Observing and interpreting class or caste markers in the discussion of a film isn’t the same as celebrating them.

I co-wrote a screenplay some years ago, and we named the hero Rahul. We hadn’t thought about Rahul’s caste.  The only thing he was, in our minds, was young – and Rahul sounded like a young name. We sent an early draft of the script around, and the first bit of advice we got was to change the protagonist’s name because it “was too Brahminical”. We were stunned. But there it was, the perception that the name sounded like it belonged to a particular caste and, therefore, that the film would not go down well with the masses.

Another incident (and there are many more): A distributor asked a filmmaker to remove scenes of the heroine (a classical singer) with a tampura because the audience would think the film was about a privileged girl – not necessarily Brahmin, but someone belonging to an educated, upper-class background. As the Rajinikanth character said of the Shobana character in Thalapathy: “Paattu paadara ponnu. Bharatanatyam aadura ponnu”. In other words, not one of the masses.

It’s probably no surprise that this perception exists in the film industry, for Tamil cinema is inextricably linked with Tamil politics, and populist politics has, over decades, vilified the Other. And because our filmmakers and mass heroes take their cue from politics (some of them seek out careers in politics), it makes sense to align with the majority. It makes sense to target the Other — in this case, the upper-middle or upper classes and the ‘higher’ castes — in films. We saw this recently in Velai Illa Pattadhari, where the villain was named Arun Subramaniam and was super-rich, sneering at the middle-class character played by Dhanush, who represented the majority, the “masses”. David needs a Goliath. The Dhanush character needs an Arun Subramaniam to vanquish. It’s all part of the wish-fulfilment fantasy. It’s why most of our heroes play characters who can’t speak English, or speak pidgin English, don’t do well in school, and often have blue-collar jobs.

As a critic, I find this interesting, since I believe that one of the jobs of cinema/ art is to hold up a mirror to society. Tamil cinema routinely showcases the interplay between the roles of the privileged and the under-privileged in society. So if Velai Illa Pattadhari is such a hit, it means that the fantasy rings true with the majority of the cinema-going public. A critic needs to talk about this. We are surrounded by caste/ class considerations, and it is inevitable that they show up in our films as well. To not have these come up during the discussion of a film is a little like expecting characters to not smoke or drink on screen, when smoking and drinking is very much a part of life outside the screen.

It is in this context that I noted in my recent review of Mani Ratnam’s O Kadhal Kanmani that the milieu portrayed was “classy” or upmarket, showing an upper-middle class hero and upper-class heroine, and that at least some of the characters seem to be playing Brahmins. This is a mere observation, a statement of fact. It neither celebrates the aspect nor says it’s wrong.

Some of the feedback the review has received, though, has left me stunned, even given the fact that we live in a culture of outrage where anything and everything is cause for taking offence. I have been accused of looking at the film through a “casteist” lens, of “stooping to the level of referring to surnames”. But as a critic, one observes all aspects of a film, and the upper-class setting is just another aspect, like cinematography, acting, or direction. Observing something isn’t the same as celebrating it.

In Tamil Nadu, there is a price cap on tickets, which makes it unviable to make niche movies that cater solely to the A centres, movies such as Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara or Wake Up Sid, so producers largely insist on making films that can sell in all markets. The audience, too, has changed over the years. O Kadhal Kanmani might not have stood out so much in the K. Balachander era, when films routinely addressed an upper-middleclass audience, which has largely shrunk. Given the very different audience that frequents cinema halls today, choosing to make a film where the I-want-to-be-rich hero talks of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg rather Tata or Birla (names more readily recognised by the masses) is interesting. It means the film is not afraid to be niche. This would be a problem if Tamil cinema always focused only on the upper classes but given the healthy representation of the underprivileged in Tamil films, it is just an interesting choice.

If there is anything I am celebrating, it isn’t the existence of a certain milieu or the choice of it for the film, but the unapologetic and pitch-perfect portrayal of it. The urbanised, upper-class protagonists are not exoticised as they are in other Tamil films, behaving in odd ways or wearing unrecognisable clothes. They are normal, instantly recognisable people. In the context of Tamil cinema, this portrayal is a big win.

Cinema exerts such an influence in the State that cinematic representation of a class or caste practically results in a form of codification, and a lot of the time, some lazy stereotypes are codified. The image of a Thevar from Madurai as someone who’s filled with bloodlust and never seen without a sickle is as problematic as the image of, say, a Tamil Brahmin from Chennai sporting a tuft and with a wife who steps out of the bath in a nine-yard Kanjivaram.

Noticing a realistic portrayal of a particular caste or class should not be problematic. Why is it legitimate to look at, say, Thevar Magan and the recent, under-appreciated Thilagar as stories of Thevars, but an expression of bias to notice the cultural markers in O Kadhal Kanmani? Why is it okay to acknowledge the Dalit angle in Madras, despite the director not making any explicit references, but a problem to notice the Carnatic music in O Kadhal Kanmani? Why is a discussion of a film or a book about the subaltern necessarily more “worthy”? Isn’t the mark of a robust film culture the presence of films about all castes, all classes, and all walks of life? Isn’t that how many of us, who only come into contact with what’s around us, see what lies beyond us?

But even if we brush aside the social connotations, it makes sense for a critic to point out things that make cinematic sense. Take The Godfather. It isn’t just the depiction of a gangster family. It is the depiction of an Italian-Catholic gangster family, and this sort of specificity adds to the film’s texturing, as in the famous baptism scene. Every community comes with its own quirks, habits and practices, and the more attuned a film is to these specifics, the more unique it becomes. It becomes less generic and more rooted. And cultural rootedness is one of the things that tell you how good a film is. In a way, films like O Kadhal Kanmani and Kalyana Samayal Sadham are as vital, as rooted as the films Bharathiraja made. Class or caste cannot be wished away simply by not being portrayed in films, or by not being mentioned in reviews.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Kamal Haasan’s films suffer sometimes because they end up looking like vanity projects, but Uttama Villain, directed by Ramesh Aravind, couldn’t be anything else – for this is the story of a vain star named Manoranjan (Kamal Haasan). This is cinema about cinema, and because Tamil cinema is really about the hero, the film begins with a shot of a projection booth (in a theatre screening Manoranjan’s latest release) and it ends with the image of the star frozen on screen. Kamal has often called himself a limelight moth, but here his wattage is increased a million-fold. He’s the sun of his universe, everyone else a mere satellite in obeisant orbit. I’m not just talking about the fans who throng malls (what a perfect location, given that Manoranjan is, in a way, a consumer product; just like you go to a sports store to buy a pair of sneakers, you go to the multiplex to buy  three hours with Manoranjan), waiting for a glimpse of their hero. I refer, also, to the Kamal Haasan repertory company (Oorvasi, Jayaram, Andrea Jeremiah, Pooja Kumar, Nasser, K Viswanath), who have to make room not just for Manoranjan and Uttaman (the character Manorajan plays in a movie inside this movie), but Kamal Haasan himself. It’s possibly the most head-spinning triple role in cinema history.

Has any Indian star bared himself – and bored into himself – on screen the way Kamal has in Uttama Villain? The closest cinematic cousin is probably Fellini’s near-autobiographical 8½, which was about a director grappling with a creative block. Here, we have a sixty-year-old actor contemplating his legacy, his mortality. At least part of the fun of watching Uttama Villain comes from that legacy, as we play spot-the-reference. Early on, we catch the name of Manoranjan’s new film, Veera Vilayattu. Is that title a nod to the film Kamal made with Gautham Menon a few years ago? We see a song with Manoranjan prancing about in foreign locations with a much-younger actress (Pooja Kumar). Isn’t this the complaint we had of Kamal in his overtly commercial films from the latter half of his career? Isn’t that why the song carries the word “Singaravela”? Like Kamal, Manoranjan specializes in the step where he leaps and taps his toes in mid-air. In a season of meta films, Uttama Villain is possibly the meta-est of them all.

Hello, old lady at the 2:30 mark with mortar and pestle!

After a while, I began to see Kamal movies everywhere. That point where he barks an order (“Sit down!”) to his female costar – is that from Punnagai Mannan? That point where he appears with a shaved head and fearsome face makeup – is that from Aalavandhan? The big man who lifts, with ease, Manoranjan’s long-suffering secretary Chockalingam (MS Baskar) – is that Bhim boy? That point where we see a minor character using a mortar and pestle – surely that’s not a nod to a beloved song from Meendum Kokila? But at least some of the nods are unambiguous. Manoranjan’s PRO is played by Chitra Lakshmanan, who handled the promotions for a lot of Kamal Haasan’s films in the 1980s and also directed him in Soora Samharam. Better yet, Manoranjan’s guru – allegorically named Margadharisi – is played by K Balachander, and like the legendary filmmaker, he finds it difficult to make movies with this star, who was a mere “actor” when they made a series of hit films together. We see a picture of K Balachander with ‘Chaplin’ Chellappa, in that bowler hat, and there’s a lump in the throat. The collaborations of this actor-director duo are so much a part of our growing-up years, their history feels like ours.

“Sit down!”

And do I need to say that there are many women in Manoranjan’s life? When his son asks him if he’s going to leave his mother for another woman, it’s like reading the headlines in a gossip rag – you have to wonder how much of this is real, how much fiction. Still, it’s clear that there’s room for only one great love in the star’s life: cinema. (Again, remind you of someone?) The rabbit hole gets deeper when we see that the film Manoranjan begins work on, playing the character of Uttaman under Margadharisi’s direction, is also named Uttama Villain, and it too has music by Ghibran. And this is when the real beauty of Kamal Haasan’s conceit kicks in. (He wrote the screenplay, but then, by now, you’ve guessed that.) Manoranjan is dying, and Uttaman cannot die. It’s one thing that actors never really age, let alone die. Every time we watch Kalathur Kannamma, Kamal is five years old. But Manoranjan will not be around forever, and playing Uttaman is the ultimate kind of wish-fulfillment. It’s Manoranjan’s ticket to immortality. (It’s no accident that Uttaman is an actor too.)

Uttama Villain – the overall film, that is, not the folklore-ish film that’s being shot within the film (and which is set in the eighth century) – now begins to play out as a series of contrapuntal scenes. Manoranjan has a tender moment with his doctor, named Arpana. (Rani Mukerji’s character in Hey Ram! was called Aparna. Just saying.) And we cut to a love song enacted in the film-within-the-film, the lovely Kaadhalaam kadavul mun. Manoranjan  collapses. We cut to Uttaman singing about saagaavaram, the boon of immortality. Manoranjan  spies his children from outside his house (for a change, he’s the spectator). We hear, on the soundtrack, En udhirathin vidhai (my bloodline…), and we cut to another father-son scene, between Prahalada and Hiranyakashipu, played by Uttaman. Both stories – the one about Manoranjan, the one about Uttaman – feature love triangles, and both feature scheming. The  niggling doubt whether a star like Manoranjan, in this commercial climate (all the press wants to know in a scene is whether Veera Vilayattu will make a hundred crores), would make a movie Uttama Villain is pushed aside when we remember that Manoranjan may actually be Kamal Haasan, who has been at war with the definition of “commercial cinema” for quite a while now. Consider this: the movie Manoranjan was attached to earlier was about the life of Adi Shankara.

Apart from a typically solid lead(s) performance, Uttama Villain has a lot of what we’ve come to expect in a Kamal Haasan movie – from reclaimed archetypes (the vidushika) to pet phrases (satyameva jayate). There’s the expected mix of languages – Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam, English. And there’s the play with language. A character is named Yamini simply so that a letter written to her can feature the words “yaam ini…” A line toys with the rhymes edai / idai / udai. That’s worth at least a small smile. But there’s a big laugh in store when the Tenali Raman-like Uttaman mounts a tiger and exclaims, “Ayyo… appa,” and an onlooker yells back, “Ayyappa!” I don’t know if I laughed at the scene itself or at Kamal’s cleverness, but there are many humorous bits in the portions with Uttaman. Even the production company formed by Manoranjan carries the whiff of wordplay. It has his name fused with his mentor’s: Manomaarga, the way of the heart. If that doesn’t define Kamal’s career, I don’t know what does.

“Satyameva jayate…”

But despite all this – all this appreciation for Kamal’s writing; all this acknowledgement of his (personal and professional) past; all these questions about his future – Uttama Villain is just a series of discrete scenes. It just doesn’t come together as a cohesive whole. And at least part of the problem is the people Kamal has chosen to help him bring his vision to screen. Pooja Kumar is pretty, and I was impressed by her athleticism when bound in chains (it’s not what you’re thinking, I assure you), but she’s a shrill presence. I didn’t buy her for a second as an eighth-century princess, not in that pixie-bob. Andrea Jeremiah, too, is incapable of pulling the weight her role requires. As for good actors like MS Baskar and Nasser (in Rasta hair and a Thai crown!), we seem them in scenes that should have us laughing and crying, but we don’t do any of these things. There’s always a beat missing. There’s always some dead air. There’s a scene where Chockalingam reads out a letter in a screening room. We can practically hear the stage directions. He unfolds the letter. The room is dark. He squints. He gets up and walks to the screen and begins to read by the light of the projected image. In other words, what we’re seeing is the screenplay. Where’s the direction?

