavani’s father arranges her marriage with Thangavelu, she attempts suicide by jumping into a pond. Arun sees this and jumps in after her. And the frame freezes. We don’t see them thrashing about in water, we don’t see the rescue – instead, we cut to the characters sitting by the banks and talking. Only, they don’t move their lips. It’s some sort of Bressonian alienation thing, which is amplified by the affectless acting of newcomers Krishnaveni and Nandakumar.

Alas, this is a charitable way of looking at these performances – and most audiences just saw this as bad acting. (Saritha, who played a small role in Aval Appadithan, was supposed to play Bhavani. She even did a photo shoot, in costume, but finally the dates did not work out.) Arunmozhi told me that Krishnaveni was fairly exposed to world cinema, and that she responded well to Rudraiah’s direction. Unlike other directors of the time, most famously Bharathiraja, Rudraiah wouldn’t act out a scene and tell performers what he wanted. He’d get them into the mood by talking to them about the character’s backstory and mental state and how all this informed the situation currently being filmed. “The cameraman always had to be alert,” Arunmozhi said. “Rudraiah didn’t like to hear excuses like ‘the lighting is not yet done’, and he didn’t give much time to the technicians. He wanted them to be ready when the artists were ready. He was always thinking about the actors.”

According to Hariharan, the film’s problems rose from the cast. Rudraiah signed director Jayabharathi (who’d made Kudisai) to play Arun. (The prospect of hiring a star never arose because Arun is a weak-willed character, the kind of man who’d give up his love because he doesn’t have the courage to talk to his domineering father. Then, as now, the character would be seen as lacking “heroism.”) But after a few days of shooting, Jayabharathi was replaced with Nandakumar, who had joined Rudraiah’s unit as assistant director. “Maybe this was Rudraiah’s way of letting people know that he could make anybody act,” Hariharan said. Eventually, Rudraiah must have realised he wasn’t making the movie he wanted to make. Later, whenever Hariharan would bring up the film, he’d say, “Andha padatha pathi pesa vendaam. Let’s talk about the next film.” Arunmozhi said that part of the problem could have also been that Ananthu, who was the screenwriter, was in Visakhapatnam, with K Balachander’s unit, shooting Ek Duuje Ke Liye, and he couldn’t be present to make changes to the script. These were finally done over the phone, which made it impossible to have the kind of back-and-forth discussion that’s possible when two people are locked in a room, arguing animatedly, feeding off each other’s energy and ironing things out. Arunmozhi later told Rudraiah that he should have postponed the shoot until Ananthu was available on the sets. I asked him if he, too, thought that the casting caused problems. He said, “Had the film worked, no one would have said anything. Because it didn’t, we try to find excuses.”

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.

Spoilers ahead…

G Vasanthabalan’s Kaaviyathalaivan transposes the barebones of Amadeus into the world of Tamil theatre in the pre-Independence period. In that film, we saw the court composer Salieri as a hard-working musician who did things by the book, and he could never transcend mediocrity – and when he laid eyes on the preternaturally gifted Mozart, to whom composing came as easily as breathing, he couldn’t accept the “injustice,” as he saw it. He vowed to destroy Mozart. Here, Prithviraj (as Gomathi) plays the Salieri part, which means that this is really his story – and once again, in what seems to have become a recent, generous habit, Sidddarth plays the lesser role. His Kaali is the Mozart equivalent. He sees a senior actor (Bhairavan, played by Ponvannan) mugging on stage and remarks, contemptuously, that the performance isn’t any good because it’s about projecting the actor rather than the character. (Gomathi, unsurprisingly, is awestruck by the performance. He doesn’t know any better.)

In a poignant moment, we see Gomathi pressing his guru’s (Sivadasa Swamigal, played by Nasser) feet after he’s been passed over for a lead role, which goes to Kaali – the latter, of course, isn’t going to be seen doing anything this… servile; he probably doesn’t need to. Gomathi asks his guru – the way Salieri railed at God – why he seems to prefer Kaali, and the guru (like God) remains silent. He doesn’t have any answers. He just walks away. Kaaviyathalaivan, in a way, is the story of the transformation of a decent man into a monster, simply because fate has dealt him a bad hand, and making things worse is the fact that Kaali’s presence is a constant reminder of what he can never be. (In many of Gomathi’s scenes, he’s facing a mirror, which lends itself to all sorts of readings.) The foundation, thus, is in place for rock-solid melodrama – and this is the kind of film, and the kind of period, where melodrama actually fits in. With films set in the present day, we wince sometimes when things get too loud because we sense a clash in sensibilities. But here, we accept, easily, the huge crescendo of a scene where a heartbroken Kaali curses his teacher.

But Kaaviyathalaivan doesn’t come close to fulfilling its potential. For one, the period setting isn’t terribly convincing, despite a lot of nifty little touches. The opening credits appear, as in the old movies, against a proscenium arch – we see the curtains parted to a side. AR Rahman is credited not for the “isai” but for the “sangeetha iyakkam,” and the Tamil alphabet is used the way it was used then. (Later, we see this again in the way “Varanasi” is spelt.) But these flourishes, perhaps understandably, remain on the surface. You probably cannot be too truthful to the era when you are making a movie for an impatient modern-day audience. A key scene has Kaali demonstrating his involvement with his work by correctly interpreting the meaning of a verse by Arunagirinathar, but on stage, we don’t hear this kind of Tamil – we hear colloquial-sounding couplets with easy rhymes. It’s the same with the music. The film opens with a dedication to legends like SG Kittappa and KB Sundarambal, but a soundtrack filled with those kinds of voices would be booed off the screen today. The singers sound lighter, more contemporary, even while rendering bits like Kaayadha kaanagathe, which was immortalized on screen by TR Mahalingam – again, a voice that would most likely make the audience collapse into giggles.

But the flip side to this “modernization” is that we aren’t pulled into this period. We could be watching one of RS Manohar’s famous stage productions from the eighties. (Indeed, one of the plays staged is Elangeswaran.) Still, this wouldn’t have been a problem had something else drawn us in: the emotions, or the overarching drama. But the characters keep us at a distance. With the exception of Gomathi, to an extent, we never really get into their heads. Almost always, we are asked to accept what they do because it’s happening before our eyes and not because this is what the characters would have done had they mulled over the “what is my motivation?” question. We don’t get any scenes of Kaali and Gomathi interacting on a personal level, so the latter’s increasing animosity and the former’s relentless niceness come to feel contrived. And instead, we are handed a lot of filler – like a bland romantic track between Kaali and a zamindar’s daughter.

The questions keep coming. Why isn’t the arc of Vadivu (Vedhika, who’s surprisingly effective) falling for Kaali more convincingly traced out, and how does she reach the point in her worship of him – and it really does seem like worship – that she’s willing to bear his child after he’s insulted her? Why not devote a little more time to the revelation that Bhairavan is a womanizer, so that this development effectively informs the scene where Kaali is practically kicked out of the troupe, owing to his love affair? Why not show a few Britishers on the roads? (Or is this a conscious decision, to tell us how hermetically sealed off this world of theatre was?) Was Kaali always a nationalist? And even if that is the case, why not go into more detail about Kaali’s decision, while in prison, to stage nationalistic dramas instead of the regular mythologicals? (Some prisoners make this suggestion, and… that’s it – a major development is effected through a couple of lines of dialogue.)

