Merry Christmas

A few days after watching Merry Christmas, I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out why it worked for me.

The film is a slow burn, to the point where there isn’t really an end to the burning. You don’t see the quiet desperation of a character who has committed a crime and is now figuring out a way to get away with it. The tone is sweet, sad, at times playful but largely quiet. Even the big revelation is done with very little drama. The story and its setting would’ve been more suited to an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents — there isn’t enough plot to justify a two and a half hour running time.

And yet…

The first thing that would’ve occurred to everyone who saw the promos was: Vijay Sethupathi and Katrina Kaif? Oh, interesting! It’s not the most obvious casting choice; for it to work, you need to give it space to breathe. And that is what the entire first half of the film is: breathing space. The tentative chemistry that develops between the two of them over the course of a long night is worth the price of admission. Despite the unlikely nature of some of the proceedings, the delicate dance between the characters somehow manages to work because of how slowly it all unfolds.

It is also what makes the ending work. The film ends almost abruptly, but really, it respects the characters’ and the audience’s intelligence in the way it does. When a single, very Christmas-y word is uttered by an unlikely character, it unties the bow on a neatly wrapped up box. We realize, as do some of the characters, how the next half hour of the film would unfold. And because Sriram Raghavan trusts us to draw this conclusion, he ends things there by allowing one character to make a choice that gives the story closure.

This is a very interesting choice for the genre. Stories like these often end with characters getting their just desserts, or characters getting away with it. But closure? In a film where all the major characters feel caged in some form or another, a character chooses to be caged, and finds that the choice is itself surprisingly liberating. (It is also in this stretch that you see what Vijay Sethupathi is made of. In a wordless stretch scored to Vivaldi’s Winter, he shows us how much an actor can convey with such minimal explicit “acting”. It is a thing of beauty.)

This is an ending about characters and their emotions, not plot. There is no earthly reason why it should work but it does. It works because the languid first half has prepared us, if not to believe it, at least to want to believe it. A lot of screen romances have that quality — they work because you want the characters to end up where they do.

And then you step back and realize that, while you thought you were watching a slow-burn crime story with a romantic subplot, what you actually got was a love story with a dead body in it. That’s a better sleight of hand than any of the characters manage in the film.

Freeze Frame #172: Ghoomer

To be perfectly honest with you, Ghoomer feels more gimmicky than anything else for pretty much its entire running time. There’s a moment towards the end when Anina, a one-handed woman picked as a bowler, steps out to bat because her team still needs a couple of runs to win and she’s the only one left. The English language commentator (AB Sr in a cameo) stands up and speaks in Hindi because, he says, the English language is too understated for this moment. It feels well written, but it doesn’t land like it should, because the film itself has been an intellectual exercise.

The moment is further weighted by a revelation anyone with two brain cells to run together would’ve seen coming – the reason why Anina lost her forearm in an accident is that she nearly collided with a drunk driver — the driver, of course, is her curmudgeonly coach Padam, the man who helped her reinvent herself as a bowler and make it this far. This revelation ought to make this moment work even better, but I’m sitting there thinking, “Come on! How many contrivances do you want to pile one on top of another?”

And then, after the match is over and Anina comes back to see Padam, and he apologizes. It’s played in a very low-key manner, pretty much as you would expect it to play in a Balki film. But as they walk away, he stumbles and holds on to her amputated arm. Then pauses, puts it on her shoulder for support, and they walk away from the camera. They’re both wearing white. And the shot is just unfocused enough that you cannot tell whose arm is holding whose shoulder for support.

I have no idea if it was intentional. But that one shot did more for me than the entire film did.

Kaathal – The Core

There is a preternatural stillness to Kaathal – The Core, Jeo Baby’s latest directorial starring Mammooty and Jyothika. People pray with solemnity, and there’s a lot of praying throughout the film. Courtroom arguments are presented in a normal tone of voice. Even a political campaign where one candidate uses a microphone is interrupted by rain, as though nature were a curmudgeonly librarian.