Kamal Haasan’s writing is so dense and allusive and overstuffed and layered and indulgent that it’s always a question whether even the best actors and directors in the world can come up with the kind of wit and timing needed to fully make the transition from page to screen – in other words, the best Kamal Haasan movies are probably locked up inside his head, where they reside in the most perfect possible manner. But with some of the lightweight cast and crew he’s been working with of late, this material doesn’t stand a chance. I saw a version of Uttama Villain that ran close to three hours. I hear it’s being trimmed to two-and-a-half hours, but that doesn’t change much except maybe save you a couple of leg cramps. From what I heard, the portions being chopped were from Uttaman’s story. I can’t say I’m surprised. This track is staged like a school play – the pacing is just off – and it doesn’t mesh easily with Manoranjan’s story. (Ghibran’s stirring orchestral passages are lost in this friction between the two narratives.) Even the much-hyped Theyyam sequence (why Theyyam in a Tamil kingdom?) plays like an afterthought – it isn’t organic, it’s just another cool thing we now know Kamal Haasan can do. The glass-half-full guy in me says I should be thankful that a film at least gives you so much to think about, but this film isn’t that kind of glass. It’s really a looking glass. How I wished the entire film had been a mirror on Manoranjan, about what it is to be a star of a certain age, at a certain stage, about what it means to be Kamal Haasan.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Aishwarya R. Dhanush likes men who see things. The protagonist of her first film, 3, saw holographic demons. Or something. The protagonist of her follow-up, Vai Raja Vai, sees the future. At least, he knows what’s coming. That’s his boon and the film’s curse. Early on, we get a hint that the clairvoyance comes and goes. Imagine the possibilities. Karthik (Gautham Karthik) is at the wrong end of a gun loaded with a single bullet. He laughs when the trigger is pressed, because he knows the first chamber is empty. And then… the power goes. The second chamber could be loaded. He begins to sweat. So do we. There’s a scene like this in Vai Raja Vai, but Karthik is so sure about where the bullet is that there’s no payoff. It’s the same with the gambling scenes in a floating casino. He knows where the ball is going to sit even before the roulette wheel stops spinning. Good for him. Bad for drama.

This may make it sound like I was bored by the film. I wasn’t, really. For one, it doesn’t run long enough to make you bored. It’s just a couple of hours. I was bored by the songs though. I’ve passed the age where, unless it’s an Aahaa kaadhal, I find Yuvan Shankar Raja’s music interesting. And the picturisations are utterly banal. We have a song set in fall colours, with the heroine twirling her skirts – it’s no Pachai nirame. Another one is staged in a nightclub – it’s no Fanaa. They should have exams for these things. In an ideal world, wannabe directors would face a stern committee that asks questions like “Will you go to Turkmenistan to shoot a song?” Candidates who answer “yes” will be shunted off to the sets of Maanada Mayilaada.

Vai Raja Vai is a light-hearted caper, and it opens interestingly. It’s as if the director is in a rush to establish everything – that Karthik has a superpower, that he’s in love (with Priya Anand, whose character is named… Priya… ooh, so meta… nah, this isn’t that kind of movie). A lot of this information comes via voiceover. I wondered why. Then the voiceover stops and people begin to speak. Karthik talks about plant pathology. His friend (Sathish) hears it as “plan panni brothel pannradhu.” Sathish (whose character is called Sathish) is referred to as “side dish.” When Karthik asks Panda (a hideously miscast Vivek) if he too uses a Blackberry, Panda twists his torso and tries to see his backside, if he indeed has “back-la sori.” There’s a general rule of thumb that if you laugh while thinking up a joke, then that joke is funny. I’ll bet that story discussion room was as grim as a funeral.

There’s a scene where Panda and Karthik take some drugs and slip into the sets of Pudhiya Paravai. Panda turns into Saroja Devi and mimics her exact moves for Unnai ondru ketpen. I was vaguely disturbed that I found this entertaining. I’m going to justify this by saying that Gautham Karthik is such a stiff (at this rate, his facial muscles are going to atrophy from disuse by his fifth film) that even a hamming Vivek is a relief. By this time, there’s a villain (Daniel Balaji) who’s holding Priya hostage and wants Karthik to make him rich. There’s a jolt of glamour from Taapsee, who swishes into the movie like a Bond girl. And there’s a special appearance from a star who I hear is related to the director. Don’t unscramble her name and you’ll see his.

Again, this may make it sound like I was bored by the film. But it wasn’t boredom, not quite. That’s when you wish you were anywhere else. This is the kind of film where you don’t feel guilty about checking messages on your phone, for you’re not really missing anything. I sat up exactly twice. One, when the Taapsee character declared she was a mathematician. I’m thinking of a joke that goes 36-24… but I’m afraid I’ll be smacked senseless by feminists. And two, when Karthik’s parents agreed to marry their daughter off to a groom who demanded ten lakhs as dowry. I know this sort of thing happens all the time around us. But the fact that a modern-day female filmmaker – someone with this kind of clout, someone from this kind of background, someone with the sensibility to make her heroine a plant pathologist – resorted to this Visu-era staple left me uneasy. Why not have, say, a truck hit the mother and bring on a crisis where the hospital demands ten lakhs? That might make good marketing sense too. After all, we do have Mother’s Day coming up.

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Midway through India Pakistan, Karthick (Vijay Antony) and Mellina (Sushma Raj) – Chennai-based lawyers both – find themselves in a village. Karthick is hanging out with some guys who think Mellina is easy: andha maadhiri ponnu. It’s the kind of cheap talk you hear all too often about urban women who have a mind of their own. Karthick says she isn’t, and as proof, he goes up to her (the others are watching) and begins a conversation. By now, she’s developed feelings for him, and she’s been wondering how to tell him – this seems like a good opportunity. After a while, he places a hand on hers. She places her hand on his. According to her, she’s saying she loves him. According to him, she’s failed the “test.” (He thought she’d snatch her hand away and shoot him the kind of look Saritha used to bestow on her tormentors.)

Even given the long tradition of misogyny in our cinema, this “test” looks like a new low – but Mellina gives it back to Karthick. She says, “Who are you to give me a test? Who are these other men to talk about my character?” The scene doesn’t have a payoff – she storms off, and it’s interval point. The thread is never really picked up again. But still, the mere fact that a generally empty-headed entertainer endows its heroine with spunk and spirit and does not make apologies for her made me want to give the director, N Anand, a small bar of chocolate – despite his making light of a rape incident, despite another moment where Karthick slaps Mellina.

Given these scenarios, you may think the film is about the romantic relationship between Karthick and Mellina, but that’s just one part. India Pakistan is insanely overstuffed with plot and characters. For a while, given that Karthick and Mellina are arguing for opposing sides of a case in court, I imagined we were in for an update of Adam’s Rib, where Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn played a couple who turned into warring lawyers. But soon, the story takes a detour into that village – and this is probably a good thing. The leads have no snap, no sparkle, and the only place we get some screwball energy is during the song India naan Pakistan nee. At least, the village gives us other, more interesting characters.

We get a chap who wants to marry Mellina. (He thinks “city girls” are beautiful.) We get two local big shots (Pasupathy and MS Baskar), who are fighting over a tract of land. (It’s this case that Karthick and Mellina have taken on.) Back in the city, we have a corrupt cop who’s after an incriminating DVD. Then there’s all the stuff between Karthick and Mellina, who can’t decide whether they’re meant to be together (cue: happy song) or not (sad song).

That’s way too much happening – nearly two hours and forty minutes – for a film that just wants to be a light-hearted entertainer. And the director doesn’t push his gags enough. Still, the laughs keep coming. It’s strange how a film that begins well and ends badly makes us feel it’s not so good, whereas a film that begins badly and ends reasonably well makes us feel it’s not so bad. India Pakistan is one of those not-so-bad films, thanks to solid contributions by MS Baskar (who holds his hands out and waits for the almighty’s sign before doing anything, much to the annoyance of others) and Manobala (the stretch where he loses his dhoti in a mall is a riot). I wished we’d seen more of them and less of the lazy comedy track written around Jagan. N Anand has a knack for the absurd. I’d be interested in watching a pure comedy by him – but please, nothing more than a couple of hours.

* * *

As an aside, can someone take a look at what constitutes “family entertainment”? India Pakistan comes with a “U” certificate, and it has a gag about a prostitute, a scene where an angry cop bashes up a goon with a long, rusty pole (the clang on the soundtrack is terrifying), and a bit where a sidekick watches a recording of an encounter killing and comments that it’s like a Vijayakanth movie. I laughed like everyone else in the theatre, but a second later, I felt uneasy about how numb we’ve become to violence. The cop’s bullet enters the back of the head. We see blood spray out. The camera shifts to the victim’s face. We see the bullet hole in the middle of the forehead. And we laugh when someone says, “It’s just like a movie.” Something’s very  wrong.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

In Rosshan Andrrews’s 36 Vayadhinile, Jyotika plays an alien. What else could the character, named Vasanthi, be? She’s 36. Her eyesight is no longer what it was. Her hair is turning silver. She has a teen-aged daughter. She works in a government job and lives in a joint family. And to unwind, she watches Tamil soaps. She lip-syncs perfectly, and the film revolves around her. Surely this not a Tamil-film heroine. I mean, there’s not even a duet. There’s no other explanation. She’s visiting from Venus. And she’s brought with her an otherworldly wardrobe. Say what you will about the rest of the film, there will be those who line up just to see Vasanthi’s impeccable taste in saris.

You could say the same for English Vinglish, where another actress emerged from retirement in a series of dazzling saris (those were designed by Sabyasachi; Vasanthi’s are more modest). Watching Sridevi there, or Jyotika here, you are reminded that, sometimes, a movie need be about nothing more than watching beautiful people swan around in 70-mm. But there’s more. Like English Vinglish, 36 Vayadhinile is a story of empowerment. It’s about a perennially slighted (some might say subjugated) housewife discovering that her inner closet has a “You Go Girl!” T-shirt after all. In the film’s most touching moment, a friend looks at this subdued version of Vasanthi and asks her what happened to the firebrand she was in college. Vasanthi simply says, “Theriyale… thedanum.” 36 Vayadhinile is about this search.

The mere existence of this film, in this hero-driven industry of ours, is reason to celebrate. (It’s produced by Suriya, and it feels like he’s atoning for the terrible movies he’s been in of late.) But 36 Vayadhinile is not cinema. It’s, at best, a glorified television soap, broadly written and staged and performed, and blaring its messages through a megaphone. Take Susan (Abirami). She turns up in the second half, as Vasanthi’s savior. (The background throbs with heavenly music. The usually subtle Santhosh Narayanan chips in with a megaphone of his own.) She’s meeting Vasanthi for the first time after college, some fourteen years later. You’d think they’ll do some catching up, have some fun, or at least an ice-cream. But no. The very next scene, she begins to lecture Vasanthi. And in the very next scene, Vasanthi changes, as if a switch were activated, as if one bit of well-meaning advice could modify years of ingrained behavior.

Another problem is the portrayal of the male characters. When we first see Vasanthi, she’s being interviewed for a job, and a man asks her how old she is. I wondered if the film was going to make Vasanthi some sort of easy victim by reducing all men to villains. It doesn’t. Her father-in-law (Delhi Ganesh) is a wonderful man, as is the cop (Nasser, with a twinkle in his eye) who investigates her background for reasons we aren’t told about immediately. Later, when Vasanthi embarks on a new career of sorts, we meet kind men who encourage her. So it’s easy to overlook the melodramatic scene where an old woman who’s unwell tells Vasanthi that she has four sons and none of them has bothered to look in on her. Some amount of male-bashing is par for the course in such a movie.

But it’s impossible to overlook what a positively dreadful man Vasanthi’s husband Tamilselvan (Rahman) is. He belongs to a different generation, one that saw the Pandian character in Pudhumai Penn, and all the mean-spirited losers in Kalyana Agadhigal, and the various men who inflicted their wives with cigarette burns. In English Vinglish, the husband was merely insensitive. The slyly passive-aggressive Tamilselvan expects his wife to take the blame for an accident he’s caused. He vents all his frustrations on her and makes her feel miserable. When the time comes for him to move to Ireland, he doesn’t discuss it with her. He informs her at a restaurant. And once abroad, he expects her to join him because he cannot afford to hire someone to cook and clean. What a prize catch. There’s not one caring moment between husband and wife, and the film’s biggest failure is making Vasanthi accept his (unstated) apology as if he merely forgot their anniversary. This, again, belongs to another generation, one that stuck with husbands whether they were stones or blades of grass, if you know the saying.