Siddharth and Prithviraj have their moments, but they struggle with ill-defined parts, and with events that are predictable in the extreme. Vasanthabalan sets up these prolonged scenes that are intended as nail-biters – who will get the plum role when Bhairavan departs in a huff? Who will be brought in as a substitute for the ailing Gomathi? – but everyone in the audience knows the answer. After a point, we even know how things are going to end (though there is a small twist in store). There is no denying Vasanthabalan’s desire to make “good cinema,” but like his other films, Kaaviyathalaivan makes us give him an A for effort, even as we rummage down the alphabet when it comes to aspects of the execution.

KEY:

* Amadeus = see here
* isai= music
* sangeetha iyakkam = musical direction
* Kaayadha kaanagathe = 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.

Spoilers ahead…

During the release of his first concert film, Margazhi Raagam, the director Jayendra Panchapakesan said, “A concert is the feeling of an artist performing on stage and an audience sitting down and listening.” By that definition, his new film, One, is not a concert film – though you could certainly make the case that it is one. After all, the film does feature TM Krishna’s vibrantly rendered music. It does feature a hint of his heterodoxy – the opening number is a standalone taanam in the raga Kedaragowlai. And as on the concert stage, we do witness TMK’s ™ gesticulations. There’s the one that looks like he’s demonstrating the workings of a windmill. There’s the one where he’s in front of an invisible potter’s wheel, sculpting invisible clay. There’s the one where he’s alternately reining in and releasing an errant kite. There’s the one where he’s weighing air, the one where he is Moses parting the waters. It’s all very much what you’d expect when you’re inside Music Academy.

Only, you’re in the forests of Nilgiris. There’s no fixed vantage – you see Krishna through the eyes of cameras that swoop and swirl around him. There are no supporting artists – no violinist, no one playing the mridangam or the kanjira. There’s just the singer, the drone of the tambura, and nature. Thanks to the astonishing sound design, all recorded live, this is Carnatic music accompanied by birdcalls, the flapping of wings, the sounds of leaves and wind and ripples on water, and even the rustle of the singer’s shawl, as he adjusts it – if you want to know what cloth sounds like, then this is the movie for you.

We may feel that part of the charm of Carnatic music is the ambient noise, everything from the catching-up conversations two rows ahead of you, to the “Excuse me”s of the unapologetic latecomer shuffling past to an empty seat, to the occasional din from the mic, like a neglected child acting up to get attention. This casualness, this communality, this sense of commingling with the everyday, is what makes this music what it is, unlike Western Classical Music, which demands that you take a vow of silence before you seat yourself.

And yet, there is something to be said for listening to Carnatic Music with a vow of silence. The music comes into sharper focus. The voice sounds different – it’s mellower. This may be the result of not having to project to the last row in the auditorium – it’s the music world’s equivalent of the difference between stage acting and screen acting. This may also be the effect of better-quality technology – we actually hear the grain in Krishna’s voice in the lower registers of the Muthuswami Dikshitar composition Jambupathe.

It’s difficult to say what these surroundings have done for Krishna. The film’s tag line says “Experience oneness with music” – but surely there are times on stage he’s experienced this oneness, when he’s slipped into a trance and everything around him, and everyone, has disappeared. And in this format, shorn of the usual distractions, the audience feels what it must be like to be in that trance – we experience some of this oneness. Something so pure emerges from this experiment that there were times I wished even the tambura hadn’t been there, that the film had just been about a voice in the woods.

The minor niggles are easily brushed away. I could have lived without the preamble where a voiceover sets up the film for us, putting into words what we’re perfectly capable of experiencing. The title cards between the songs are equally unnecessary. They, too, try to pin down the singer’s experience, and what’s expansive and magical in the mind becomes trite when expressed in words. But the bigger problem is the lushness of the visual treatment. The camerawork is breathtaking – and yet, there’s the sense, sometimes, that this isn’t nature so much as nature as imagined by a high-priced landscape architect. Each song comes with its own colour scheme (blue for Jambupathe, gold for Bruhi mukundeti, green for Varugalaamo), with costumes in complementary colours. And while it’s refreshing to see a Carnatic musician perform in pants and shirts with unbuttoned cuffs, the picture-postcard aesthetics threaten to overwhelm the unvarnished mission of the project, which is to strip the music down to its essence. When you see Krishna seated just so on a rock, with a shawl draped just so across his lap, the mist snaking past him just so, you may find yourself wishing for surroundings more Spartan. That wish, finally, is granted during the moving rendition of the Thiruvasagam verse Pullagi poodai puzhuvaai. Krishna is seated in what looks like a patch of mud, and as the experience turns less visual than aural, the music, the setting, the lyrics, the listeners, all coalesce into a singular experience, the one of the title.

KEY:

* Margazhi Raagam = see here
* taanam in Kedaragowlai= see here, from 17:40 onwards
* Jambupathe = see here
* Bruhi mukundeti = see here
* Varugalaamo = see here
* Thiruvasagam = 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.

This is a Book Club event and entry is by invite only, so do let me know in advance if you need an invite. Look forward to seeing at least some of you there.

Spoilers ahead…

One question we ask of most Rajinikanth movies, as we exit them, is this: Why aren’t they better? As a star, he occupies a universe of his own, so budgetary issues can’t be the problem – you could ask for the moon and get it. With him on board, there’s going to be little trouble getting the best supporting actors, the best technicians – heck, you can hire the wizards who choreograph the stunts for the Bond movies. And his films have become biennial events, if that – Lingaa marks his return to the screen four years after Enthiran (the animated Kochadaiiyaan doesn’t really count). Isn’t that enough time to write a rock-solid script that does his stature justice while also satisfying his fans? Why, then, do these outings come off less like movies than a hastily put-together dispensing mechanism for a Rajini fix? Take a puff during the opening weekend. The effects will last two years.

But consider, also, the director KS Ravikumar’s plight. It’s hard enough making a movie with any big star, with all the calculations that go into what the star’s on-screen character can be allowed to do. Imagine, then, accommodating all the must-haves of a Rajinikanth movie. You have to pay tribute to the past (here we have lyrics from Baasha, a snatch of the title song from Billa). You have to look forward to the future, which involves the inevitable speculation about a political career. (This film’s plot is about a dam that will irrigate the drought-stricken lands of Tamil Nadu’s farmers, and there’s a reference to a Supreme Court ruling. We’re told that Rajinikanth has behind him “makkal sakthi,” people’s power. We’re also told he can become governor, or end up in the Parliament.) You have to try and work in socially relevant issues as well. (This film, in one stretch, tackles the issue of caste.)