And most telling of all, the major characters in the film don’t share conversations that have wended their way through the many years they have known each other — they share silences. These, however, aren’t people with little to say to each other, even though that is precisely what a character claims at one point. It’s as though someone read about how dark matter is hypothesized to constitute 85% of the universe and decided to write a domestic drama on the premise.

This is not just a feature of these relationships. Even the issue that is central to the film — the reason why the wife of a very well-regarded man files for divorce when he is contesting a local election — is discussed by everyone in the first half of the film but never explicitly verbalized. In a way, it is a sly commentary on how much trouble we have talking about things that matter.

As intriguing as it all sounds, this is a very problematic strategy from a filmmaking standpoint. How do you get the audience to understand what’s going on without letting the characters say much? There are a few extremely cathartic moments towards the end of the film, but those payoffs are earned only if the audience is primed for them. And said audience has to be primed by characters who play their cards extremely close their chest. The writing and the performances have to convey so much while doing so little. Do too much, and it all comes across as a bit on the nose. Do too little, and it comes across as dull. It is to the immense credit of Jeo Baby and his cast that you are never in doubt as to what is happening.

Take the Thankam character, for example. There is an incredibly well-framed scene just before the interval, where you see him, Mammooty and a bunch of party workers. Not a single line of dialogue is spoken, but you could pick out any random member of the audience and they’d be able to write an essay on what the characters are thinking.

I spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out if I should reveal what the story was about, but then I realized that I didn’t have to worry, so here goes: Omana, the wife of Matthew Devassy, divorces her husband of twenty years because she alleges that he is gay.

The beauty of the film is that it is not about whether or not he is gay. Even if you hadn’t encountered any of the media buzz around the film, you realize very soon that he is, indeed, gay. Not because Mammooty exhibits the mannerisms you are used to seeing in portrayals of gay people on screen, but because he exhibits… nothing. He says as little as possible, and keeps his responses and his denials — even to questions on his sexuality in court — as banal as possible. But here’s the thing: he is so palpably opaque, he is practically transparent. So you, the viewer, are no longer concerned with his gayness. You’re concerned with whether he would, at any point, admit to it. Or even admit to any overt emotion. It makes the closing segment of the film so much more effective.

What Mammooty achieves in this film is nothing short of transcendent. In Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam, he played a man with a lot happening on the surface, with nary a hint of what’s going on underneath. This performance is its mirror image. At seventy-two, he’s still finding a new gear.

The counterpoint to this character is his wife Omana. In the beginning, you see her send off a manuscript through a colleague. The conversation, all of two lines long, implies that she writes fiction. And you realize, not too long after, how those two lines tell us something — in response to the carefully constructed fiction that is her marriage, she has sought refuge in producing fiction that is ostensibly a lot more exciting and romantic. Jyothika’s recent performances have reached for depth but come across as more strained than anything else — here, she seems to hardly reach for an effect, yet delivers precisely what is required.

Since this is Kerala and the events take place at the same time as a local election, the word comrade is bandied about often. But the comradeship you really see is in this central relationship. The two of them have an extraordinary moment in the closing scene of the film. He walks away from her table at a restaurant and the camera dwells for a moment on her reaction, as well as on his. Live a lie long enough, and you’ll find some undeniable truths.

Leo

Statutory warning: Here be spoilers.

For more or less the entire first half of the film, I was transfixed by Leo. The writing is clean, the screenplay flows like water, the action is well shot, and Vijay finds another gear I didn’t know he had. The opening stretch involves a stunningly shot and edited encounter with a hyena, and by the time the plot gets going, we’re entirely immersed in the world of this quiet coffee shop owner with unplumbed depths. It keeps getting better, as a bunch of criminals come to town, and when they are followed by others who believe he is someone other than who he claims he is.