But as I said, it’s not easy to dismiss 36 Vayadhinile. It’s not right to evaluate films on just what they want to do. It’s also important how they do it. And I wish Vasanthi’s emergence as her own woman had been done in a smaller way, instead of making her some sort of crusader. (That megaphone again.) But in K Balachander’s time, films about working women were routine. Not so today – and just for being such a movie, you have to give it points. The opening-credits sequence is joyous. We hear the sprightly Vaadi raasaathi over visuals of women, doctors and lawyers, auto drivers and flower sellers, young and old. Jyotika, too, is one of them, a woman juggling work and home, and even putting her career on hold because of kids, something a man would never have to do. Deservedly, she gets top billing.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 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 lot of filmmakers make “message” movies. SP Jhananathan makes propaganda movies. His films aren’t about walking home with a warm glow and a trite little homily ringing in the head. He weaves complex tapestries from skeins of impassioned ideology. His first film, Iyarkai, an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s White Nights, was something I didn’t care for at all, but his follow-up, E, made me sit up. It wasn’t just a rich-versus-poor story. It was about the First-World rich versus the Third-World poor. If the film didn’t become all that it could have been, it’s because Jhananathan is less a filmmaker than a pamphleteer – but the points he brings up are incendiary, plucked from the headlines and set ablaze by his fiery passion. (Prakash Jha, who tries to make similar films in Hindi, could pick up a trick or two.) Then came Peraanmai. The movie was a mess of badly executed good intentions, but its protagonist was a man from the minority, a tribal. And with a difference. He wasn’t the kind of exotic creature Tamil cinema usually throws at us – say, someone familiar with the ways of the jungle who helps the hapless city dweller – but a smart man in uniform who cared about his country. The best part was the end. He saved the day, but retreated into the shadows as a superior officer took all the credit. He wouldn’t be a Jhananathan protagonist if he allowed the government – the establishment – to pin a medal on him.

Jhananathan’s new film, Purampokku Engira Podhuvudamai, is also about a man – Balu (Arya) – from the minority. But this isn’t about his affiliation to a particular caste or class. It’s about his affiliation to a particular colour: red. He’s a Communist. A line in the film acknowledges that, in an increasingly capitalistic world, Communists are but a bare handful – a minority – but someone’s got to fight the good fight. (Not my words. The film’s.) Purampokku begins with Balu’s arrest for waging war against the Indian Army. He’s sentenced to be hanged. A little later, he is seen in a police vehicle alongside a cop rather pointedly named Macaulay (Shaam, surprisingly effective). Why that name? Maybe because he is one of “Macaulay’s Children” – if not a slave to Western culture and ideology as the phrase has come to mean today, then certainly a blind follower of the laws of the land, most of which were laid down by Westerners. (He believes that hanging criminals will result in the eradication of crime.) Macaulay sees a group of people holding up placards, demanding Balu’s immediate hanging. He tells Balu that this is what the country wants. Balu replies, “Neenga paakardhu mattume Indhiya jananga kidayaadhu.” He’s so filled with self-belief, he makes these protesters seem like the minority.

In other words, we have Balu espousing what appear to be Jhananathan’s views. Balu calls Macaulay a “uniform poatta rowdy.” He says he doesn’t consider himself a criminal. He declares that the way forward is not thani udamai but podhu udamai. In a lair where a wall displays a Guy Fawkes mask, his comrades talk of the Russian revolution, of Mao, of Lenin. Looking at a prisoner being tortured, Balu brings up the Geneva Convention. (This is some kind of war, after all.) He speaks about the overpopulation of our prisons. He is portrayed as a modern-day Bhagat Singh, a revolutionary whom the establishment doesn’t want to make seem a revolutionary. A higher-up tells Macaulay, “Balu should not die like Bhagat Singh. He should hang like Kasab.” (Purampokku is dedicated to fighters who were sentenced to death.)

The film’s big tragedy is that this beacon of change is played by Arya. I’m not saying that the only way to play these “seditious” roles is to do what Sivaji Ganesan did in Veerapandiya Kattabomman, all but leaping out of the screen, grabbing your collar and bellowing into your increasingly spittle-flecked face. But at least some inner spark has to shine through. Arya is laidback to the point of being catatonic. The hanging seems redundant –  there’s very little life in his eyes to speak of. The other problem is that the character’s motives aren’t sharply defined. He’s some sort of generic, all-purpose do-gooder. He targets a train carrying food and medicine and distributes these supplies to the poor and needy. He protests against First World countries using the Third World as a dumping ground for hazardous electronic, nuclear and pharmaceutical waste. It’s hard to get a hold of him. It isn’t a good sign when Macaulay calls him a fool and you kinda-sorta agree with Macaulay. It’s like watching a Robin Hood story and rooting for the Sheriff of Nottingham.

What’s surprising, amidst all the lal salaam salutes, is the preponderance of religious imagery. We get a scene with an old man’s last rites being performed as per Hindu tradition. We get a dialogue with Kali, who’s seen, in some parts, as a subaltern goddess. We get a wall plastered with pictures of deities, including Jesus, and a line that references the Biblical story of God asking Abraham to kill his son Isaac. A retired judge speaks about the law versus dharma, and – as an extension, in a touch that tickled me no end – a hangman invokes NT Rama Rao’s advice to the paralysed Muthuraman in Karnan as an exhortation to do one’s duty.

The hangman is named Yemalingam (Vijay Sethupathi, who just seems to have stopped trying). I wasn’t clear why he’s the only “experienced hangman” around (that’s what the law demands), given that he seems to have witnessed a hanging just once and was subsequently severely traumatised. But his entry into the story infuses some much-needed momentum. Without him, we may have been subjected to endless ideological back-and-forthing between Macaulay and Balu, but when Yemalingam joins Balu’s comrades, the film slowly transforms into a gripping prison-escape drama. The latter portions are especially well-done, with top-notch technical contributions, especially from cinematographer NK Ekambaram, who transforms the prison into a character. He leaves no part uncovered, from the roof to the bowels. Who could have guessed that inside Jhananathan lies a pretty proficient genre filmmaker? If his principles let him, he could jettison the speechifying and end up making pure action movies – and a lot of money.

But this doesn’t mean his pamphleteering side is subdued. One of the pleasures of Purampokku is how, at times, it achieves the magical mean that many films strive for, to entertain people and yet be about something. We get a crash course on everything a hangman does – how the rope is fortified, or how the height of the prisoner is measured (from the neck down). We even get to know how hangmen were recompensed in earlier times. Jhananathan’s sympathy for minorities is evident throughout. In a standout moment, after learning that Yemalingam hangs out with prostitutes, his mother realises that no one from a “decent family” is going to give him their daughter in marriage. She tells Yemalingam’s friend that maybe they should just get Yemalingam married off to one of “those girls,” who can always be made a “kudumba ponnu” after marriage. She’s not preaching. She’s just a frustrated mother at the end of her tether, and the “message” is secreted into a situation, a conversation. In another scene, Macaulay stumbles on cops censoring the newspapers. One of them is cutting out pictures of sexy-looking women. The other is cutting out an article on homosexuality. Macaulay tells the man to let the article be because only those in prison know what it’s like. What could have become an easy joke about dropping the soap in the showers is transformed into a casual plea for tolerance.

I was also impressed by a bit that weaves in lines of Sanskrit. I expected a Santhanam-type comedian to scratch his head and make a joke by mangling the words – a lot of mainstream Tamil cinema, after all, prides itself on being anti-intellectual. But the scene stays serious. Of course, there are other mainstream compromises. There’s a silly song involving Kuyili (a thoroughly ineffective Karthika; with those strangely sinuous eyebrows, she should be playing the evil snake queen in a remake of Kanavane Kankanda Dheivam). We also have one of those songs inside the jail, with the name “Macaulay” worked into a lyric. Vijay Sethupathi, meanwhile, gets full-on hero treatment, with a heroic entry scene followed by a song. But he doesn’t get a love angle. Neither does Macaulay. In these films, we usually get a scene where the tough cop returns home and his little kid comes running into his arms. Ask those directors why and they’ll say they’re “humanising” the character. I wondered if Jhananathan felt there was no need to humanise this character, or if he didn’t want to humanise this representative of the majority, the establishment. But to be fair, Balu doesn’t get a love angle either. By not opting for a romantic track here (and in Peraanmai), Jhananathan is himself in the minority, at least among mainstream filmmakers.

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

The National Award for Kaaka Muttai doesn’t make any sense. Best Children’s Film. What does that even mean? Best film that has good parts for children or good performances by children? Or best film for children? Either way, the award is an insult. Kaaka Muttai isn’t just for children — actually, some of the humour apart, it’s not for children at all. And it features stunning performances from everyone, the kids certainly (Ramesh and Vignesh, playing siblings in a slum), but also the grown-ups — especially Iyshwarya Rajesh, who plays the kids’ mother with a world-weariness that belies her years, registering amusement, annoyance, love, exasperation and about a dozen other things you rarely get from a Tamil-film heroine. Watching Nithya Menen in O Kadhal Kanmani, I felt there couldn’t be a better lead performance this year. Now, I’m not so sure. Just watch Iyshwarya’s small, tired smile at the end, when she hears that her younger son has stopped wetting himself. She doesn’t oversell the moment. It’s a triumph, all right, but it’s a small triumph. That small smile is enough.

What a relief to find a real person on the Tamil screen. But part of the performance, I am sure, has to do with the sensibilities of the director M Manikandan. This is one of the most assured debuts I’ve seen — one deserving of more than just that consolation-prize-of-a-National-Award. He wrote and photographed and directed this film — but this isn’t one of those ego trips we are often subjected to, with filmmakers multitasking just so that they can slap their names on all aspects of the film. There is a voice, and an eye not just for scenes but moments… exquisite little vignettes. Look at the scene where the younger kid — called Chinna Kaaka Muttai; the older one is Periya Kaaka Muttai; henceforth CM and PM — finds out that a ten-rupee note is full of holes. The usual Tamil-cinema director would consider his job done by just giving us this information. But Manikandan stages this small moment. CM holds the note up against the sky. The sun shines through the holes. Even amidst the squalor, there’s beauty.

There’s more beauty in the writing, where even a casual reference to raahu kalam at the beginning returns in an echo at the end. And I cannot remember the last time I saw a movie so populated with small-but-memorable characters. Take Pazharasam, the kids’ grown-up friend. As with the kids, we know him only by his alias. There’s a beautiful moment when PM realises that’s not the older man’s real name, and the scene informs both characters — PM is puzzled, a kid who thought he knew this grown-up and is now realising maybe he didn’t, and an enigmatic layer is added to Pazharasam. (Who is he really? The film won’t tell us.) Or take the kids’ father, who’s in jail. We hardly see him, and yet, we get a sense of him. He’s in the TB ward. And through his wife, we get to know how he looks at her — pleadingly. He wants to get out, but who’s got money for bail? Or take the kids’ grandmother, who sighs to her daughter-in-law that she is not able to contribute to the running of the household. How much greater her pain must be when her pint-sized grandson points out the same thing!

Kaaka Muttai is so entertaining — it’s either a crowd-pleasing art film or an arty crowd-pleaser; maybe both — that it’s easy to forget how sad the undercurrents are. CM and PM no longer go to school because there’s no money. They sell coal they pick up from railway tracks — “oru kilo, three rupees.” The houses are cramped, and there’s no address. The ground they play in is sold to a developer, who builds on it a pizza parlour. In other words, it isn’t just globalisation. It’s globalisation at the doorstep of the underprivileged, whose lives remain unchanged by all this… progress, if that’s the word for it. It’s not like they’re getting jobs in that pizza parlour.

Heck, they’re not even allowed inside. The story is about CM and PM’s desire to taste a pizza, which they see in a mouth-watering television commercial. No, scratch that. The story is about desire, period. It’s about the kids’ desire for a cell phone.  It’s about the mother’s desire to bring her husband back home. It’s about a low-rent thug’s desire for easy money. It’s about the desire of upper-class kids for the ‘lowly’ and unhygienic pani puri that’s sold on streets. It’s about the desires invoked by television, which teaches us to salivate over things we never knew existed. Even the pizza isn’t just pizza. After a point, it comes to represent the desire of these kids to get access to a better world — an entry ticket to an exclusive club. Rarely has the divide between haves and have-nots been laid out with such devastating understatement, without the moralistic gavel-banging our filmmakers are so fond of.