You have to think up punch dialogues that will outlive the movie. (It’s unlikely the ones here will last. Sample: “Vaazhkayile edhuvume easy ille. Muyarchi panna edhuvume kashtam ille.”) You have to accommodate the actor’s interest in spirituality, which means weaving in lines that refer to God. (Yes, fans, there’s apparently someone Rajinikanth himself considers a higher power.) You have to have scenes where the Rajinikanth character gets emotional and ends up making great sacrifices for the well-being of the other characters, and, alongside, you have to have scenes where the other characters burst into tears and remark how great the Rajinikanth character is. And you also need a heroine or two. (Two, in this case – Anushka Shetty and Sonakshi Sinha.) No, this isn’t about Rajinikanth’s age. After all, if an ageing Sean Connery could play Bond in Never Say Never Again, there’s no reason to get worked up about Rajinikanth romancing much-younger actresses. But there’s the pesky problem about his image, which will not let him strike any real sparks with these heroines – he has to keep them at an arm’s length. And this does the romantic tracks no favours.

With all this, it’s a small miracle that the person summoned to make a “Rajini movie” doesn’t turn chalk-white with fear and flee to a foreign country under an assumed name. But that cannot excuse the films. Lingaa is talky and overlong (nearly three hours), plagued with pacing issues, and – worse – it tells a story that lays no claims to our emotions. Rajinikanth plays two roles. In the present-day portions, he’s a thief, and a lot of time is wasted on this character’s doings (one of them a heist involving a tennis ball, balloons, and sticker pottu) till we get to a British-era flashback that’s this film’s reason for being. Here, Rajinikanth plays a munificent king who’s also a Cambridge-educated civil engineer (weren’t they all?) – he decides to build that dam.

Of course, there are people who don’t want that dam built, and the chief villain is a Brit whose name I never caught. That’s another problem. Rajinikanth’s films work best when he’s butting horns with a strong adversary – the deranged Neelambari in Padayappa, or Rajinikanth himself, playing a robotic terror in Enthiran. The villain here is unintentionally hilarious (just watch him wrap his tongue around words like “nayavanjagam”). With the preordained outcome, the stakes are negligible.

It’s easy to overlook the inaccuracies (though with a production this big, you’d think they’d do more research) – at a palace ball, we hear symphonic music when the musicians on stage are playing guitars and drums; in the flashback, set in 1939, we see repeated references to Josephs Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which wasn’t published until a decade later. But it’s harder to forgive the near-complete lack of entertainment, save for a late-in-the-day action sequence where Rajinikanth jumps on a motorbike and does what we pay to see Rajinikanth do. The theatre erupted at this point – out of sheer relief, it seemed to me, at finally having something worth cheering about.

Oh, there was one other scene that ushered in much excitement. It’s when we learn it’s the birthday of the Rajinikanth character in the flashback. A cake is wheeled out. People sing the birthday song. Fans watching Lingaa on its day of release, December 12 (Rajinikanth’s birthday), will enjoy being in the superstar’s vicinity as he cuts his birthday cake. But that’s just a temporary high. Next time, how about a film that leaves us with happy memories on other days as well?

KEY:

* Enthiran = see here
* lyrics from Baasha = see here
* the title song from Billa = see here
* “Vaazhkayile edhuvume easy ille. Muyarchi panna edhuvume kashtam ille.” = Nothing’s easy in life. But if you try, nothing’s difficult.
* Never Say Never Again = see here
* pottu = bindi; or this
* nayavanjagam = deceit; treachery

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.

This is a response by Rahini David to the review of Lingaa. It’s a counter to an accusation (by another commenter) that Shankar’s films are worse than the average masala-film in terms of the regressive concepts they put forth. Such good points here that, in my opinion (happy?), it deserved to be rescued from languishing in the comments section and become its own post. Here goes…

I agree with all the problem parts of Shankar movies but I have to disagree with “the problem with Shankar is that I find his scripts being even worse than the average masala-film in terms of the regressive concepts they put forth.” What average masala film are we talking about here? Let us just a few Rajini movies

• Kai Kodukkum Kai – The wikipedia entry says “Revathi plays the role of a blind girl who is raped by the villain, and Rajini her husband forgives her for that and they continue to live together”. Nuff said.

  Thambiku Entha Ooru – Breaking into a woman’s house and kissing is a punishment. It teaches her a lesson.

  Maaveeran – She whips him. So he whips her. So she kisses him and asks for a kiss back. (That is how I remember this movie) But then again BSDM exists and apparently there is a market for it.

  Guru Sishyan – Rajini commands Prabhu to romance and seduce Sita so that they can later bully Sita’s dad. So Sita can fall in love with Prabhu but can’t fall out of love after she realises that he romanced her for manipulative reasons? She doesn’t even get offended. Is romance a cul-de-sac thing for women?

  Kodi Parakuthu – Isn’t this the movie in which Rajini bullies Amala to lick ice-cream off him? I can’t think of a strong enough word to discribe how I felt seeing that movie

  Annamalai – “You saw me naked. You will have to marry me”

  Mannan – Slapping to teach a lesson. And the movie he gets to say “Mothathula Pombala Pombalaya Irukanum”

  Yejaman – Rajini and Napolean fight over who gets to have Meena. Nobody asks her who she is interested in. This movie also had Aishwarya claiming to have slept Rajini just to say “The man can fuck”. It is of supreme importance in this movie.

  Valli – Rajini attempted a “why kill yourself instead of killing the rapist”, but the movie comes across badly as it fails to distinguish between Rape and just plain old premarital sex.

  Veera – Rajini is deeply in love with Meena and so plans to drop a goldfish into her blouse. He plans it out meticulously with a bunch of his friends

  Padayappa – Sitara is in love with Nasser and will remain in love with him even inspite of the fact that he is a dowry demanding what-not. Apparently falling out of love is just not done by women in tamil cinema. It is almost implied that it is not even possible

  And these movies provide the template for future Rajini-wannabes. I am not defending Shankar here. But he is not the worst one out there. That is unfair.

Spoilers ahead…

The title of Mysskin’s new movie, Pisaasu, suggests a change of pace. After years of dealing with stories about dread, you think the director has opted for a genre – horror – that will allow him to ratchet up the queasiness quotient a couple of notches. But despite the presence of the titular spirit, Pisaasu is very much a companion piece to Anjaathey or Yuddham Sei. Here, too, we have a story that revolves around dark, mystifying occurrences (at interval point, the screen literally turns black) and a procedural-based investigation that, by the end, brings everything to light. Of course, longtime Mysskin watchers will also include the other aspects – visuals, themes, tropes – that position this film firmly in the continuum of his oeuvre. (You may skip the following paragraph if you’re familiar with these signature elements, though a full listing would require an essay of its own.)

The frozen poses. The scenes set in auto-rickshaws and subways, and featuring flower sellers and blind beggars. Characters whose hairstyle obscures part of the face (Prasanna in Anjaathey, Pooja Hegde in Mugamoodi). A character prone to philosophizing, and who is always surrounded by acolytes, is named Plato. Nods to Ilayaraja and a background score that emphasizes solo-violin passages – the protagonist is a violinist who plays mostly sad-sounding pieces. A static camera that records people entering and exiting the frame, and a top-angle shot that gazes at a character railing at God. Also, the unusual selection of shots. You’d think the scene where someone buys a bottle of booze would warrant a wide shot that takes in the liquor shop and a few drunks sprawled around it, and that the scene where a father breaks down upon hearing about his daughter’s death would present itself in a close-up (all the better to record all those tormented emotions on his face) – but it’s the opposite. We see a close shot of extended arms waiting to purchase alcohol, and the father is shown at the far end of a wide shot – he’s so far away we don’t even see his face. Then there are what I like to call the Zen shots. In a scene where a key witness is being interrogated, the camera isn’t even interested in the man – it wanders to someone nearby, washing his hands after a meal. Even the event that kick-starts the film recalls the scene in Onaayum Aattukuttiyum or Anjaathey where the protagonist (Siddharth, played by Naga) stumbles on an accident victim and rushes him (or her, in this case; she’s Bhavani, and she’s played by Prayaga) to the hospital. At one point, a beggar with a harmonium plays the old song Vaadikkai marandhadhum yeno, and you have to laugh – could this be Mysskin’s admission of habits that simply won’t go away?