And then… well, here’s where the film falters. Firstly, I found myself doing a Cary Grant from Arsenic and Old Lace: “When you say others, you mean… others? As in, more than one others?” There’s Mysskin and his crew, followed by Madhusudan Rao. Which is okay. But then Sanjay Dutt enters the picture. And Arjun. And a goon-filled convoy of vehicles large enough to cause a small Himachal town look like Outer Ring Road on the evening of the ill-fated Trevor Noah show. And you realize that the screenplay now has all the mobility of the average car on the aforementioned road that evening.

The second half of the film is essentially about one man claiming he isn’t who all these goons think he is. It’s practically like a drinking game, except, every time this question is asked and answered, someone dies. Or many someones. Couldn’t the backstory have been simpler and more plausible? Couldn’t they have jettisoned a whole bunch of characters? (Not Mansoor Ali Khan though. Keep him in there by any means necessary. Or George Maryan — this man has, thanks to the LCU and Kalakalappu, become my favourite movie cop of all time.) The trouble with so many characters is, we’re never really emotionally invested.

One of the pleasures of a Lokesh Kanakaraj film is the effectiveness of the action set pieces, but apart from some bravura moments in the first half and the odd clip in the second half, the film doesn’t make you feel his desperation. Take, for instance, the fight in Vikram’s house when Kamal tries to keep things quiet and protect his grandson — the physical constraint (the need to keep things quiet) and the emotional stakes (his grandson’s life is at stake) are combined brilliantly to create a thing of beauty. You get that sense of desperation in the incident at the coffee shop that kicks things off here. You have innocent lives at stake. You have a bunch of goons with a, um, history of violence. By the time the action explodes, you’re primed for it. But when he’s fighting off yet another bunch of goons (who, as per the norm these days, seem to be striving towards a Gillette-free society as earnestly as the LCU heroes strive towards a drug-free one), you can barely suppress a yawn. You just want to get to the point where you know whether he is or isn’t who he claims to be.

Despite this gaping hole where an engaging script and a more economical cast of characters needed to be, the film offers a few pleasures. There are a few tributes to filmmakers (Scorsese and Tarantino) that Lokesh has cited as major influences, and they all work just fine. (It also bears mentioning that the opening stretch is at least a little bit reminiscent of Tiger Zinda Hai.) My favourite, though, is a Moondram Pirai reference that had me in splits because — and I swear this is true — I thought of the exact same thing before Vijay said it.

The bigger pleasure is in watching Vijay perform under a director who seems to know what to do with him. Let’s be clear: this is still a commercial film performance from perhaps the most bankable star in the Thamizh firmament, and the writing isn’t as good as in Master. Still, when the norm is a completely invulnerable character like in Varisu, this performance comes across as a stretch. There are little touches in the writing with regard to his character — towards the end, you see him say eppidi da irukke to another character, and somehow, that single line and his tone of voice rings truer than everything that has happened in the preceding 20 minutes or so. His relationship with his family suffers from some uneven writing, but a key conversation with Trisha in the third act works beautifully.

The ending is a bit of a curiosity. The big action sequence fails on every level imaginable, but the parallel sequence in Himachal works. It asks more questions than it answers, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The bigger question is, given what the whole film has been about, is this a wise decision? I suspect my answer will vary depending on which day of the week you ask me. Still, it takes some courage and trust in the audience to do this.

My cousin worried before the film that the law of averages would catch up to Lokesh. As it happened, he wasn’t wrong. But if this is what we get when Lokesh has an off day, I can live with that.

Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani

Firstly, why the hell does the title need that extra i? Ah, never mind.

Here’s the thing, and watch out, because there are going to be a few spoilers here: A young man finds out that his wheelchair-bound mostly-mentally-absent grandfather once had a dalliance with a woman named Jamini. Turns out they had, at the very least, an emotional affair many years ago, but decided to separate because they didn’t want to break up their families. He finds her granddaughter, and the two of them get the two oldies to meet. The meeting ends with the old man getting up from his wheelchair and kissing the woman. While the old man’s wife looks on.