Sometimes, there’s a literal divide. CM and PM are pals with a rich kid, who’s always seen on the other side of a fence. Crossing over isn’t so easy. PM and CM think they can enter that pizza parlour if they dress like this rich kid, and they even manage to get the clothes, but the doorman knows they’re impostors. They may be wearing clothes that resemble the ones worn by pizza-eating kids, but they don’t look like pizza-eating kids — and look at the irony, the doorman himself is one of them. The scene is brilliant. PM is slapped and he smarts from the humiliation — not just because someone has hit him and denied him entry to this club he so badly wants to belong to, but because his friends from the slums are watching. And then we see where he gets this streak from, this independence, this pride. His mother refuses an MLA’s offer of tea/coffee, and when her neighbours talk of participating in a protest for free biriyani, they know she won’t join them. PM, too, isn’t looking for handouts. He wants to buy the pizza, even if the money is obtained through means not exactly legal.

How, with all these story threads, did Manikandan think up so much humour? Or maybe the question should really be addressed to other filmmakers. Why do they get so wrapped up in their dour mission to educate that they forget to entertain? If there was a National Award for Best Non-Sequiturs (or Best Use of a TASMAC Bar in a Tamil Movie), Kaaka Muttai would have walked away with it. The impotency flier. The grandmother’s attempt at making a pizza. The revelation of what a sidekick did when his pal tried to milk money from the people who own the pizza parlour. About the latter, there’s a sense that this thread is extraneous — but after the film, I felt it was very much part of the weave. These guys are opportunists, but so are the kids. The guys, in other words, might be what these education-less, opportunity-less kids will grow into in the company of their cell-phone-stealing friends — though the frustratingly twinkly music (by GV Prakash, who seems to be under the impression that this is a Disney fairy tale) keeps instructing us to think otherwise. The kids are cute enough. There’s no need for the music to be cute as well.

But as long as the focus is on PM and CM, Kaaka Muttai can do no wrong. Apart from the score, there are hardly any missteps. A few scenes with the media come off as too-pointy, especially given how muted the rest of the movie is. There’s a bit about a drunk who begins to talk about lower castes, and the mood quickly (though not abruptly) becomes more light-hearted — the whiff of a lecture lingers. But this is like a topping (pineapple, in my case) that you pick out and set aside, because the rest of the pizza is so lip-smackingly good. The moment when the kids enter the pizza parlour, I had gooseflesh. But the euphoria doesn’t last. Even as they sit down to finally consume the object of their desire, CM tells PM that it’s cold. They’ve never experienced air-conditioning. At least a few people are going to feel a twinge the next time they call up Domino’s.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Romeo Juliet, directed by Lakshman, is first and foremost a public service announcement from Kollywood: Look, boss, I know you saw ‘Kaaka Muttai’ last week, and it was funny and well-made and thought-provoking and everything you want cinema to be, but don’t go expecting that kind of movie every week. We are like this only. In other words, it’s back to business.

But at least there’s a nice idea in here. Karthick (a bland ‘Jayam’ Ravi) is a trainer at a gym. Aishwarya (Hansika Motwani, flawlessly implementing the acting mantra of treating everyone around as if they were her 97-year-old grandfather who’s misplaced his hearing aid) is a flight attendant. Their professions are fitting. He’s a modest man, content with life on treadmill-mode, but she has her head in the clouds – she wants to marry rich. They come together when she mistakes him for someone with a Benz and a house on Boat Club Road.

So we have a woman who’s very clear about the kind of man she wants. And who’s to judge her? We all harbour desires that, to someone else, may seem ridiculous – this is just her ridiculous desire. The most interesting stretch of Romeo Juliet – on paper; certainly not in execution – is when Aishwarya finds out the truth about Karthick, and because he’s fallen for her and won’t let her go so easily, she decides to teach him a cruel lesson. She takes him to fancy places and makes him spend tons of money to show him the kind of life she wants, the kind of money he’d have to make in order to give her that life. We’ve seen love stories. For a while, this is a tough-love story.

Karthick, too, is no stereotype. He cannot bear to lose Aishwarya, and in a turn of events quite rare for Tamil cinema, he debases himself constantly. He allows her to humiliate him just so that he can be around her. Later, of course, he gets his spine back and turns into – a Shakespeare reference doesn’t seem inappropriate, given this film’s title – Petruchio, all set to tame the shrew. Both Aishwarya and Karthick are thoroughly unpleasant people. They’re made for each other. At least, they deserve each other.

The film, though, is a disaster. I know it’s not much use examining this type of movie too closely – Dhanush might say, “It’s for the youth-u, not the critic-u.” I was willing to overlook quite a bit. Early on, when Aishwarya decides to “correct” Karthick, one of the ideas a friend gives her is to send him an “I Love You” note written in blood. And let’s not even get into Aishwarya’s description of herself as middle-class. For a flight attendant, she comes with an amazing wardrobe – you’d think she owned a plane or two. But she does look lovely, and the youth-u in the theatre certainly weren’t thinking about logic whenever she appeared.

Maybe we should ignore the male-fantasy element as well. When Karthick asks Aishwarya to wait five years so he can become the kind of man she wants, she tells him that she’s 24 now, a “figure-u,” and in five years, she’ll become an “aunty.” I think it’s safe to assume no women were involved in the scripting of this movie, especially in the scene where a repentant Aishwarya tells Karthick, “Enna seruppaala adi.” Elsewhere, when Aishwarya sets Karthick up with someone else, he compares their eyes, lips… Even better is the scene in which Karthick’s newfound girlfriend (Poonam Bajwa) invites him to her house and opens the door in little more than a shirt. “Hi machi,” she says. Then she winks and adds, “Veetla yaarume illa.” And proceeds to get him a glass of… badam milk. Had Shakespeare been wired the way this film’s writers were, his comedy about shipwrecked twins would have been called First Night.

But it’s impossible to digest the overall preposterousness. Like Raja Rani, Romeo Juliet just cannot make up its mind whether it wants to be a screwball comedy or a melodrama – the tone is all over the place. And the writing is painfully inconsistent. Karthick’s self-proclaimed love for T Rajendar is just a lead-in to D Imman’s chartbuster, Dandanaka. We see romantic clips from older films over the opening credits and during a jogging scene, but soon this conceit disappears. It’s a new kind of screenwriting. Everything’s a bit, just for that moment – who cares about consistency and narrative arcs?

It might have helped if the jokes were funny. But there’s only so much the audience can do when Karthick tells his friend his girlfriend’s name is Aishu and the friend hears it as “ICU.” But maybe the characters are the real joke. Take Aishwarya’s super-rich fiancé (Vamsi Krishna). What kind of business tycoon coolly hands over the operations of his company to a flight attendant? Perhaps she said she worked in Business Class and he thought she said she took a business class? Ah, but again, I’m thinking about logic-u. Clearly, I’m no youth-u.

KEY:

• “It’s for the youth-u, not the critic-u.” = lingo inspired by this song, which vent viral with the youth-u.
• correct = slang for getting a girl/boy to be your girlfriend/boyfriend
• figure = slang for ‘babe’, maybe with roots in the number 8
• “Enna seruppaala adi” = Beat me with your slipper (not in the S&M context, though)
• machi = bro
• Veetla yaarume illa = there’s no one at home

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Note the title, Inimey Ippadithan. This is Santhanam announcing that, henceforth, this is what he’s going to do. He’s going to be the hero. He’s going to wear yellow sneakers and cavort with a non-Tamil-speaking heroine on foreign beaches. He’s going to do stalk-the-girl-till-she-says-yes scenes (otherwise known as “romantic track” in Tamil cinema). He’s going to do action scenes. He’s going to do sarakku scenes – not that he hasn’t done them before, but he’s not the side dish anymore, consoling the heartbroken hero. He is the heartbroken hero. And he gets two heroines, an alabaster automaton (Ashna Zaveri) and Akila Kishore, who seems to have decided that she can’t keep waiting for the next Kathai Thiraikathai Vasanam Iyakkam.

But the things we’d tire of in normal-hero mode become a little more bearable with a comic hero. The action scene, for instance. It’s the usual one-versus-many scenario, but with a sharp twist. And it helps that the writer-director duo Muruganand (Prem Anand and Murugan, from TV’s Lollu Sabha), for inspiration, look towards one of our most successful comic heroes, K Bhagyaraj. Inimey Ippadithan is what you’d get if you put Bama Rukmani, Chinna Veedu and Thooral Ninnu Pochu into a time machine set to today. Hence the very first scene, where some kids are stopped by an elder with this advice: “Room-ukkulla poga koodadhu. Innikku unga akkavukku first night.” Inside that room, Cheenu (Santhanam) is getting ready to play what he calls “jingili bingili vilayaattu.”

Is there another cinema culture that is so turned on by the wedding night? And how do women feel about these scenes, where they are portrayed as consummation containers? Or take the other scene where Santhanam asks a prospective bride to go back in, discard her silks and jewels, and reappear in a nightgown – because that’s what she’ll be wearing every day after marriage, doing housework from morning to night. According to Cheenu, there’s no use appraising a woman who’s all decked up – “Nayanthara-ve nightie-la sumaaraathaan iruppaa.” Even the casual chauvinism is from the heyday of Bhagyaraj.

But when we go to these movies, the question isn’t “How politically correct is it?” but “Are there laughs?” And there are plenty. I was prepared for Santhanam’s trademark alliterations and rhymes, along with fat jokes and bald jokes – but there’s some nicely staged physical comedy too, especially in a restaurant scene that’s guaranteed to have a long YouTube afterlife. I could have lived without the songs (a sprightly set of tunes from newcomer Santhosh Dhayanidhi), and the film takes too long to get going. But once Cheenu finds himself trapped between his two women – a classic Bhagyaraj situation – we experience the gamut from hmmm… okay to hey, not bad to that was actually hilarious. Another import from the Bhagyaraj school: messy emotions. There’s something at stake, and by the surprising climax, there’s a comeuppance in store. Those fat jokes don’t seem so cruel anymore.

KEY:

• Inimey Ippadithan = henceforth, this is how it’s going to be
• sarakku = booze
• Kathai Thiraikathai Vasanam Iyakkam = see here
• Lollu Sabha = see here
• “Room-ukkulla poga koodadhu. Innikku unga akkavukku first night.” = Don’t enter that room. It’s your sister’s wedding night.
• jingili bingili vilayaattu = that thing you do to make babies
• “Nayanthara-ve nightie-la sumaaraathaan iruppaa.”= Even Nayanthara won’t look so hot in a nightgown.

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

All we ask of a comedy is that it keep us entertained. At least, this is what I ask. Not plot. Not acting. And certainly not whether it “makes sense.” I was doing some idle YouTube-ing a while ago, and came across this scene with Kallapetti Singaram and two others. They’re villagers, and they’re in the city for the first time. Inside a posh hotel, they see a man step into an elevator. The doors close. When the doors open a little later, a woman steps out. They think the elevator is a magic gender-changing box, and as none of them have had much luck with women, they hatch a plan… I cracked up. This is all I want, really – a series of silly “bits” like this one, strung up to feature length.

Unfortunately, Yuvaraj Dhayalan, the director of Eli, gets tangled up in the mechanics of a dense plot that’s – are you ready for this? – based on The Departed. Vadivelu plays a small-time conman named Eli who’s asked to infiltrate a criminal organisation, etcetera. There have been films (the Pink Panther series, the Austin Powers movies) that have mined comedy from crime, but just about nothing works here. Eli is full of scenes that go on forever – and for no reason. It begins with an AIR broadcast in which someone goes on about… the evils of smoking. Why this PSA in a comedy? Just because the villain (Pradeep Rawat) is a cigarette smuggler? I’d have preferred a PSA about the two-and-a-half hours that loom ahead.

No one seems to know what to do with this material. The director keeps adding masala elements like action scenes and songs. You’d think these would be comic action scenes, comic songs. But only occasionally. The rest of the time, it’s all played depressingly straight. Even Vadivelu is stranded – the gags he’s in are shockingly weak. He gets a scene where he romances Sadha (she’s the moll, I think) to the strains of Mere sapnon ki rani. He lip-syncs the whole song, as if the mere idea of Vadivelu in a Rajesh Khanna scenario is automatically funny. It is – for about ten seconds. But like the rest of the film, this bit too goes on forever.

KEY:

• Eli = rat; sorry, too depressed now to think up anything clever

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

In most films, we can sense the director’s terror that the audience is going to tune out and start looking at their smartphones – hence the frantic cuts, the soundtrack whoosh accompanying the change of camera angles, the insistence that every scene carry a punch. Madhumita’s Moone Moonu Varthai exists at the other end of the spectrum. It’s so low-key that you feel one of those whooshes would blow it right off the screen. Maybe that’s why I liked it. And it’s full of little surprises, right from the title. I thought the three words were “I love you” – I expected a rom-com. But there’s a nice little high concept tucked in here. That, too, is refreshingly low-key.