But these habits are what make his films so compelling. One could argue that Mysskin’s films are essentially rearrangements of his pet visuals and themes and tropes, and part of the fun is waiting to see what form these will now assume. But at least one of his habits isn’t in here, the visual with the woman in the yellow sari. Well, there is a woman in a yellow sari, but I’ll be damned if I know what her function is. (That procedural-based investigation, along with the reason for the apparently random shot with centipedes, will have to wait for future viewings of this film.) The director, instead, turns to a couple of other colours. There’s green – in the name of an auto-rickshaw driver who’s mockingly called Pachai, in the tint of the bottle that brings a fight sequence to an unexpected end, and in the numerous glimpses of vegetation, which sometimes frame the shots. And there’s red – the colour of a pencil, a car, a turban, and also a herring. File away the early shot where Pachai, driving his auto-rickshaw, almost collides with the bike in front of him – you’ll need it for later, when you see it in a new light.

Pisaasu is nominally about Siddharth trying to get rid of the ghost that’s taken residence in his house – but the film is really Mysskin’s idea of a love story, which means it’s light years away from your typical love story. Is there another filmmaker whose work is driven less by the love between hero and heroine and more by the emotions between friends, or brother and sister, or parents and children? I’ll leave it to you to discover what kind of love story this film is, but I will tell you that it upends the trope of love at first sight. (Indeed, the shot that opens the film is that of a pair of eyes.) Those expecting to be scared out their wits, therefore, are bound to be disappointed. This is a ghost a boy could fall in love with. This is a ghost a father could fall in love with. This is a ghost a mother-in-law could fall in love with. Heck, given its views on smoking and drinking, this is a ghost Anbumani Ramadoss could fall in love with. (The film is unexpectedly rich in humour, and the joke I enjoyed most is the mandatory “sarakku scene” of Tamil cinema being turned on its head. Never have bottles seemed so ominous – the beer drips like blood.)

If there’s a complaint, it’s that this love is more an abstract conceit than something that worms its way into our hearts – we don’t quite feel the emotions we’re meant to feel. But this is also a function of the formal nature of the filmmaking, where everything is stylized, almost ritualized. It’s not just the performances that hover somewhere between realism and artifice, something akin to performance art. Mysskin may be the only filmmaker around whose violence is rendered as some sort of poetry. Take the scene of the accident. Instead of screeching brakes and sounds of metal crunching into metal, we get slo-mo visions of grace. And this grace extends to the characters as well. A brute husband is helped by the very women he’s brutalized. Siddharth empathizes with a father (Radharavi, who aces a tour de force scene that has him on all fours) even though he has genuine reasons to hate the man. Even a biryani vendor – a man we don’t see for more than five seconds – has his moment of grace, when his assistant chides him that he’s adding too much meat to a plate and he says, “Let the man eat well.”

A film’s fate at the box office is no concern of the critic – and yet, I walked away from Pisaasu wanting it to do well. We need films like this to do well. With most of our movies, we sense pages from the script being transposed, mechanically, to screen – there’s so little that can be called cinema. Mysskin’s cinema is all cinema, and it appears to well up from some place deep within him, some place even he may not be aware of. And he’s at a point now where he can execute the must-haves of commercial cinema in increasingly inventive ways. There’s just one song, and it’s extraordinarily shot – a reminder to other directors that you don’t need to seek beauty in the Alps; you can find it in the heart of the city, if you have a vision and an alert camera. (The framing is exquisite.) And I love the way Mysskin shoots action, which comes with an almost existentialist tinge. There was a time when Mysskin’s movies had stretches that could be termed amateurish, but with Onaayum Aattukuttiyum and Pisaasu, he has overcome those excesses. The filmmaking is more than clean. It’s – and I’m not saying this lightly – pure.

KEY:

* Pisaasu = ghost; evil spirit
* Anjaathey = see here
* Yuddham Sei = see here
* Mugamoodi = see here
* almost ritualized = see this scene from Onaayum Aattukuttiyum
* Vaadikkai marandhadhum yeno = see here
* woman in a yellow sari = 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.

‘Avargal’ is a good place to begin analysing K Balachander’s unique, complicated and quite amazing love for his female characters.

As reductive as it sounds, is there one film that sums up K Balachander? It isn’t easy – not when there are so many to choose from, but maybe we can settle on Avargal, which examines the life of Anu (Sujatha) as she deals with the affections of three men. One of these men is Ramanathan, played by Rajinikanth. Villains have existed since the beginning of cinema, but here was someone who enjoyed doing to people what a kid with a magnifying glass would do to an ant on a sunny day. Except, he wasn’t obvious. He wasn’t a Nambiar wielding a whip. He didn’t let you see that he was holding the magnifying glass, and he didn’t let you know that he regarded you as an ant. You ended up fried all the same. Anu certainly did. At the end of the film, she called Ramanathan a sadist. It was a new word in Tamil cinema – not because of the Englishness of the word, though that brought in its element of newness too, but because emotional sadism, the kind Ramanathan specialised in, was new.

In a way, KB was like Ramanathan. I am not going as far as suggesting he was a sadist, but he loved to put women under a magnifying glass – to study them, yes, but also to watch them squirm under heated circumstances. He made them shoulder monstrous burdens and made them bear those burdens willingly, and then, as if as a reward, he led them, again and again, to the brink of what looked like a happy ending, only to kick them over the ledge into an abyss. Take Arangetram, for instance, the story of a Brahmin woman who becomes a prostitute to provide for her large, impoverished family. (The largeness of this family is illustrated through a simple dinner-time shot, where the father is seated on the floor, as if at the head of the table, and his children sit in two apparently endless rows on either side – there’s a separate essay waiting to be written about the mise-en-scène in KB’s cinema.) At the end, when her family finds out and throws her out on the street, she is rescued by a good-hearted acquaintance whose son is willing to marry her. But she loses her mind. Happily ever after – so near, yet so far.

But in many other ways, KB was like Janardhanan, the character Kamal Haasan played in Avargal. He adored women, respected them, took care of them, nourished them, groomed them, cheered for them when they turned independent, and, yes, loved them. To see his work is to see a filmmaker who worshipped women, who essentially demolished the myth that a film needed a hero to be a hit, and who did not mind that his female characters often came off stronger than the males. Look at the insufferably male-dominated (hero-dominated, really) Tamil cinema today, and look back at KB’s cinema. In Moondru Mudichu and Manmadha Leelai, the hero is taught a lesson at the end. In Sollathan Ninaikkiren, the hero is pursued by three women, and yet, by the end, they marry others – he ends up all alone. In Achamillai Achamillai, the hero winds up at the sharp end of a knife held by the heroine, his wife. Few directors, before or after, have endowed their women characters with so much agency.