Her reaction is played for broad comedy. She faints, while the background music does broad comedy things.

The leading pair in the film make an unlikely couple. He’s a swaggering gym rat whose idea of democracy involves voting on Bigg Boss. She’s, well, the polar opposite, and can’t even explain to herself why she’s falling for him. The central conceit of the film is that they spend time in each other’s household to try and woo the families, and in the process, a whole bunch of people learn to be more empathetic. There’s a very well-written monologue towards the end of the second act where the hero calls this out, and he nails it. Absolutely, flat out nails it. He talks about what he grew up thinking was normal, and how everyone has a learning curve.

My problem is, did this empathy not extend towards a woman whose husband’s affair these two were getting him to relive? She is representative of the patriarchy that the film wants to dismantle, but wasn’t she as trapped in a system she became part of? She gets a moment at the end, but did these self-aware characters not see her as a person at any point during this entire saga?

I say this not to point out why I didn’t like Rocky Aur Rani. I say this to get it out of the way. The truth is, despite what was, to me, a big honking problem with the script, I loved the movie.

Here’s how I see it, okay? When you make a love story, watching the lead pair together should feel like watching Federer and Nadal on Wimbledon Centre Court, or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on a dance floor. They don’t necessarily have to be romantic, or funny. (Funny helps, but it isn’t a requirement. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise aren’t funny.) There’s got to be some kind of rhythm. Whether they’re fighting or flirting or any other f-ing, you gotta feel like you’re hearing that rhythm in your head. (You don’t believe me? Listen to the Tota Roy Choudhry character in the film. He knows what he’s talking about.) And from an acting standpoint, there ought to be a palpable sense of joy in the performance.

To be honest, the movies rarely achieve this. Sometimes you’ll get a segment of the movie where it happens (about half an hour around the middle of DDLJ). Sometimes, you’re the supporting cast (Prakash Raj and Leela Samson in OK Kanmani, for instance), so you have to get it right for lesser screen time. Sometimes the writing is so phenomenal that it does half the heavy lifting for you (Cheeni Kum, but it helps that Amitabh and Tabu are absolutely brilliant). But to do it for a whole film, and to do it so well that you elevate the writing, and each other’s performance, every time you’re on screen — that is damn hard. Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt as Rocky aur Rani give us pretty much a masterclass in how it’s done. I’ve rarely seen a couple of actors this much in tune with each other’s rhythm.

Ranveer Singh might just be one of the finest commercial actors working today. He can do the little things as well as his contemporaries, but none of them can also do the big things as well as he does. Rocky is fun to watch but he’s a damn hard character to play – he’s a very exact combination of over-the-top exuberance and vulnerability and a bunch of other things, and it would have been so, so easy to get it wrong. Alia gets a more easily written part (in some ways, she doesn’t have to discover herself so much as him), but her skill is in making us see why she loves this guy.

The film has eight other characters — a veritable crowd — but if your movie is about winning over each other’s families, you gotta have room for so many. Not all of them are equally well-written in my opinion — the ones that really worked for me are the fathers of the lead pair — but outside of the big issue I mentioned at the outset, nobody really gets shortchanged.

My view of Karan Johar’s filmography has generally been mixed. He’s cut from the same cloth as a lot of older filmmakers, and while I respect that sensibility, and that eye for drama, I’ve also found his films to be disappointingly uneven. Still, he’s consistently knocked at least one scene out of the park in each movie, as though to remind us that he is capable of much more. This time, to quote Maggie Smith from The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, he gets plenty wrong, but never where it counts. And when he gets it right, it’s something to behold.

On the structure of Oppenheimer

Listen, before you read any further, this post is gonna contain spoilers the size of a Wikipedia article on Dr. Julius Robert Oppenheimer. So beware.