The film opens in a hospital where K Bhagyaraj (playing himself) is undergoing treatment for a panic attack. Few premises are more mouth-watering, few actors more suitable to be struck by this condition – but this track, disappointingly, is set aside as a framing device. A rather redundant one. Arjun (Arjun Chidambaram) happens to be in the same hospital, and when he discovers Bhagyaraj is there too, he barges into the latter’s room and begins narrating a story – his story. Why cast an actor with all the screen history that Bhagyaraj brings, only to use him as an audience substitute?

Over the opening credits, we see various people talk about Arjun as a loser – though an amiable one. He’s the kind of guy who quits his job because his supervisor wouldn’t give him the day off to watch a CSK match. A man-child, in other words. Arjun knows that his best friend – named, wait for this, Karna (Venkatesh Harinathan) – has to prepare for an office presentation, and yet he keeps distracting him, the way a bored child would. His indulgent grandparents (SP Balasubrahmanyam, Lakshmi) probably have something to do with the way he is. The story, then, is about Arjun becoming less child, more man.

I’m not going to oversell Moone Moonu Varthai. This is not the kind of film for which you use superlatives. I kept thinking… light… easy watch… nice, relaxed vibe. The high concept is in the business idea Arjun and Karna cook up. They become human telegrams – deliverers of bad news. You know this film is not working for you if you hear this idea and think: Why not email? But it didn’t bother me at all. This is exactly the kind of borderline-absurd thing a man-child would dream up, caring little about the feelings of the recipients of all this bad news. One of the clients is MS Baskar, who shows up in a purple robe, pipe in hand. Just looking at him made me laugh.

The film doesn’t do serious very well – but that’s, fortunately, a small part, like when Arjun’s girlfriend Anjali (Aditi Chengappa) closes the door on him. Most of the other potentially heavy moments – a nanbenda scene; a scene with the increasingly concerned grandparents – are treated with a light touch. I’ve rarely seen a Tamil film where so much booze is consumed and with such little narrative consequence. There’s no item-ish dance in a bar, no drunken drama. The songs could have been axed, but I suppose no film can afford to go that low-key.

Moone Moonu Varthai is a talky comedy, and it would have fallen apart with the wrong actors. Madhumita’s strength is her cast – especially Venkatesh Harinathan, who’s a superb ham. Just watch him belt out the title song of Padayappa. But he also aces a number of bittersweet moments. One of them involves a girl he’s fallen for. She rejects him. The scene makes us squirm a bit – we’ve gotten so used to laughing at (and with) Karna that we’re not sure how to respond to a situation that’s threatening to turn somewhat serious. Santhanam would have cracked an alliterative one-liner. Vivek would have turned faux-melodramatic. But Venkatesh Harinathan takes it on the chin, and is soon making a joke about kadalai. Like the film, he’s pleasantly nuts.

KEY:

• Moone Moonu Vaarthai = just three words
• kadalai = slang for flirting; also, nuts (the G-rated version)
• nanbenda = a Tamil-cinema friend (namely, much more melodramatic than your regular friend)

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Like Appuchi Gramam, Indru Netru Naalai is “local” sci-fi – and this localisation is the best part. The story is about a time machine from the future that falls in the hands of two men in the present who have to go back in the past so they can remain who are… in the present. In other words, it’s the standard time-travel pretzel narrative. There’s always a mad scientist in this sort of story, and here we have Parthasarathi (TM Karthik) who’s working on an automobile that can be operated through voice-recognition software. But that won’t pay the bills, so we have Parthasarathi’s day job as the proprietor of Edison Electricals. Talk about relativity – he fixes fans and mixers. In an early scene, he’s grinding a mix for a customer whose family demands onion chutney. It makes you wonder: If Einstein had been born here, would he have ended up doing the wiring at Emcee Square?

The director, Ravi Kumar, begins with a gnomic Kurt Vonnegut quote from Slaughterhouse-Five: “All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.” And he continues to “explain” – throughout the film – the sci-fi nuts and bolts that rivet this story. So yes, there’s the inevitable amount of spoon-feeding – but the surprise is how smoothly it all goes down. There’s always something clever. Take the scene that contains a long, involved conversation between two scientists about the time machine. The talk is the meat – but there’s also a dog eying a holographic bone, an offhand visual that lightens things up. The non-sci-fi exposition – say, the introduction of the leading man (Ilango, played by Vishnu Vishal), juxtaposed with the “predictions” of an astrologer (Karunakaran, as Pulivetti Arumugam) – is equally inventive.

Karunakaran keeps us smiling with his lines, and the “lost and found” business that Ilango cooks up with Pulivetti Arumugam is a riot. (This may be the only time you crack a smile about the missing Malaysian Airlines flight.) But some of the setups needed more breathing space. Like the bit about Pulivetti Arumugam heading back in time and clocking a boy – his maths teacher-to-be – on the head. It’s a great idea, but it isn’t allowed to blossom into a great gag. And while the romantic track (with Mia George, last seen in Amara Kaaviyam) is smartly woven into the proceedings – the mandatory duet is a series of time-travel scenarios – the crucial angle with the gangster Kuzhandaivelu (Ravi Shankar) isn’t thrilling enough. These portions are sluggish when they should be zipping by at the speed of light.

KEY:

• Appuchi Gramam = see here
• Amara Kaaviyam = see here

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

• I’m getting increasingly fascinated by our heroines these days. Take the Royal Enfield-riding Kayal (Nikki Galrani) in Yaagavarayinum Naa Kaakka. She knows the hero (Saga, played by Aadhi) is interested in her. She spots him waiting for her outside her college. She approaches him from behind and taps his shoulder. He turns, surprised to see her outside rather than in class. “Waiting for me, no?” she asks. He mumbles something. “Why waste time and energy?” she says, and seats herself behind him, on his bike. She asks him to stop at a TASMAC shop. She buys two bottles of beer. She asks him when he started drinking. “College,” he says. She says she started in school. She then directs him to a pharmacist’s, where she buys a ten-pack of “protection.” The rate she was going,  I kept waiting for her to specify a flavour. And then, she takes Aadhi to her terrace. There’s no one around. She asks him, “Are you a virgin?”
• There’s a twist to this, of course – a rather cheeky one. And I kept thinking, “She’s just like the Karthik character in Mouna Raagam.” I thought that was just me, since a lot of my reference points come from the 1980s. But what do you know, Saga himself asks Kayal, “Un manasula Mouna Raagam Karthik-nu nenapaa?” Thereon, it’s just easier to spot the other Mani Ratnam hat-tips. The “Are you a virgin?” line on the terrace? Dil Se. The scene where Mumbai’s top gangster, a Tamilian, lifts the sheet covering a badly disfigured corpse and staggers back? Nayakan. Kayal barging into Saga’s home and making him splutter nervously? Agni Natchatiram.

• This is one of those movies where a very ordinary young man gets entangled with someone super-powerful and is drawn into violence – something like Sathya. Again, I thought that association was just mine, since a lot of my reference points come from the 1980s. But we have an action scene that ensues after a goon figuratively disrobes Kayal by snatching her dupatta. Change the dupatta to a dhavani, and you have an action scene from Sathya.
• Kinda strengthens my theory that either (a) today’s filmmakers are so influenced by Mani Ratnam and Kamal Haasan that bits and pieces from their films keep creeping in, subconsciously, or (b) Mani Ratnam and Kamal Haasan have put their unique stamp on so many situations and tropes that we cannot help but be reminded of their work when we see these new films drawing on those same situations and tropes.
• The director, Sathya Prabhas Pinishetty, likes twists. Apart from what Kayal plans to do with the beer and condoms, there’s a twist about the owner of a forearm with a distinctive tattoo. There’s a twist about a character you think is good, but then there’s a twist and you think the character is evil, and then there’s a twist and you realise the character is good, after all.

•  The most idiotic twist is about a lecherous friend, who gets the plot rolling in the second half. (Till then, of course, we have endure a time- and patience-sapping romantic track, which is so totally irrelevant to the actual plot that I’d be complaining about it if we weren’t being subjected to this in every other movie.) If this pal is a lech, then you can’t just have this character trait pop up when you need it. You have lay the groundwork early on. Otherwise, it’s just a random plot-ignition device.
• But then, that would mean we shrink disgustedly from this chap, and that cannot happen. After all, he’s a nanban, and this film is about natpu. There’s even a song that goes Thozha thozha. These are the kind of friends who don’t mind too much when one of them tears up their exam hall tickets, so they can hang out in college for some more time. If one of my friends did something like this, I’d unleash the first half of this movie on him.
• All that said, this isn’t a terrible movie – merely a generic and often clueless one, of which you say things like “the second half picks up.” The problem isn’t that it’s preposterous (despite being based on a true story and all). The problem is that it isn’t taut enough to stop us from thinking it’s preposterous.
• I am always amused when films of this sort feel the need to inform us that we’re “26 nautical miles from Keelakarai coast.” Not 25. Not 27. 26. Because that makes all the difference.
• Aadhi is just not convincing. He’s all muscled up, which means it’s hard to take him as an “ordinary young man.” Plus, he doesn’t just do emotion. He does yemoshun – the quivering lips, the halting speech patterns. Someone should tell him we’re in 2015.
• The antagonist is played by Mithun Chakraborty, who’s not bad. But this sort of casting is always distracting. About the only flaw in Aranya Kaandam was Jackie Shroff. Sure, he looked the part. But he didn’t feel like he belonged there. The small lip-sync issues. The slightly odd body language. You keep wondering what it might have been like had an actor familiar with the language, the milieu had played the part.
• But at least, this is interesting casting. As opposed to Naren and Pragathi, who play the hero’s disappointed father and indulgent, excuse-making mother. Just a few weeks ago, they played these same parts in Inime Ippadithan.
• The best thing about Yaagavarayinum Naa Kaakka is the cultural-education aspect of the title, which I had to look up. It’s part of a couplet from the Thirukkural, and it means you have to have control over your tongue. Clearly, this doesn’t apply to people reviewing movies like Yaagavarayinum Naa Kaakka.

KEY:

• flavour = see here
• “Un manasula Mouna Raagam Karthik-nu nenapaa?” = Do you think you’re Karthik in Mouna Raagam?
• dupatta = see here
• dhavani = see here
• nanban, thozha = friend (in the bromantic sense)
• natpu = friendship
• Thirukkural = see here
• Inime Ippadithan = see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Let me begin by saying how intensely jealous I am of those of you who haven’t seen Drishyam, the Malayalam movie that inspired Papanasam. Most times, it doesn’t matter whether we’ve seen the original film or read the book the screenplay is based on – because, as the cliché goes, there are only so many stories, and most of what we see involves permutations and combinations of the elements in those stories. And we watch these remakes for, say, the freshness the new cast brings to the material, or what the director does with it. But once in a while, you get a premise so gobsmackingly good, so fresh and audacious, that nothing anyone does can recreate your first time. I experienced that when I watched Gone Girl after reading the book. Something similar happened with Papanasam.

But those of you who haven’t seen Drishyam, I’d imagine, are in for a white-knuckle treat. Jeethu Joseph, who directed Drishyam, is in charge of Papanasam too, and, wisely, he doesn’t try to fix something that ain’t broke. The film opens with a shot of a lake whose smooth surface is interrupted by ripples – the image prepares us for what’s to follow, the increasing turbulence in the placid life of Suyambulingam (Kamal Haasan) and his family (wife Gautami, daughters Niveda Thomas and Esther Anil). But first, we see what a placid life it is. The early portions are leisurely paced – the scenes seem to be cut to the rhythms of a small town. It’s like strapping yourself to the time machine from Indru Netru Naalai and setting the dial to an era when cinema meant more than breakneck editing and the conviction that every audience member is a three-year-old suffering from ADD.

The details (save for a bafflingly fake-looking moustache that Kamal sports) are pitch-perfect. On top of a TV set, we see a model airplane – we know instantly what kind of household this is. And again and again, we’re shown what a loving, tight-knit family this is. We see them frequently around the dining table, and no one is staring at a smartphone. Suyambulingam chats with his wife, his daughters. He chats with the owner (MS Baskar) of a restaurant he likes to frequent. These aren’t plot-oriented conversations. They’re the kind of things people talk about when they have a long history, when they’ve exhausted every topic on earth and now muse about earthworms and agriculture. Suyambulingam’s father-in-law (Delhi Ganesh) speaks of selling his house. Suyambulingam doesn’t want to hear about it. Suyambulingam is a mite too careful with money – he’s the kind of person who keeps switching off the lights in the house. This annoys his wife. That’s about the extent of conflict in these lives. We’re being shown paradise – before it is lost.

The fall comes about when… no, I won’t tell you. With most thrillers, the suspense is based on what happened or who did it. Here, the question is: Will he get away with it? He, of course, is Suyambulingam, and we’re on his side, of course – but the director is canny enough to muddy our emotions, by showing us another set of parents (Asha Sarath, who plays an Inspector General, and Anant Mahadevan) who love their son as much as Suyambulingam loves his daughters. At one point, you may feel the IG is going too far for the sake of her son, but then you remember that Suyambulingam has possibly gone further for the sake of his daughter. It’s no surprise that, by the end, we hear the word kuttra unarchi (guilty conscience) from both families – there are no winners. It’s a masterstroke to make Suyambulingam’s adversary a woman, a mother. Papanasam is one of those rare films in which the amma sentiment doesn’t make you regurgitate your breakfast.