This blend of Ramanathan and Janardhanan – or Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan, if you will; they are, after all, his two most famous protégés – is the thing that makes KB’s work endlessly fascinating to analyse. His films, today, don’t look like just films. They come off like autobiographies. And his women characters – not just the heroines, but also the supporting characters like Chandra, played by ‘Fatafat’ Jayalakshmi in Aval Oru Thodarkadhai – come off like the fantasies of a man who was brought up in rather conservative times but yearned to liberate his women, and ended up swinging wildly between these extremes. Chandra, for instance, is all happy-go-lucky and who-gives-a-fish in the film’s early portions, but by the end, she falls gratefully at the feet of the man who says he will marry her. Looking at the film today, some may sneer that the bohemian has been tamed by tradition, but the right way to look at the film is through the eyes of the audiences of 1974, the year it was released, when even the existence of such a bohemian was a miracle.

There is another man in Avargal, Bharani (Ravi Kumar). He loves Anu too. He was Anu’s boyfriend earlier, before she married Ramanathan. And he becomes her boyfriend again after she divorces Ramanathan, even as a love-struck Janardhanan looks on hopefully from the sidelines. The culmination of these loves plays out during the exquisite MS Viswanathan number Angum ingum, where Anu falls ill and is tended to by all three men. One of them measures out medicine. Another squeezes juice from oranges. The third cooks and takes care of her child. Anu will end up in the abyss, but at this moment, there seems to be no luckier woman than the K Balachander heroine.

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.

Spoilers ahead…

A young drug-cartel employee named Siva is shown to be a bad shot – such a bad shot that he misses even the outermost circle of the target board in front of him. (The bullet pathetically pierces the surrounding wooden frame instead.) A little later, Siva is shown to be having an affair with a cop’s wife. Someone trails him and sees him loitering outside the cop’s house, and after the cop leaves, he looks around furtively and goes past the doors the wife holds open for him. We don’t believe a minute of it. We don’t believe that Siva is a drug-cartel employee. We don’t believe that he’s a bad shot. And we don’t believe that he is having an affair. We don’t believe these things because Siva is played by Arya, and the hero, in Tamil cinema, cannot be painted in these colours. Sure enough, the scene soon arrives where Siva aims his gun at the same target board and pumps bullets through the very hole that his earlier bullet made. And then he repeats the action with his left hand. Now we’re talking.

We discover, soon enough, what Siva really does for a living – though he’s not, as his neighbor Usha (Hansika Motwani) imagines, a software engineer. Why does she imagine this? I have no answer. Heck, the director Magizh Thirumeni probably has no answer. The poor man had to shoehorn Usha into his story because you cannot make a movie without a heroine, and once you hire a heroine, you have to give her something to do – like imagining Siva is a software engineer… in the US. Apparently, it’s written in her horoscope that she will marry someone who lives abroad. After two minutes with Usha, you begin to wonder if tucked away in that horoscope is the revelation that one of the million bullets zinging through this action-adventure will end up in her skull. I realize that sounds harsh, but consider the alternative: putting up with scenes like the one where Usha is on the terrace and her unassuming mother walks through saris hung out to dry on clotheslines and asks her to help her father carry a water can into the house. This is what passes for a middle-class touch, I suppose. But imagining a world where Hansika Motwani has come to embody kitchen-sink realism made me wish for a bullet through the skull.

Luckily, Usha isn’t given too much to do. She goes through the motions of one song and disappears for long stretches. And this is when you realize that the younger Tamil directors are slowly adopting the Hollywood model, which is the only model that works when it comes to gritty action-adventures. (There’s just one other song, an item number that plays in the background as our attention is drawn to more important events.) There’s a best friend-type character, but he isn’t reduced to nanbenda clichés – he’s just one of the emotional components contributing to Siva’s mission. Important characters end up killed. The ending isn’t quite the happily-ever-after you expect. And even when the word sarakku comes up, it isn’t an excuse for a jolly visit to a TASMAC bar. It means what the word really means: goods, consignment. This is, after all, a story about a 1000 kilo drug deal. (The druglords are played, with appropriate amounts of hamming, by Ashutosh Rana and Ashish Vidyarthi.)

Meaghamann could have used a more charismatic hero, but it helps that Siva is a grade-A brooder, not given to effusive displays of emotion. Anupama Kumar compensates somewhat as a cop given to declarations like “The game is getting deadlier.” Indeed, the director actually makes us believe that Siva is in danger. Given the general invincibility of the hero in our cinema, this is no mean accomplishment – a stretch involving enemies closing in on Siva is particularly well done. There’s nothing distinctive here, but sometimes all we ask for is that the film hums along proficiently. The plotting is pretty tight too, save for bits like the one that involves a random phone-video. More impressively, the director doesn’t seek to pander to family audiences. He understands that a certain amount of brutality is necessary in these films, and he unleashes scenes of corpse-kicking and chainsaw-abetted-limb-hacking and a scene with a maimed eyeball that probably has Buñuel chuckling. It’s time we got rid of the generic dishoom-dishoom.

KEY:

* Meaghamann = captain of the ship (that’s what Wiki says)

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.

Spoilers ahead…

The ignition point of every love story is the stretch where the hero and heroine meet – and in Kayal, the director Prabhu Solomon gives us a wonderfully orchestrated sequence. Aaron (Chandran) and his friend Socrates (Vincent) have unknowingly abetted a crime – at least, it’s a crime in the eyes of the men who bring these two to the local zamindar’s house. We know something is up because, as they enter the house, we hear the same Ilayaraja song (Enge en jeevane) we heard earlier, when Aaron told Socrates that he was waiting to fall in love. But once there, the men begin to beat up Aaron and Socrates. The mix of moods is amazing. Along with this violence, we get a lot of comedy – the reason for an old woman’s speechlessness is hilarious, and a batty old man brings the house down with his spaced-out demeanor. There’s drama as well, involving caste, family honour. And above all, there’s melodrama, when Aaron falls for the servant of the house, Kayal (Anandhi), and ends up in a situation where he is doused with petrol and she holds the match. It’s literally the ignition point.

There’s a lot to like about Prabhu Solomon’s movies. He takes on refreshingly offbeat premises. He makes earthy stories set far away from the cities, and he doesn’t subscribe to the notion that stories set in villages are necessarily drenched in blood. His violence is more emotional – he deals with love stories. He uses actors who look like real people, not glammed-up stars who’ve gone de-glam in order to play “villagers”. (The fresh-faced Anandhi looks lovely, and she performs pretty well too.) I loved the conception of Aaron and Socrates as two homeless youths who take up temporary jobs and then blow up all their money on grand tours. They go far north and marvel at stalactites. Then they visit the Taj Mahal. There’s a moving reason behind this wanderlust, and it has to do with Aaron’s father – but this is where the problems with this director come to the fore.