There’s a moment in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer when the team on the Manhattan Project is setting up for the Trinity test (the first nuclear test explosion) and the titular character is worried about whether the planned detonation strategy would work. If it doesn’t, they’ll be picking up pieces of plutonium from all over the desert. Nobody at that point had built such a bomb before, and trying to do it with a world war breathing down your neck doesn’t help. So you see the nervousness.

Assuming you have read any history at all, you know that the test succeeded, America got a working atom bomb, and then went ahead a dropped a couple of them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This biopic, however, felt to me like plutonium scattered in the New Mexico desert. There are some very potent bits, but the structure of the film scattered them around and didn’t allow them to attain critical mass.

The story has two framing structures. The inner frame is a closed door review of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, an orchestrated kangaroo court that led to his clearance being revoked. For the man who at that point was one of America’s most famous scientists and widely regarded as the architect of their nuclear program, this was a slap in the face. The outer frame is a Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss, the man who orchestrated the security clearance review to carry out a personal vendetta and found, to his dismay, that his revenge came with a price. The majority of the narrative focuses on the process of building the bomb, and the people involved. However, the film is not called the Manhattan Project. It’s supposed to be a biopic, which means that its objective is to give us a better understanding of the man himself. The framing structures, and the commentary around them, are the devices Nolan uses to accomplish this. Some of the decisions Oppenheimer makes are driven by his guilt about what he has helped unleash; however, in the height of the Cold War, these could conceivably be seen as proof of his long-suspected Communist leanings.

Here’s the trouble with this structure. Apart from the two framing structures and the intercutting between them and the original timeline of events, the rest of the story is actually pretty linear. Why not ditch the framing devices and simply tell the story in chronological order? As it stands, every time the narrative has an opportunity to build up a head of steam, we cut to what happens after the war. The emotional momentum is lost in the machinery of the storytelling. This is not a dense story, simply one with many characters around the central one, and we mostly see only as much of their lives as Oppenheimer sees. So a linear structure would’ve had ample scope to slowly draw us into Oppenheimer’s inner world, and let us see how his big accomplishment became, in some ways, his albatross. Instead, we see the actual events in instalments, and the emotional core of the film is spoon-fed to us through this framing structure.

Now, to be fair, I understand the difficulty of telling it straight — once the bomb goes off, our interest in the story is likely to wane, and only truly great writing will save the third act from becoming a turgid mess. But that’s the challenge, isn’t it? Make that third act work, and you have a shot at greatness.

This is especially ironic because Nolan is willing to trust the audience’s intelligence when it comes to the science itself. There is the necessary amount of expository dialogue but think of the brief but critical conversation where Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence discuss the news of the Uranium atom being split, and reach the conclusion that this now means a bomb can potentially be made. This scientific portion of this conversation is as brief as it needs to be — it doesn’t fall into a trap of having two accomplished scientists explaining the obvious to each other for the benefit of the audience, and they revert to human-speak only when they have to explain the implications to a junior colleague who is with them.

This is not to say that I didn’t like the film. I liked a lot of it. The performances are uniformly good. The Trinity test explosion scene is an absolutely magnificent piece of cinema. There is a lovely moment with Harry Truman in which the president schools him on where the buck stops. Matt Damon has so much fun playing Leslie Groves, I found myself leaning forward every time I saw him. Like I said, so much to like.

I just wish I had loved it.

Wonder Women

There is an extended sequence at around the midpoint of Wonder Women where various expecting couples who make up the prenatal class that the film is set in, engage in an exercise involving a baby doll that they have to pretend is their baby. The subsequent conversations, largely centered around the women’s significant others, give us a glimpse into how the fathers feel about what’s coming.

One of the couples, Jaya and Umesh (Amruta Subhash and Sandesh Kulkarni) is much older than the others; they worry that she might be too old to do this without serious health consequences. The husband talks about how her well-being matters more than anything else. Each word feels like it’s been wrenched out of a quagmire of guilt before it could escape through his larynx. The moment is gut-wrenching in its emotional honesty. The wife’s response is wordless, both here and in an earlier moment with the doll. But the reason why every picture in the world doesn’t speak a thousand words is that every frame of hers in the film uses up more than its allocated quota of words.