Another thrill is watching the good guy do the kind of things the bad guy usually does. Lying. Covering up. Manufacturing alibis. Tampering with evidence. It’s a spin on the classic Hitchcockian scenario of an innocent man on the run. Only, Jeethu Joseph is no Hitchcock. We watch the latter’s films over and over, without tiring of them, because of how cinematic they are. Once we know who did what to whom – that is, the basic plot, which is what grips us the first time we watch a movie – we observe, during subsequent viewings, the elegance of the filmmaking. We notice the camera casually eyeing, from the upper floor, the guests at a party, and then craning in to peer at the key in Ingrid Bergman’s hand. We notice a murder as reflected in a fallen pair of spectacles. Set to carnival music. Joseph, on the other hand, relies on reaction shots to tell us what to feel. I haven’t seen this many cutaways to “pointed” expressions on actors’ faces – we might as well be staring at subtitles saying things like “this man is afraid he’s caught in a lie” or “this woman is suspicious.”

Still, that plot is so strong that all this, ultimately, matters little. Plus, there’s the leading man. Suyambulingam is a cable-TV operator. And a cinema fanatic, like… Kamal Haasan. This seems to be the season for meta reflections on the actor. Uttama Villain was practically a meditation on the Kamal Haasan persona. Here, we get a reference to his 1975 release Cinema Paithiyam, as well as a reminder of the actor’s indifference to politics. And let’s not forget that, like Suyambulingam, Kamal Haasan has two daughters and is starring in this movie with his real-life Significant Other.

And like Kamal Haasan, who’s often accused of ghost-directing his films, Suyambulingam watches films and offers commentary on what he would have done with the scene. Later, fittingly, he actually turns into a “director,” recreating a day in his life with “props” and (unwitting) “actors.” Cinema is a running subtext in Papanasam, which employs cinematic tools like the zoom-in (every time Suyambulingam thinks back on a movie) and the flashback (the entire film is one). Even Suyambulingam’s emotions are dictated by the movies. Pasamalar makes him cry. A song from Siraichaalai makes him hurry home to his wife and enact what he jokingly calls a “rape scene.” Elsewhere, the wife, fed up with his talk, accuses him of spouting the same “dialogue.” There’s a scene of “filming” on a phone. There’s a discussion about film versus digital. And like in the movies, a moment of high drama occurs just as rains break out. Earlier, there was non-stop sunshine – now, thunder and lightning.

My favourite bit was a reference to Padikkadha Medhai. At first, it’s just a pun, a Crazy Mohan-lite joke. Later, we see that it’s an allusion to Suyambulingam himself, someone who’s hardly educated and yet has the street smarts to… no, I won’t tell you. Kamal takes a cue from Sivaji Ganesan in that earlier film. Not only does he say his hairstyle is like Sivaji’s, he also pitches his performance at a more “cinematic” level than Mohanlal did in Drishyam. Future film scholars are going to tie themselves up in knots about who is better, which approach is better, but for now, let’s just say Kamal Haasan is terrific. And it’s terrific to see him play a “normal” part, something that doesn’t ask you to view it through special Subtext Revealing Glasses. As fun as that is, sometimes, more of this, please.

KEY:

• Papanasam = the name of the place (see here) where the characters reside; though also used for the literal meaning of the word (papa + nasam = destroyer of sins)
• Gone Girl = see here
• Indru Netru Naalai = see here
• Padikkadha Medhai = An uneducated genius

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

At the beginning of Baahubali – The Beginning, we’re shown the lay of the land. This kingdom lies here, that one there. It’s nothing new as an idea – we saw this in Lagaan, for instance. But look what the director, SS Rajamouli, does. He renders the map in three dimensions and follows it all the way to a waterfall, which morphs into an actual waterfall – there’s always a little tweak, a little twist. We see the Ramya Krishnan character (she’s good, but can’t anyone think of anything she can play other than The Glowering Woman) running towards us clutching an infant – but as she moves past us, we see the arrow sticking out of her back. We see Palvaalthevan (Rana Daggubati) preparing for a fight with a bison-like animal – but it’s only when man and beast are in the same frame that we register how big the animal is, what a monster it is.

The small problem with Baahubali is that these visual twists aren’t complemented by narrative ones. There’s a wonderful revelation at the end involving Kattappa (Sathyaraj, who has the most moving part and aces it), and it sets up Part II of the film (expected next year) wonderfully – but otherwise, this is not the kind of movie you watch for the plot. As he did in Naan Ee, Rajamouli proves here that the story doesn’t really matter – for what is Naan Ee but your average revenge saga? But the minute you make that man a housefly, everything changes. Suddenly, it’s a brand new experience.

Baahubali, seen as just a story, is as old as the hill that Sivu (Prabhas) wants to climb. The film takes us back to an era of palace intrigues and deliverer myths, when royals spoke formal Tamil (“Mudiyai mudippavan mudi”) and commoners a more colloquial tongue. It’s the kind of cheerfully manipulative film where, after a war, a wounded man raises himself painfully on a stick as he cheers the newly crowned king. But Rajamouli makes us feel we’ve never seen anything like it. It’s part AP Nagarajan. It’s part Cecil B DeMille. Even Tolkien is in here somewhere. Along with a kitchen sink full of masala tropes: the long-suffering mother, brothers-turned-enemies, flashbacks and double roles. All updated with six-pack abs, computer-generated effects and eye-popping visuals. (Cinematographer KK Senthil Kumar and production designer Sabu Cyril are practically co-directors.)

The emotional beats take a while to cohere, so the first half is a bit of a drag – but even so, there’s much to enjoy. Take the romance between Sivu and Avantika (Tamannaah). If you’ve seen the trailer, you may have thought (as I did) that the actress was cast because she looks pretty in that gold bustier and those diaphanous white robes. But she’s actually some sort of – are you ready for this? –guerrilla warrior. One of Rajamouli’s achievements is that he makes us buy Tamannaah as this warrior. For once, her face shows character. And the mandatory love scenes are delightfully reimagined. There’s a bit that has to do with underwater calligraphy. And later, we see the classic taming-of-the-shrew construct depicted through choreography. Of course, there’s also a song sequence where the camera lights lovingly on Tamannaah’s navel. Some conventions are sacrosanct – you don’t mess around with them even if you’re SS Rajamouli.

I couldn’t quite buy Prabhas as this saviour. He has the physicality, all right. As the film’s title suggests, he’s strong. He keeps lifting things – a giant lingam, a giant boulder on a mountain, a giant statue. (In the Marvel universe, he’d be called Hoist Man.) And he acquits himself well in the action scenes – the one where he grabs a sword from its scabbard, in midair, is why wolf whistles were invented. (The battle manoeuvres are brilliantly imagined.) But Prabhas looks like a soft romantic lead, especially when compared to the oak-like Daggubati, who looks like he was nursed by a dragon. When Sivu delivers this movie’s equivalent of the rousing speech Henry V gave before leading his men to the Battle of Agincourt, we don’t feel the fire.

Then again, one way to experience Baahubali is to simply block out the sound (Maragatha Mani’s tunes aren’t very memorable) and imagine you’re watching the most spectacular silent movie of all time. In the midst of filmmakers who think they’re giving us spectacle by going to virgin foreign locations and shooting mountains and flowers, Rajamouli gives us more.. and more. This isn’t just about grandeur in visuals. It’s about grandeur in ideas. If DeMille’s saviour, in The Ten Commandments, was transported in a basket as a baby, Rajamouli has the child held aloft by a hand amidst swirling waters. There’s a superb romantic scene whose centrepiece is a snake twined around an arrow. I laughed out loud at the sheer audacity on display. Rajamouli proves that it’s possible to reinvent even the “TASMAC song” – here, the dancers emerge from a pyramid of ropes, as alcohol flows from pitchers overhead. But the best sight of all is that of a filmmaker not, for a second, taking his audience for granted.

KEY:

• baahubali = strong of arm
• Mudiyai mudippavan mudi= (loosely) to the victor, goes the crown

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Gautami opens up to Baradwaj Rangan about ‘Papanasam’, her milestone movies, and, yes, Kamal Sir.

You know how some actors look even better sitting across you than on screen? Gautami is charmed like that. She could probably jump out of bed and pose, simultaneously, for a keep-your-skin-glowing ad, a be-trim-in-your-forties ad, and one of those ads where a woman gets mistaken for a college-goer until her daughter comes running in, screaming Mummy. She speared a broccoli floret in her rice pasta and laughed when I asked if it was the genes. “I eat sensibly,” she said. That probably explained why the broccoli was disappearing faster than the pasta. She reframed that statement: “I don’t eat what doesn’t suit me.” Translation: no gluten, no lactose, very little salt and sugar. The latter is a problem, she said, because she has a sweet tooth. I didn’t believe her. Looking at her, would you?

She was in a white, cottony kind of salwar kameez ensemble. A pale blue dupatta hugged the neck. Her daughter Subbulakshmi, sitting nearby, had tuned out, preferring to listen to whatever her earphones were piping in from the tablet in her hand. It was an upscale restaurant, so people didn’t exactly stare, but you could sense them pausing as they passed by. The quick recognition. Hey, that’s… The slight hesitation that follows, whether to carry on and act cool or stop and say things like I’m a fan. This, Gautami said, is a validation of success. “If ten people don’t look at me and point, then what am I doing? It’s part of the job. It’s the path I’ve chosen.” And no, it doesn’t bother her. “It’s as normal to me as a bank guy going to his office. Of course, if people do this in a boorish manner, then I get angry. But then, I’d feel that way even if I were a girl going to college.”

She was that college girl once. She didn’t want to endure ragging during the first weeks of engineering, so when a relative offered her a part in a Telugu movie he was making, Dayaamayudu, she jumped at the offer. I looked it up. It’s some kind of Biblical costume drama, with Gautami attired like an extra from The Ten Commandments. If you believe in what the film industry likes to call “sentiment,” Gautami’s subsequent rise to fame is not surprising. Her first words on screen couldn’t have been more auspicious. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. She had a bigger role in Gandhinagar Rendo Veedhi, released the same year, 1987. “I was this sheltered, protected child,” she said. “Prim. Proper. A polite, Bishop Cotton child, all yes ma’am, no ma’am. Suddenly, I was like, Wow, let’s do this. I get a kick out of pushing the envelope for myself.”

* * *

Alice in Wonderland. That’s how she described herself when I asked how that prim, proper, polite child, that Bangalore girl, felt on the sets of one of her rustic Ramarajan movies. “I didn’t know one side of the field from the other side. I had no idea how to wear a pavadai-dhavani.” She had no idea about Tamil either – her household was Telugu, and she spoke almost exclusively in English. So she learnt the language. The first Tamil word she taught herself to read was seidhigal, which appeared on the title card of the nightly news bulletin on Doordarshan. “I taught myself the language through a process of elimination. I’d pick up a Tamil newspaper. I knew what a word should look like. Then I’d look at the letters that would repeat. I’d look for patterns. It was like a jigsaw that I put together.” It paid off. Gautami had quite a run as heroine. “I didn’t sleep very much for about seven years, and I loved it.”

There was a gap – almost two decades. And now, Alice is all grown up in Papanasam. The most difficult scene, Gautami said, was the one where she pleads with the boy whose actions change the course of the story. “By nature, I’m rather restrained. I’m not the kind who’ll burst into tears. It always takes something for me to step out of that natural core of reticence and perform highly emotional scenes, especially after such a long time. It was a pivotal scene. If it fell flat, then the rest of film wouldn’t work.”

Thevar Magan was another “big push.” That scene where Banu returns and finds Shakti married… Gautami called it a personal triumph. “That’s not me on screen. It’s not who I am in life.” I called the film memorable. Gautami preferred to call it a milestone. Aboorva Sagotharargal is another. It was early in her career. She was an industry outsider. She knew nothing about makeup, hair, emoting. “I was shown a particular paradigm, and I was following it.” She’d sit patiently in her chair for an hour and a half , while the makeup artist slathered her face with stuff – first, a pan stick foundation to camouflage the skin, then powder to remove traces of oil, and finally pancake to smooth it all out. One day, she asked him why he took so long. He said if he didn’t take that long, they’d think he wasn’t doing his job. Also, this was what makeup had meant since the black-and-white days, when the film stock needed heavy lighting.