He cannot resist overstatement – and I’m not just talking about the cut to a poster of Kaadhal when a love-struck Aaron comes looking for Kayal. Take the scene at the railway station where Aaron and Socrates are revealed to be the proverbial “free birds.” A few dozen lines have already left us with this impression. (And these aren’t just lines – they’re more like the slogans you’d find on motivational posters.) Then, Socrates points at pigeons on the platform, and when they fly away he exclaims that they’re like these birds, only without wings. And we’re still not done. A song follows, and it goes… Paravayaa parakkirom. The tunes by D Imman aren’t bad (though not as memorable as the ones he gave for Prabhu Solomon’s previous film, Kumki), but there are too many songs and too little writing to fill up the stretches in between.

The film appears to be an attempt to tell a story whose beats we are familiar with, the only difference being the setting – the tsunami of 2004. (It’s quite nicely rendered. For a change, they seem to have spent money on the special effects.) The elements, destiny, even God (manifest as the sun peeking through a cloud) – all have a part to play. And if we’re being really charitable, we could say that this near-mythical superstructure accounts for the too-easy contrivances – despite being separated, Kayal and Aaron are always just an accidental meeting away. But that still leaves us with an enormous problem. The central emotion that’s supposed to drive all this, the great love between Aaron and Kayal, is too wispy to warrant all this drama, which is constantly underlined by a score that just won’t stop. We’re meant to feel their pain, their pining, but all we feel is the film straining to be an epic.

KEY:

* Kayal = carp (as in, the fish); usually used in names to denote the beauty of a woman’s eyes

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.

Recalling the Tamil films of 2014 that, even if not great in the overall sense, stood out for some reason(s). Here, in alphabetical order.

1. Appuchi Gramam: A meteor threatens to annihilate a tiny village in a clever little subversion of the Hollywood disaster epic. Stuffed with a ton of clichés, yet the sci-fi backdrop makes them fun again.
2. Arima Nambi: No flashy cutting. No mood-killing romance. No comedy track. Just tense, atmospheric mood in a solidly crafted conspiracy thriller. May not be great art, but a supremely well-engineered machine.
3. Burma: A lot of attitude, atmosphere, flavour, good writing and wry comedy in this crazy-noir movie about car thefts. Makes you so high on how crime can entertain that you almost forgot it doesn’t pay.
4. Goli Soda: A sequel in spirit to Pasanga, this gloriously inventive masala movie featuring teenagers is a terrific example of how, with a little imagination, you can make a film whose appeal is broad without insulting the audience.
5. Inam: As a drama, Santosh Sivan’s latest, about the conflict in Sri Lanka, is middling. But the near-surreal imagery is a powerful representation of the horrors undergone by the citizenry and the resignation with which they regard life.
6. Jeeva: The second half is pretty much a disaster, but there’s much to like earlier in this story of a small-time cricketer who yearns for a big break. When he feels like it, Suseenthiran is capable of a casual kind of greatness.
7. Jigarthanda: The coolest, cult-est film of the year is a meta movie about moviemaking as well as a gangster epic. The two strands don’t quite cohere, but who’s complaining when the result is so exquisitely written, staged and performed?
8. Kathai Thiraikathai Vasanam Iyakkam: Another meta movie about making movies – can you believe this? And from Parthiban, who dispenses with a conventional plot where each scene locks into the next one and just dives from moment to uproarious moment.
9. Madras: A familiar story about jobless youths (think Sathya meets Subramaniyapuram) is elevated by magnificent filmmaking. The film’s “horror” element is possibly the year’s most under-examined subtext.
10. Nedunchalai: A rock-solid B-movie that, thankfully, doesn’t want to elevate our taste, ennoble our souls. All it wants to do is tell a muscular story with craft and confidence. What a bloody relief.
11. Nerungi Vaa Muthamidaathey: Whose story is this? Where is it headed? The most interesting aspect of this drama is that it keeps us guessing. What the narrative loses in momentum, it gains in texture, thanks to the sprawl of the characters that results in lovely non sequiturs.
12. Oru Kanniyum Moonu Kalavaanigalum: Part sci-fi, part myth, and part one of those what-if movies where we’re invited to wonder how things might turn out had someone set out to do them a minute later. It’s hardly perfect, but there’s always a genuine sense of playful invention.
13. Pisaasu: An easy candidate for the film of the year, Mysskin’s latest promises us horror-movie chills and, instead, turns into the year’s most haunting love story. The filmmaking is more than clean. It’s pure.
14. Poovarasam Peepee: This coming-of-age story should have been much better, but it can’t be dismissed either. There is a mind at work here, and a voice.
15. Poriyaalan: An action-thriller marked by superbly economic storytelling, lingering grace notes, plus texture – you can taste the grit.
16. Saivam: A toothsome little fable revolving around a pet rooster and a large, loving, and very loveable family. Wry humour, terrific ensemble acting, wonderfully observant writing – a mainstream entertainer without an iota of cynical calculation.
17. Thegidi: A tight paranoia thriller (also featuring a nicely written romance) where the protagonist finds himself deeper and deeper in a conspiracy. The deliberate pacing ensures plenty of tense moments.
18. Thirudan Police: The “appa sentiment” served with a twist. After the father dies, we think we’re in for a typical revenge saga, but instead, the hero’s emotions become the target of a running gag. The climax is a riot.
19. Vaayai Moodi Pesavum: A disease called Dumb Flu strikes, and everyone falls silent. The terrific conceit isn’t fully exploited, but the film is an example of how a smart filmmaker can imbue even a “light entertainer” with a strong sensibility. The YouTube mashup is an instant classic.
20. Velayilla Pattathari: The year’s best star vehicle is a Selvaraghavan movie you can take your mother (and her mother) to. Yes, it gradually becomes cliché-heavy, but complaining is futile when both actor-Dhanush and star-Dhanush are in such fine form.

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.

Spoilers ahead…

Is there another filmmaker as fascinated by the double role as Shankar? (Even the frivolous Jeans is riveted by the sight of twins.) Where others employ this trope as merely a means to magnify the hero – see two stars for the price of one! – or maybe to flesh out the separated-at-birth scenario so popular in the masala format, Shankar uses the device to split open the protagonist’s psyche. In films like Mudhalvan and Gentleman – where it’s not two roles so much as two faces of the character (journalist/Chief Minister; mild-mannered entrepreneur by day/vigilante by night) – the second “character” is made to do things the first one cannot, and in Sivaji, the bald-headed persona was essentially the hero assuming another “face” in order to continue where he left off. This split was carried out to the extreme in Anniyan and Enthiran, where the other roles weren’t just assumed by the protagonist but birthed by him. In the former, which gave the leading man three roles to play, the driving force was a psychiatric disorder, and in the latter, the Evil Twin was “invented” by the Good Twin as a reflection of himself, in his own form. For all its problems, Enthiran marked a departure point in Shankar’s career because, for the first time, the second role wasn’t that of a vigilante or a do-gooder out to clean up society, but a confused, gone-berserk manifestation of the protagonist’s id. All of which is another way of saying that I had quite a few expectations of I, which arrives four years after Enthiran, after teasing us with trailers featuring a regular-looking Vikram and a hunchbacked avatar.