In contrast, another father Jojo (Harris Saleem) talks about how his wife Nora (Nithya Menen) seems to have been subsumed by her impending motherhood, and she responds, pretty much, that she wants to be everything that her mother hasn’t been for her. If the term “disappointingly generic” hadn’t already been invented, this exchange would’ve given us a reason to do so. Nithya Menen is a fine actress, but here, all she manages is to be as good as the material, and that’s a problem.

Now consider a third couple, Veni and Bala (Padmapriya and Srikanth Vijayan), who hail from a conservative Thamizh family. She studied to be a lawyer but has settled into the role of a housewife, and is slowly finding a way back to herself. He, from what we have seen so far, acts pretty much like you expect. But in this scene, he finally expresses how much his cluelessness about parenthood bothers him — the last time I touched a doll, I was scolded, he says, which conveys so much (I was reminded, for a moment, of the last chapter of Volga’s Liberation of Sita). Veni responds that this is something they can do together. For a moment there, she sounds as much like his parent as his spouse, and that specific note she finds imbues an ordinary exchange with an extraordinary amount of subtext. Hers is perhaps the most generically written, yet specifically performed character in the entire film. 

While there are other couples involved in this scene, I bring these three up to indicate how this extended sequence is emblematic of the film itself: uneven writing coupled with performances that don’t always make up for it. I came away from the movie feeling underwhelmed.

I wondered at first if the somewhat stagey nature of the entire setup is what I had a problem with. Here’s the thing: it’s not a deal-breaker if the details transcend the structure. Anjali Menon is a good writer-director, but it almost feels like the best scenes are the ones where she kept things absolutely minimalist. 

Take Mini (the Parvathy character), for instance. She’s a single mom dealing with a divorce and a pregnancy at the same time. Everything about her screams someone who is at war with the world. There’s a moment when you see her just standing on the side of a busy road at night, waiting to cross. The way she holds her hand around her belly, you feel as though that baby is her sword and her shield and her castle all at once. Even the tiny moment with the baby doll, when Nandita (Nadiya), the woman who gently pries the doll away from her, is transcendent. But where was all this poetry in either the writing or the acting when it came to completing this character’s arc?

We got all the women. All the wonder? Not so much, I’m afraid.

Vendhu Thanindhathu Kaadu

There is an exchange between Muthu, the protagonist and Paavai, the girl he is interested in sometime early in the second act of the film. She asks him where he is from; he replies with the name of his hamlet, and adds, by way of clarification, the name of a slightly larger place it is close to. The fact that even the larger place being referred to is not Tuticorin or Tirunelveli, let alone Chennai, is emblematic of the world his character has been transplanted to. This is not a gangster movie about dons and police commissioners and the like — it involves little screws in large organized crime machines, and their clear-eyed realism about where they are in the food chain permeates their every move.

It is easy to use adjectives such as “gritty” and “realistic” to describe this world. It is gritty, yes. But while the characters seem to inhabit the real world, their dialogue is tinged with such a hyper-awareness that you almost feel as though they are watching themselves from a distance while talking. It’s equal parts exposition, introspection, and realism. I do not say this as criticism — this stylistic choice is a Gautam Menon trademark (his characters have done this in voiceovers often enough before, and sometimes in dialogue as well), so the real question is whether it works in a film like this, or yanks us out of the world it has created.

The first big reason why it works is that, for the most part, you see the characters around Muthu do this, whereas Muthu himself seems, for the most part, to simply inhabit this world. His character always seems ill at ease with his surroundings and what he is doing, and the film brings us so gradually into this world that his discomfort becomes our own emotional anchor throughout the film. What is even more interesting is that his discomfort is clearly not just with his surroundings, but also with what he has discovered himself to be capable of. (What Silambarasan accomplishes here is nothing short of fantastic — this is his finest performance in years.)