Kamal Haasan was present at the look trial of Aboorva Sagotharargal. He did the makeup very differently. No foundation. No eyeliner. Very light makeup, to suit the new kinds of film being used in that period, which needed less light. Gautami kept goggling at the mirror. For the first time, she saw a person in there. She told herself, “This is what I want. This is what feels right on my face.” From that day, she began experimenting. “I made mistakes, but I found what I was comfortable with.” Another milestone: Dharmadurai. She spoke of the scene where, after a separation, Rajinikanth comes looking for her and finds her washing clothes for a living. “I had done heavy scenes before. In Enga Ooru Kaavalkaran, I had to break down at one point, and for the first time I really burst into tears. But this scene took me to the next level. It was a solo shot, a close-up. It tapped into something deeper. It wasn’t just about crying. It was about acting. I wanted to do this more often.” She also spoke of Nee Paadhi Naan Paadhi. “I let go. I’d go to the set and become the character. It was about ease of performance. It was just me with a clean, scrubbed face. No tricks.”

Gautami found that she had to undergo a “period of readjustment” when she played Rani, the character from Papanasam. “I wanted her to look natural. But the makeup you see in the mirror is different from what shows up on camera. I’d do it differently today.” I said there was this other thing that seemed out of character: Rani’s manicured fingernails. Gautami grinned. “I noticed that too. I whacked myself mentally and said, That’s unforgivable. That should not have happened.” But the rest of the look worked – the gold chains, the glass bangles, that purse, the clothes. Given that Gautami is credited as Costume Designer, I asked how one went about “designing” costumes for someone like Rani, someone so next-doorly. “It’s common sense plus an instinctive understanding of the character,” she said. “I got my saris from the places we shot. Chennai. Thenkasi. Thodupuzha. The sari you see me wearing during the first song… that was the most expensive. It cost around 1800 rupees. The others cost some 300-400 rupees.”

When the budget is “kind enough,” the saris get fancier – like the ones Andrea Jeremiah and Oorvasi wore in Uttama Villain. “These days, there are duplicates for everything,” Gautami said. “But there is an innate difference. The difference comes from the lustre, the fabric, the quality of the embroidery. Most importantly, it’s about how the sari makes the wearer feel. You carry yourself differently when you’re wearing a real Kanjeevaram.” In Kamal Haasan’s forthcoming Thoongavanam, Gautami has given Trisha a “stylish, very feminine look. It looks like designer wear, but it’s very approachable, very wearable.” She spoke about a suit she got made for Kamal. “The tailoring is different. I keep playing with cuts and fabric and lining. It adds so much to the character, whether he’s seen in silhouette or is in motion, running and jumping.”

* * *

Speaking to Gautami can sometimes sound like speaking to Kamal Haasan. There’s always that – what’s the word for it? – hyper-intelligence, hyper-awareness, hyper-articulation. When I asked if I should refer to her as Gautami or Gautami Tadimalla, she said, “Just Gautami. There was a time people kept seeing my surname and they were confused. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. A name is born of a need to regulate society. It’s like having a voter ID. It’s like DNA. People probably started using names to avoid inter-marriage…” When I asked if heroines had it better today, she said, “Definitely. It’s still hero-centric, but the arena is open to experimentation with so many platforms for content delivery…” When she spoke about losing her parents, she said, “I was forced to step out, but I was ill-prepared to face the rocks and boulders of life…”

I asked if it was easier acting with Kamal Haasan now. “Yes and no,” she said. “Personally, I am more attuned to him. I can read him as an actor, which is needed when you’re doing a scene. Otherwise, it’s the same. We have a very strong personal equation, but on the set we are just two actors.” She started her career in awe of him. She still is. “I’ve seen every side of him there is to see, and yet the pedestal hasn’t faltered. The innate honesty with which he lives his life is amazing. He is what you see.” Even as an actor. “I feel that Kamal Sir’s performance comes from the mind and heart. It’s an intellectual and emotional exercise.” And what about Mohanlal, who played the protagonist in Drishyam, the Malayalam film on which Papanasam is based? “I find with Mr. Mohanlal a certain analytical, clinical approach.” That sounded similar to how the two legends interpreted their parts. “I don’t think one can’t do what the other does. They’re more than capable. But at first glance, this would seem to be the difference.”

Gautami’s first shot for Papanasam was the one in the bus stand where the family meets the character played by Charlie. “It felt good. It felt familiar and new at the same time.” She was never really away from cameras, after all. She was on TV –  serials, a talk show, reality dance shows. She was on film sets. She was designing costumes. But as part of the crew, she had gotten used to looking at the whole picture, what everyone was doing. Who’s doing what off of whom? Who needs what kind of support? She caught herself thinking about all this when she began to play Rani. “I was stepping outside the character’s skin and taking in a panoramic view. Then I remembered that as an actor your perspective needs to turn inwards. You need to develop tunnel vision. Once I realised this, on the third or fourth day, I was fine.”

I asked her if the things she’d been through – life, basically – had made her a different actress, maybe even a better actress. “The older and wiser you get, you become a better actor,” she said, and spoke of her battle with cancer. “It’s not that that experience is going to help me play a cancer patient better. But you become more… self-aware. It adds to your personality, how you look at things.” At one point in her life, one thing caromed into another. She married. She separated. She became a single parent. She lost her mother. She lost her father. And then, cancer. She called it “the finishing touch.”

That changed everything. “I was always dealing with issues, anticipating the next blow. But now, something within me gave me a kick in the back and said, ‘Get out of this constant crisis-management mode.’ I started looking at where I wanted to be, how I wanted to spend my mental and emotional resources. If you give me a negative review or if someone else doesn’t like my face, that’s your problem. That’s not my problem. I don’t want to focus my energy on that. I want to focus on goodness, the right kind of life, filled with smiling people…” Being a parent has been another teacher. “Children are so sensitive. They get their baggage from us. So when Subbulakshmi was around, I never said things like ‘My hair does not look good today’ or ‘I’m looking fat today.’” Fat? She saw my eyebrows shoot up and said she had toxaemia during pregnancy. She ballooned up to 200 pounds.

These life experiences, she said, changed her approach to performing. It’s now a technical and intellectual exercise rather than psychological and instinctive. She reads a lot. And when she reads, it’s an audiovisual exercise. “I have a movie running inside my head.” It’s the same thing with a script. “But now, I can also bring an intellectual approach to the character. What are the other angles to this scene? What is the deeper implication of this action? I am enjoying that. Twenty years ago, I was an actress with potential. I have the confidence now that I can deliver on that potential.”

* * *

I asked Gautami if she felt there were deeper implications – maybe something misogynistic – in the scene where Rani’s husband comes home and says he’s in the mood for sex. Only, given his tendency to filter life through the movies, he playfully says he wants to enact a “rape scene.” Gautami gave me an I-don’t-believe-this smile. “This is a man who’s overwhelmed by oestrogen. He’s supremely indulgent with and protective of his wife and daughters. There’s a strong, secure relationship between man and wife on an intimate level. So it’s a private joke. So many people make inappropriate jokes. It’s just that. Anyone who can even infer such a horrendous meaning from one light, barely-there statement, made by actors and filmmakers with this kind of credibility, can see anything terrible and horrible in the most innocuous things. At the end of the day, it’s a character.” She did concede, though, that “in India, the line blurs a lot between character and actor.”

Gautami got the Papanasam part during the Theyyam-makeup trials for Uttama Villain. Jeethu Joseph, the director of Papanasam, showed up for a preliminary meeting with Kamal Haasan. After a while, they called for her. She thought they were going to ask her to help with costumes for the film. Instead, Jeethu Joseph said he’d like her to play Rani. Gautami asked him if he was considering her as an actor, or because of the curiosity factor that would arise from casting a real-life couple. She agreed only when he said he was interested in her performance. In any case, she told me, “I know Kamal Sir…”

Sir. I asked if she called him that because that’s what she used to call him when she was his co-star. “It’s not habit,” she said. “ It’s a very conscious decision born of respect that has been earned consistently. When I refer to him in public, in any kind of context, that’s how it is.” And in private? “Even then, I do not call him by name. I’m a traditionalist in some ways. That respect is always there.” Anyway, she continued. “I know Kamal Sir. I know who he is. I know about his integrity. At the end of the day, despite his personal feelings, the actor has to be right for the role.” She shrugged. “So it does not bother me.”

The defensiveness was directed at some journalists who asked her, before the film’s release, if her personal equation with Kamal Haasan fetched her the part. (She hasn’t signed any film after Papanasam.) She spoke of the uncertainty on the part of the industry. “Most people think I’ve done this movie only because it’s Kamal Sir’s movie. In that case, he’s done so many other movies. Why wasn’t I in them? I did this one because it was right. I did it because of the film. The fact that it was with him was icing on the cake and the cherry and everything.”

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

Every young Tamil-film hero looking to become a super star (if not the Superstar) makes a film in which he plays a cop. That’s when he announces his ambitions of entering the big leagues. Enough with all this love from the urban pockets. I now want B- and C-centre adoration. Maari is Balaji Mohan’s announcement that directors can do this too. He wants to show the industry that he isn’t just the sweet guy who made Kadhalil Sodhappuvadhu Yeppadi and Vaayai Moodi Pesavum. He wants to show he has chest hair. No more long, lyrical titles, please. Maari: one word, rhymes with massy. It’s the kind of film that would be fifteen minutes shorter if they removed all scenes with slo-mo strutting by Maari (Dhanush) – but if they did that, how would the excited boys seated ahead of me have gotten the opportunity to stand up every few minutes and bring the house down? Maari is Balaji Mohan’s stab at the uniquely Indian genre meant for Whistling Thronging Fans. It’s a WTF movie.

Which isn’t to say it’s a terrible movie. The director shows that he can stage a mass moment with the best of them. One of these moments involves a table and Maari’s propped-up feet. That’s it – he doesn’t utter a word. This setup is repeated a little later, this time with firecrackers. Again, no words. But Maari can’t be silent all the time, especially if he’s got to keep repeating the mantra that’s such a part of the mass-hero persona. It’s a good one: senjiruven, I’ll do you in. Maari’s fingers scissor through the air and land inches away from the opponent’s throat. It’s a mark of Dhanush’s capabilities that we don’t laugh when these heroics come from a man who could hide behind Kajal Aggarwal’s arm. The part is by no means a stretch – all it needs is star power. But Dhanush acts his heart out, as though he believed he were the first ever actor to play a small-time rowdy with a heart as golden as the fat chains around his neck. At times, he makes us believe too.

Kajal Aggarwal is Sridevi. She wants to set up a boutique in Maari’s lower-middle-class neighbourhood, but he is a nuisance. He wants a cut. They’re opposites, and you think it’s just a matter of time before they’re attracted to each other. In fact, I thought this would happen the first time they met. He sees her and the world sort of goes silent, the way it does in the movies when people fall in love. A few scenes later, he tells her, “I love you.” But this angle comes with a surprisingly sharp edge. We think, for a while, that Sridevi is your garden-variety loosu ponnu, and then we see that she isn’t. Balaji Mohan seems to be saying that he isn’t selling out – at least not completely. He knows these are clichés, and he knows we know these are clichés – and he’s trying to present them in a new light. There’s another nice scene between Maari and a distraught little girl. You roll your eyes and think it’s the usual “sentiment” scene, but the way it ends made me smile.

The problem is that there isn’t enough of this. Save for the bits with Robo Shankar (he’s a riot as Maari’s sidekick), the writing is shockingly ordinary – lots of tell, very little show. A long voiceover at the beginning of the first half sets up the protagonist; another long voiceover at the beginning of the second half sets up the antagonist. Does making a mass movie mean that you forget to make an interesting one? The film keeps adding subplots – about pigeon racing, about red sandalwood smuggling, about Maari turning auto driver (or maybe this is really Dhanush turning into Rajinikanth) – but these developments come and go. They don’t particularly add to the movie, which seems to have been thought of in terms of a few mass moments and very little else. The casting, too, is off. Was Vijay Yesudas really the best you could find for such an important role? He looks like a man trying to pull himself out of quicksand using his shoelaces.

Would we complain so much had the director been different? Maybe not. But then, Maari shows hints of being a different kind of mass-masala movie, and it’s frustrating when we keep getting long, dull stretches of sameness. So, yes, you’re giving your leading man John Lennon glasses and machete sideburns – but what use is it when little else about him is new? Yes, you’re sprucing up action scenes with Steadicam shots and 360-degree camera swirls – but what use is it when there’s so little innovation in the stunts themselves, and when the villains are so unmemorable? Yes, Anirudh peps things up for a few minutes with the ultra-catchy Don-u don-u – but why are the other numbers so forgettable? But there may be at least one other reason this composer was chosen. He makes an appearance in a song sequence and makes Dhanush look like Schwarzenegger in comparison. As I said, it’s a WTF movie.

KEY:

• loosu ponnu = the heroine in every other Tamil film; she looks like she’s a few sandwiches short of a picnic

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

The king is dead. Long live the king. Baradwaj Rangan remembers MS Viswanathan.