But I is just more of the same – it’s the old vigilante scenario, except that the villains don’t represent a microcosm of society. This time, it’s purely personal. The evildoers in I mess up the hero’s life and he embarks on revenge. After a point, the film begins to remind us of Aboorva Sagotharargal, where a noxious substance results in the hero’s “deformity,” and when he discovers how he came to be this way, he doles out punishment in a variety of inventive ways. (Even the parrot from that film finds an equivalent: a faithful dog.) For a while, I is innocuous fun. We meet Lingesan (Vikram), a gym rat who’s in love with a model (Diya, played by Amy Jackson) he keeps seeing in magazines and on TV and on billboards. As his best friend Velu, Santhanam contributes a few laughs and keeps things light, and Vikram, too, does no heavy lifting outside the gym. He is relaxed, charming, and he draws us to this nobody who wants to be a somebody. In an amusing scene, he participates in a body-building championship and dances to Azeem-o-shaan shahenshah, his “choreography” made up entirely of poses that show off his muscles. There’s more showing off, courtesy the technical departments, in the Mersalaayiten music video – the song’s pep is complemented by a series of well-imagined, well-staged visual effects.

But once Lingesan meets Diya and gets a makeover, the film turns tedious. Since Anniyan, Shankar has run out of ideas for storylines for the “normal guy” character – we need to wait for the second half in order to get to the real story, with the “other guy” character, and so we bide time with lavishly shot (but very generic-looking) song sequences (music by AR Rahman) and a patience-sapping love angle. Shankar’s never been the most sensitive of filmmakers, and there’s never much use in expecting these “mass films” to depict politically correct attitudes (Diya’s suitors reject her because she may not be a virgin) – still, the track with a transgender makeup artist (Ojas M Rajani) made me squirm. Things become slightly better once the focus shifts to the hunchback, but even these portions come with a strong sense of déjà vu. There’s no urgency, no tension, not one surprising moment in the narrative – even the mastermind-villain’s identity is evident from the minute we set eyes on him.

There’s a hint of subtext in the beauty-and-the-beast premise. I is set largely in the world of advertising, where looks matter, and the biggest suffering one can endure, according to the film, is the loss of these looks. But it’s understandable that these themes aren’t elaborated – no film made on this kind of budget, with gargantuan images from PC Sreeram, can afford to traffic in that kind of nuance. What’s surprising, though, is that even the entertainment aspects are glossed over. There’s a great masala moment that involves undone shoelaces, but elsewhere – in the fights, in the revenge scenarios – there’s a distinct lack of freshness. A story this pulpy should have been way more exciting.

And moving, too. In over three exhausting hours, we get just one human-sized moment, when Lingesan collapses in the gym due to over-exertion and we sense his desperation to win the championship. Everywhere else, I leaves us with the impression of watching a giant machine grinding away. In films like Mudhalvan, Shankar made us feel for his characters. Here, there’s nothing to make us care – nothing, except Vikram’s performance as the hunchback. Despite the pustules on his face, the swollen lower lip, the horrifying emaciation – the makeup and the physical transformation are both top-notch – he does his darnedest to make us care for the character, using his voice, his eyes. But beyond a point he has nothing to do, nothing to play – he’s all dressed up and he has nowhere to go.

KEY:

• Shankar’s fascination with double roles = 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.

Spoilers ahead…

The ideal Sundar C movie would last 30 minutes. Don’t believe me? Then do the math yourself. Aambala, for instance, goes on for some two-and-a-half hours. The songs take up about half an hour, and they add nothing – despite the fact that the tunes by Hiphop Thamizha are really catchy. Take away the protracted, been-there-done-that action sequences, and that’s another half-hour gone. That leaves us with an hour-and-a-half of narrative, which is not why we go to a Sundar C movie. (The plot is about the protagonist’s attempt to reunite his family… or something.) Take away an hour of this, and you’re left with 30 minutes of pretty decent comedy – no, not the revelation that Hansika plays a Botany student, but some crack one-liners from Santhanam and a nice little set piece involving a closed window and a stolen bottle of water. The question, as always with these films, is this: Why should we endure the other two hours, when some kind soul will, at some point, put up on YouTube the 30 minutes that really matter?

Since my profession does not allow me the option of waiting that long, I suppose I have to formulate some thoughts around this film. I’ll begin by wondering why Vishal, after Pandiya Naadu and Naan Sigappu Manidhan, is back to this kind of masala. Well, the answer is obvious. These are safer bets. Still… Also, is there a hint of a political career in the offing? Consider his character’s (named Saravanan, not that it matters) retort to a political underling who asks, “Enga edathukku vara aasai padareengala?” Saravanan says, “Unga velaya neenga ozhunga senjaa naan yaen saar unga edathukku varren?” Maybe this is just something that’s trying too hard to be a punch line. Still, you cannot rule out the other possibility. I felt a little sorry for Vishal, though. His name came up first – he is the aambala, after all – but Hansika’s name (her character is called Maya, not that it matters) got more whistles.

You slowly see why. In one scene, the pallu of her sari gets caught on something and slips, and Saravanan, on behalf of the teenage males in the audience, opens his mouth wide, as if his most fervent prayers have been answered. Later, Maya goes jogging and the camera stops to gaze at her behind – Saravanan’s reaction suggests he’s just been confronted with the marvels of the Sistine Chapel. A little ahead, we find Maya having a furtive phone conversation with Saravanan, and when someone passes by, she drops her mobile into her blouse – at the other end, Saravanan practically passes out. Maybe the camera was on? Ah, Hansika Motwani – the flavor du jour. What a lottery it must be, lucking into Tamil cinema like this. No learning lines, no acting, just a lot of new clothes and the opportunity to travel around the world, plus tons of money – is there a happier life? All my griping about these heroines is probably just sour grapes. Maybe I’d be happier too if someone else was typing out this review and I was just pretending to move my fingers… in Amsterdam.

I doubt Sundar C devotes much thought to existential underpinnings, but the casting of Kiran had me intrigued. Remember her? She was the flavor du jour about a decade ago, and now she’s playing the mother of a girl so grown up, she must have had her when she was 10. Did Hansika meet Kiran on the sets and wonder if she was looking at a ten-years-later version of herself? I’d give good money to know. Anyway, one plot point has Kiran bundled into a sack and carted around by Saravanan and his two cohorts (Vaibhav, Sathish). This is the kind of movie where the number of sacks equals the number of men, and the other sacks are filled with women too – Aishwarya (because you always call on Aishwarya when there are many women-0f-a-certain-age roles) and Ramya Krishnan (because you always call on Ramya Krishnan when one of these women-0f-a-certain-age is a ball-breaker). Prabhu is in there somewhere, attempting to anchor the story with some semblance of emotion. I like this actor. I like his voice. He almost always adds something to the one-dimensional roles he gets. Plus, he can do comedy. Only, here, he’s asked to put on his glum face. But that shouldn’t have been very difficult. One look at the script should have been enough.

KEY:

• aambala = he-man!
• “Enga edathukku vara aasai padareengala?” = Trying to take my place?
• “Unga velaya neenga ozhunga senjaa naan yaen saar unga edathukku varren?” = If you did what you said you’d do, why would I try to take your place?
• Kiran = see here
• Aishwarya = see her in this Ilayaraja song, from about the time he was segueing into his synth-dominant phase
• Ramya Krishnan = 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.