Our focus on Muthu is not just because of Muthu himself. The film uses a sly device to get us even more involved — it provides him with a counterpart who mirrors his discomfort but diverges in terms of the decisions he makes. It is, in calculus terms, as though you get to see the partial derivative of Muthu’s arc with respect to Muthu’s choices!

The other big reason why the film’s big stylistic choice works is its running length. When characters talk like this, our instinctive reaction is, why are you telling me instead of showing me? Writers Jeyamohan and Gautam Menon counter this by making very few narrative jumps and building up to each major development slowly. When Muthu fires a gun for the first time, the development feels earned. Characters have an arc, but interestingly here, even the gun has an arc. You get the whole Chekhov’s gun thing, but the writers take it one step further, and that denouement is sort of surprising but fits what has happened so far.

What doesn’t fit, sadly, is the last 10 minutes — I understand that it is meant to tell us where the next installment is headed, but I would have been perfectly happy to have been kept in the dark. The tonal shift is jarring and, in my view, unnecessary. But this is a minor quibble about a film that has so much to offer.

I realize that I have spent most of this blog post talking about a specific aspect of the film, but trust me, there are several other delights. Rahman gives us a background score that reminds us of why we fell in love with his work in the first place so many years ago, and tops it off with an absolutely mesmerizing duet in Unna nenachadum (flashbacks to Viswanathan-Ramamoorthy’s Kodi Asaindhathum might have been entirely intentional). The camerawork gives you a real sense of how dirty and grimy Mumbai can be. It is hardly ever showy. Even familiar landmarks are viewed from the perspective of these characters. My favourite aspect of the cinematography and editing comes in the big fight that sets up the rest of the film — you find yourself plunged into chaos, same as the protagonist, but then, when the character finds focus in the middle of all this, so does the camera. It is a perfect example of how cinema can be such a visual storytelling medium.

Between this film and Vaanmagal, it feels a bit like we are seeing Gautam Vasudev Menon discover a new gear. In his romances and cop dramas, we saw a man comfortable in his skin as a storyteller. In Achcham Yenbadhu Madamaiyada and Enai Noki Paayum Thota, you could see him trying to take his characters to difficult places both physically and emotionally, but… I don’t know quite how to describe it, but it felt as though he flinched when it really counted. He isn’t flinching now.

Card tricks

Assorted musings on Mahaan, a very interesting film that unfortunately doesn’t work as well as one wishes it had. This piece is likely to contain some spoilers, so don’t read it unless you’ve watched the film, or don’t plan to, or don’t care if someone puts out spoilers.

Karthik Subbaraj seems to have made a message movie about honesty and moderation, but in a format that seems least suited for message movies. To paraphrase my favorite Ramachandra Guha line, here’s a film of moderate views, these sometimes expressed in extremist fashion.

The man who embodies the message of honesty turns out to be named… Satyavaan. He remains true to himself and his loved ones to the end. He is also the one who strives for moderation, although he rarely attains it. Turns out to be a good son and a good parent in the moral universe the film inhabits. And what happens in the end? He’s killed, and the two men left standing are extremists and liars. One a flawed parent, the other a flawed son. Seen through this lens, Mahaan is a tragedy. Or maybe he meant it to be a commentary on our times?

The idea of starting with a story that foreshadows the ending is quite nicely done. I just wish he didn’t see the need to spell it out to us.

A tighter first half would’ve made such a big difference to the film. The second half is gold.

Vikram finds a way to somehow shepherd his character through a topsy-turvy first hour, but by the time we get to the meat of the story, he’s gotten us hooked. This is a beautiful performance, complemented by a fantastic Bobby Simha. Sananth does well enough in a part that reminds me of Arya in Arinthum Ariyamalum. Dhruv Vikram appears psychotic enough to start (he’s got Resting ‘roid Rage Face, to paraphrase something my cousin told me), but the last half hour demands more of him than he is capable of giving at this point in his career, it feels like. Simran, I’m sorry to say, sticks out like a sore thumb. I’m not sure if that melodramatic pitch was a deliberate choice, but the performance didn’t work for me at all.