At 7:59 am, last Tuesday, I got this sms from a friend: You have to write a great tribute. I hadn’t looked at news sites yet, but I knew who the tribute was for. We’d been hearing news about his hospitalisation and the word “critical” was being thrown around a lot. It wasn’t surprising, that sms. What surprised me, though, was my reaction. I misted up. I usually don’t do this. There’s some sadness when you hear such news, certainly, but when people have lived a long life and when they’ve produced an immortal body of work, their own mortality doesn’t seem as calamitous. Tears are for the family, for those who knew him personally. For fans, for those who knew him only through his music, MS Viswanathan will always manifest himself at will. In a song on the radio. On YouTube. From the pen drive of an auto driver with roof-blasting speakers. Why, then, this surge of emotion?

I guess it’s because another link to my past is gone. When you’re young, you absorb pop culture intensely. Your mind is a blank slate, and gradually songs and stars and movies begin to leave their mark on it. These songs and stars and movies become… home. Then you grow up and, at some point, there’s no more room on that slate. Thereon, you still listen to music or watch a movie, but because your mind has more to do, more to process, with work and family and other things that make up life, pop culture no longer becomes personal. Thereon, it’s a kind of disengaged participation. Luckily for me, MSV was around when the slate was still being filled. And at least some of the tears were due to an image, however fuzzily recalled, of me tying my shoelaces and making sure I had the right textbooks in my satchel while Kaatrukkenna veli played on the radio.

Around that time, the late 1970s, there was a programme on Doordarshan called Mellisai. As the name suggests, it featured light music – that is, music that is “lighter” than classical music. The title card for this programme had the name in Tamil (obviously), and behind it was this design: notes of music on a staff, except that the staff wasn’t a series of parallel lines. The lines undulated, like a wave, like a sine curve – the impression was that there was a breeze and the notes were flowing along. That’s the image I have as I read obituaries that refer to MSV by his appellation, Mellisai Mannar, the king of light music. Beginning to end, his songs just flowed.

It’s impossible to do more than scratch the surface in a space like this, but take Minminiyai kanmaniyai, from Kannan En Kadhalan. The melody line descends like steps – sharp, distinct notes, the kind given to beginner music students so that they learn to land on a note without the crutch of the preceding (or succeeding) note on the octave. You’d think such a tune would sound a little staccato. You think it wouldn’t flow. But it does. And a dizzy accordion flows around it. The beat is a waltz, but try figuring that out from the percussion, with at least two rhythm patterns flowing simultaneously. MSV did this over and over. He made songs whose constituents suggested one thing (say, if you read the music) when the outcome was entirely different.

MSV’s mind must have resembled a bottomless pot of spaghetti, with coiled loops of tunes that he kept pulling out for our consumption. So many songs today have four lines in the opening verse – the pallavi/mukhda– and these are usually four repetitions of the same melody line. But MSV would fashion four different tunes for each of the four lines. One of my favourite songs done this way is Madhana maaligayil, from Rajapart Rangadurai. And the stanzas – charanam/antara – too contain astounding variations. A rise here. A precipitous dip there. If there’s such a thing as a “Guess the Next Note!” competition, MSV’s songs would be the ones you’d play in the fiendish final round. And yet, this unpredictability never stood in the way of your being able to hum the number as you would a pop standard. And such style too. Velli kinnam dhaan could be something sung by Frank Sinatra. Only, this isn’t a song meant to be sung so much as crooned, caressed, made love to.

Writing comprehensively about MSV would mean writing a book. One chapter would deal with his early work with TK Ramamurthy (many of the songs people have been attributing to MSV in obits and remembrances are actually by the duo). Another would delve into his staggering mind-meld with the lyrics of Kannadasan. A third would discuss the genres he adopted (is there a better instance of Big Band jazz in Tamil film music than Ninaithadhai nadathiye mudippavan?), the instruments (bongos, the xylophone) he made his own, the great voices he had at his disposal (TM Soundararajan, P Sushila, LR Eswari, PB Srinivas). Then, a look at his exquisite latter-day work with SPB (pausing for many, many listens of Bharathi kannamma, Kanaa kaanum kangal mella, Enakkoru kaadhali irukkinraal, Nitham nitham en kannodu). And an appendix filled with “mad songs” like Kettukodi urumi melam, in which the Indian part is scored with Western instruments and vice versa. By “mad,” I mean out-of-the-box – then again, with MSV, there was no box at all to begin with.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Other songs mentioned in the piece above:

Spoilers ahead…

Naalu Policeum Nalla Irundha Oorum is the kind of film where we’re not supposed to care that it looks like a Class IV production of Aattukkara Alamelu. The jokes are supposed to be the thing – and for a brief while, they are. The four cops of the title (Arulnithi, Singampuli, Bagavathi Perumal, Rajkumar) live in the village of the title. It’s a crime-free village. There’s a gold chain on the street, and no one picks it up – I mean, not even a dog or a crow or a child fascinated by a shiny thing makes off with it. Such a utopia, naturally, needs no cops – and so the dismayed quartet receives a transfer order to someplace spilling over with riots. Singampuli gets a bright idea (and in case we don’t get it, a bulb appears on screen, behind him, and lights up): Why not stage phony crimes and create the impression that this village does need cops?

It’s not a bad premise. It’s adapted from a 1939 British comedy named Ask a Policeman. Arulnithi is very awkward. He still hasn’t figured out what to do with his hands while delivering dialogue. But it’s really Singampuli’s show – even if the jokes are predictable. When a knife is thrown at someone who’s fleeing, you know it’s going to land on the butt. Tears are guaranteed – either because you’re laughing so hard, or you’ve realised that of all the things you could be doing with this precious life, you’ve chosen to watch a knife land on a butt. There’s a love angle too – Arulnithi and Remya Nambeesan. She’s a schoolteacher. The heroines in these films are always schoolteachers. He’s the guy who’s tongue-tied every time he sees her, which leads to the film’s only interesting conceit – all the hero-like things he does are in his dreams. He dreams that he fights for her. He dreams that he sings with her – in CS Jayaraman’s voice. I suppose, to a modern-day audience, that’s shorthand for “clutch your sides now.”

And then the director, N J Srikrishna, gets really ambitious. The film switches tracks and becomes a dead-serious parable. About the dangers of deceit. About how civilization is just a veneer and we are all bloodthirsty savages underneath. Suddenly, we get songs that go chinna chinna theeporithaane kaatta koluthuthu – small sparks can burn up forests. You wish one of those sparks had found its way to the film negative. The change of tone is terribly done, and the characters transform instantly, conveniently, like a switch was turned on. And yet, Srikrishna keeps going for laughs. There’s one bizarre bit where a thief (Yogi Babu) orchestrates a series of burglaries – he literally orchestrates it, waving a baton as his minions scamper about stealing stuff. All of this needs infinitely better writing, staging and acting, along with an actual ending. I don’t think I’ve seen another “comedy” that left this bad a taste in the mouth.

KEY:

• Naalu Policeum Nalla Irundha Oorum = Four cops and the trouble-free village
• Aattukkara Alamelu = see here
• Ask a Policeman = see here
• CS Jayaraman’s voice = see here

Copyright ©2015 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Spoilers ahead…

You may know Ramesh Thilak as the sidekick from films like Soodhu Kavvum. He’s the guy who looks like Prabhu Deva’s long-lost younger brother. Orange Mittai, directed by Biju Viswanath, is his coming-out party. He plays an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) named Sathya, and the film gets going when he responds to a 108 call from an elderly man named Kailasam (Vijay Sethupathi), who’s suffered a heart attack. Or has he? When Sathya and Arumugam (the ambulance driver, played by Arumugam Bala) reach Kailasam’s home, we get canted camera angles and horror-film music. The pictures on the wall – of zamindar-like personages – hint at what once was. But now, there are overgrown weeds outside and cobwebs inside. Then we see that it isn’t a haunted house so much as a house haunted by memories. Loneliness in one’s advanced years is its own kind of horror.

The film is basically a road movie. It’s also a drama about fathers and sons. Sathya lost his father recently. Kailasam keeps hinting at a son who’s a journalist. Anyone familiar with the map of a road movie will be able to guess that Sathya and Kailasam will find, in each other, a surrogate father and son. But Orange Mittai isn’t as banal as that description sounds. It deals with something we’ve rarely (if ever) come across in our cinema – how it’s easier to be a good son to someone else’s father, how it’s easier to be a good father to someone else’s son. All too often, we hurt (and end up being hurt by) the ones we’re closest to, and sometimes it’s just easier to bond with outsiders who aren’t freighted with familial baggage.

The pleasant surprise of Orange Mittai is that it doesn’t belabour these points. There’s no melodrama. There’s not even much drama. There’s a miscalculation at the end – an emotional moment that isn’t quite built up to. But as with the rest of the film, this moment too is laced with a comic touch. An emotional Sathya embraces Kailasam, but the latter freezes, hands stuck to his side. Like many Indian fathers of a particular generation, Kailasam may crave an emotional connection, but not so much, not this kind. I laughed out loud at his discomfiture. Full credit to Vijay Sethupathi for playing this much-older man, but I got the feeling that the role may have been better served by someone who’s actually that age. Vijay Sethupathi puffs his stomach out and streaks his hair with silver – it still comes off like stunt casting. But Kailasam, as written, strikes a chord. It’s hard not to feel for him when he tells Sathya, “Unakkum oru naal vayasaagum… Neeyum enna maari aave.”

Like many people forced to fend for themselves after a point, Kailasam is an eccentric. The film, unfortunately, oversells this aspect, which is highlighted by a really odd-sounding background score (Justin Prabhakaran). You may recall Balumahendra’s last film, Thalaimuraigal – the old man there had spent so much time alone that he’d forgotten how to be around others. His eccentricities were all-too-human. But here, Kailasam is treated like a “character.” When Sathya responds to his distress call, Kailasam makes him wait – he has to first powder himself, then comb his hair… Much later, he begins dancing on the street to the unstoppable beats of Adiye manam nilluna nikkadhadi. The scene goes on and on.

Then again, maybe this is this film’s answer to the songs and fights we get as audience sops in the more commercial movies. Because there’s very little masala otherwise. Even Sathya’s subplot with Kavya (Aashritha) is very understated. There are no duets. There’s no this-is-how-they-fell-in-love. There’s just a brief flashback to a time they sat across each other in a restaurant, having ice-creams and trading endearments – she calls him karuppaa, he keeps calling her di. We see another father in these scenes – Kavya’s. He’s interesting. It’s clear he doesn’t care much for Sathya, but he probably knows his daughter is going to have her way, so he insults Sathya with silk-sheathed jabs. We get another father-daughter angle when Sathya and Arumugam are forced to pick up a second patient. That man, too, is having problems with his girlfriend’s father, and in an inspired touch, we see Sathya mouthing the latter’s dialogue – after all, these lines describe his situation as well.

Some of these scenes are handled flatly – like something you’d see on TV. And the primary emotional arc isn’t traversed too convincingly. There are a few times the director overreaches – a showy shot involving shadows that practically comes with the subtitle “director’s touch,” or the song that refers, distractingly, to Macbeth (“sound and fury signifying nothing”). But mostly, he keeps it simple. The film slowly grows on you because the content works. Save for an interlude with cops, all other detours – like a delightful non sequitur with a thief – are integrated smoothly into the narrative. (The film runs just 100 minutes and change). Sathya gets a second subplot, this time with a supervisor who keeps yelling at him over the phone (we never see him) – this adds colour to his character. And there’s the stretch that shows us that EMTs are the minnows of the medical-industry food chain – doctors treat them like dirt. Sathya’s face falls, but there’s no sentimentality. He’s calmly accepting of his lot.

Ramesh Thilak doesn’t act in the sense we usually define acting, but he really sells Sathya. He gets two great lines. He tells someone that he didn’t realise his father’s worth until the latter died, and he asks the listener not to repeat his mistake. He says this matter-of-factly – there are no tears. But his line brought a lump in the throat: Manasu ennamo theduthu. And when he has a spat with Kavya, he tells her to be practical. If she wants to break it off, she should. Thevayillaama love pannittome-nu kalyanam pannittu kashtappadathey. The title – mercifully unexplained – may refer to candy but the film is a quiet ode to the bittersweet life.

KEY:

• mittai = candy
• Soodhu Kavvum = see here
• zamindar = see here
• “Unakkum oru naal vayasaagum… Neeyum enna maari aave.” = You too will age one day. You’ll become like me.
• Thalaimuraigal = see here
• karuppaa = blackie
• di = see here
• Macbeth (“sound and fury signifying nothing”) = see here
• “Manasu ennamo theduthu.” = The heart searches for something…
• “Thevayillaama love pannittome-nu kalyanam pannittu kashtappadathey.” = Don’t marry someone just because you fell for him and then repent.

An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2015 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.