Spoilers ahead…

SJ Surya’s Isai begins with a curious disclaimer, that what we’re about to see is fiction. Wait. Isn’t that obvious? After all, this isn’t a biopic. But slowly, we begin to see why this bit of bordering-on-legalese was necessary. The film tells the story of a famous film-music composer named “Isai Vendhan” Vetrichelvan (Sathyaraj, having fun hamming it up in his trademark style). In his heyday, his music alone guaranteed 25-week runs for films. His notation book has his image on every page. He has a reputation for hubris — in a scene that plays wickedly to the gallery, he literally spits out a tune. Remind you of anyone? And he is pitted against a composer named AK Shiva (those initials… again, remind you of someone?), who’s called “Isai Kadal” (wink, nudge) and who was once part of Vetrichelvan’s orchestra. Shiva composes on the keyboard, in contrast to Vetrichelvan, whose music is created live. And get this. Shiva’s debut as an independent music director was in a film directed by… I forget the screen name now, but the character is played by Azhagam Perumal, who formerly assisted… Mani Ratnam. Phew. Without that disclaimer, Surya would have been toast.

So we sit back and await the story – the fictional story — of, as a voiceover puts it, “what jealousy can do to a genius.” But instead, a large swath of the first half covers an excruciating romantic track between Shiva and Jennifer (Sulagna Panigrahi). This being an SJ Surya movie, you brace yourself for the inevitable carnality (if you want to be kind) or sleaze (if you don’t) — the director doesn’t disappoint. Sulagna brings to mind the heroines of a certain era who were chosen not because they had beautiful eyes or a bewitching smile but because of the quiver-quotient of their navel when confronted by a close-up. In one of the couple’s early scenes, Shiva wraps his hand around Jennifer’s waist and wiggles his fingers as if playing the keyboard. In response, she closes her eyes and reaches the higher octaves, if you catch my drift. Then he commands her to place her hand on her chest and asks, “Ulla enna irukku?” When she flounders for an answer, he supplies one: “Idhayam.” If you insist. And if you like this sort of thing, you’ll love the plot point in which he’s bitten by a snake in a forest and she stumbles into him (she’s a local) and begins to administer medicine by straddling his legs and pouring the potion into his mouth. To counter the bitter taste, she soaks her fingers in honey and he sucks on them and… You don’t have to look any further if you wondered what it’d be like if a horny, hyper-imaginative teenage boy wrote a Penthouse letter.

Luckily, around interval point, the story veers back to the central conflict. Shiva begins seeing things and thinks he’s going mad — and you know Vetrichelvan has a hand in this. The hows and the whys would have been far more interesting had the film been shorter (it runs over three hours). We get long scenes with lots of redundant dialogue, all intended to showcase Surya’s prowess as a performer. (Let’s just say Kamal Haasan needn’t lose any sleep.) The characters, the contrivances needed more work. A scene in which Shiva confides in Vetrichelvan is most unconvincing. And they seem to be the only music directors around. For a film set against the backdrop of a vibrantly active industry, the staging is oddly insular. (And a film about musicians could have used better music.) And yet, I found Isai a better watch than the recent big-ticket movies we’ve been subjected to. It has to do with the plot, which gradually becomes so preposterous that the sheer whatever-next factor pulls you through. After a point, the film lurches madly between psycho-thriller, Victorian melodrama (think Gaslight), horror-movie staples, and — I kid you not — a meta musing on the director’s long absence from the screen and his return to it. Whatever else, you have to hand him points for audacity. By the end, I was chuckling.

KEY:

• Vendhan = king = Raja
• Sathyaraj style = see here
• Kadal = sea = name of the film, a notorious bomb whose music was composed by… er, you know…
• navel, quiver-quotient = see here (don’t miss the one with the coconut)
• Ulla enna irukku? = what’s inside?
• Idhayam = heart
• Gaslight = 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.

So there’s a new Gautham Menon movie out this week. I look forward to his films, for two reasons mainly. One, to see the way the heroine has been shaped. I know. This is borderline-blasphemy considering it’s essentially an Ajith movie and all, but even in Menon’s big-star outings like Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu – the kind of film that, in other hands, would provide ample excuse to trot out the sheepish excuse that “I had to make all these compromises because this is a big film and I wanted to reach not just the A-centre audiences but the ones in the B- and C-centres as well” – we get a fascinating heroine, not a virginal PYT but a divorcee with a daughter. Let’s not get into whether this character has much to do in the overall scheme of things. Her mere presence in a film of this magnitude is enough. Sometimes a rocket is enough to brighten up a night sky.

The other reason to anticipate Menon’s movies is the music. Yennai Arindhaal – as with Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu and Pachaikili Muthucharam, this title is a play on an MGR song – marks something of a return to form for Harris Jayaraj, a talented but often frustrating musician who’s content to coast on tunes that even an Easy Listening station would find too easy to air. But even in his most repetitive tunes, one element stands out: the sound. His sound is one of the best in the movies. It’s a modern sound, and it’s not just about audio effects and instruments. It also showcases voices beautifully. (Whether we want to hear some of these gibberish lyrics is another question. The answer: Let’s not go there.)

At the recently concluded Lit for Life, the Hindu’s literary festival, I attended an eye-opening workshop by the lyricist Madhan Karky. Among his many revelations was the fact that the first word in the song Ladio (from AR Rahman’s album for I) was “pani koozh,” i.e., “snow soup” – and every time, earlier, I’d heard it as “panikkul,” i.e, “inside snow.” This isn’t a major deal-breaker, for this isn’t a lyric-driven song. It’s punch comes from the propulsive arrangements and the breathy singing – that voice, really. Still, there’s a bit of sadness when a lyricist uses a beauty of a word and you miss it.

If you don’t know the language, you don’t care about lyrics. The tune, the music that supports this tune – these are the only things. The strange words become part of this tune, like scat syllables or ululations. But if you know the language, lyrics become important. And the lyrics in the Menon-Harris Jayaraj films are sumptuous affairs, thanks to the not-so-secret sauce that is Thamarai.

One way to assess the talent of a lyricist is by the unusual words used, and Thamarai always brings something new to the table – thula thattu, paramapadam, fresh rhymes like maattri/oottri. Another way is to see how they use metaphors, how they extend existing metaphors. The metaphor of one’s heart being a blank piece of paper isn’t new. This was used, most famously, by Anand Bakshi in Aradhana: Kora kaagaz tha yeh man mera / likh liya naam is pe tera. My life was a blank piece of paper… I fell in love with you… And now, on that blank paper, I’ve written your name. That’s the essence of these lines.

Look how much further Thamarai takes this metaphor in Menon’s Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya (whose music was by Rahman). In the exquisite Mannippaaya, she writes, Kaatrile aadum kaagidham naan / Nee dhaan ennai kadidham aakkinaai. I was a blank piece of paper being tossed about in the wind… You settled me… You stabilised me… And now that piece of paper is a (love) letter. That’s the essence of these lines. A blank paper with a name on it doesn’t let you, the listener, go too far. That’s pretty much the end of the imagery. But a letter, the things it makes you imagine… Ah.

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.