One of my friends asked me how many stars I’d give the film. Here’s the thing: more stars could either indicate that the film is worth watching, or that it’s a very good film. Now, in many cases, these might be the same thing. But not always. This is one of those times.

Super Deluxe: There are more things on heaven and earth…

There might be the odd spoiler, so beware. But as with most of my reviews these days, read it after you’ve watched the film, please?

Those of you who have been following my reviews, sporadic as they are, would have noticed that I seldom write about the whole movie anymore. I tend to focus on that which grabbed my attention. Two viewings and a lot of thinking about Super Deluxe later, I still don’t know what to talk about.

I could talk about the performances. The powerful ones, the delightful ones, the surprising ones, the one that made my skin crawl, even the one that lasted maybe a minute and involved pretty much just one word: Go.

I could talk about the sound: Yuvan’s minimalism, his use of just ambient noise to underline a mood in incredible ways. The layering of voices and overlapping conversations (some of them from TV and radio) — like Robert Altman on steroids. The use of music in surprising ways: Maasi maasam aalaana ponnu plays over a visual of a ponnaana aalu. A localized rendition of the Star Wars theme over, well, a Death Stair?

I could talk about what each subplot reminded me of. Like Eugene Ionesco’s Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It, a play about a married couple dealing with a corpse. Or Guy Ritchie. Terry Pratchett. Tarantino. Baasha. Arjun Reddy. The recent dist-up around Radharavi’s ill-advised comments about Nayanthara. Trust me, if you ran a drinking game around finding them, you’d have cirrhosis by the time you get to the interval point.

I could talk about guilt and acceptance, and how each subplot explores these themes in its own way.

I could talk about any of these things and it would make for a lengthy blog post all by itself. Rarely has a single film given us so much to take in. I was speaking to Baradwaj Rangan recently about how keeping my eyes wide open during a film has made the viewing experience so much more enjoyable, but nothing prepared me for the kind of sensory overload I encountered in Super Deluxe.

So, instead of talking about these things, let me talk about what the film seems to be about.

Filmmakers have dealt with the concept of connectedness of individual stories in different ways. Mani Ratnam in Ayutha Ezhuthu took three individual stories and have them dovetail into a single incident. Linklater in Slacker followed one character for a short while, then followed another who was in the same scene, and then another who was in the same scene with the second character, and so on.

But connectedness can be so much more than just people and stories and even objects caroming off each other. And so much less.

Sometimes, as one character says in the film, we look for a deeper meaning in patterns that could have just been random coincidence. A man turns his life around because he survived a natural disaster, and holds as the basis of his faith, the object that was the instrument of his survival. One could argue, as Jules did in Pulp Fiction, that it didn’t matter if it was an “According to Hoyle” miracle. He felt the touch of God. God got involved. But this character, who has named himself Arputham — meaning miracle — is himself dealing with a crisis of faith. Not only do the others not understand his faith (he doesn’t consider himself Christian, although everyone else seems to), he no longer understands it himself. Has he been seeking meaning where there was none to be found?

But here’s the thing: this is a movie where a character tells us that we might be reading too much into random coincidence, but there is nothing accidental about its making. Nothing.

A little boy learns the f-word when an adult uses it, but it’s not a one-off. You see another boy using the word kamnaatti after you’ve heard an adult in his family use it in an earlier scene. One father’s attempt at suicide is mirrored in his son accidentally harming himself, but that’s not all: another father worries that his sins have been visited upon his son. A throwaway line in the beginning about television beating porn on a phone is illustrated later in an unexpected way. I could go on.

All this does not just happen in a movie. Someone has to make it happen.

And so it is that two viewings and a lot of thinking about Super Deluxe later, all I know for sure are two things:
a. Thyagarajan Kumararaja has made a great film, and
b. He’s definitely messing with us.