HOOD FELLAS
teakada.com - March 24, 2006

A story about two criminals proves yet again that you don’t need super stars to make a satisfying movie.


Picture courtesy: indiavarta.com

If the lead character in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya had had a best buddy who joined him during the killing sprees, the resulting movie would have been something like Pattiyal. As in Satya, here too, a guy-next-door is a killer. Here too, he falls for a girl-next-door who does not know what he does for a living and is devastated when she finds out. Here too, his love for the girl gets in the way of his work. Here too, the antagonists are only fuzzily defined because they’re really not much more than targets to be killed. And here too, the audience is asked to empathise with protagonists who deserve no empathy because of the work they do.

But if I’ve made Pattiyal sound like a remake of Satya, it really isn’t. (It’s reportedly a remake of the Thai film Bangkok Dangerous, but that’s another matter altogether.) It’s about Kosi (Arya) and Selva (Bharath), friends who are killers for hire and who learn the hard way that violence begets violence. There’s a scene where Kosi and Selva are given something wrapped in an old Tamil newspaper; when they open the package, there’s a gleaming gun inside. That’s a good visual metaphor for this film. While we usually have movies where the material is familiar but the packaging is fresh – old wine, new bottle – it’s quite the opposite here. The material is fresh, and it’s presented through the familiar constructs of Tamil masala cinema (the love angle, the buddy-buddy angle, the hero-avenging-the-rape-of-a-loved-one angle, the hero-avenging-the-death-of-a-loved-one angle, and so on). I guess we could label it: new wine, old bottle.

Very early on, director Vishnuvardhan establishes that our heroes’ lives revolve around death. It’s not just that they kill people; they also dance at funeral processions, a seemingly minor plot detail that assumes heartbreaking proportions later on. But the mood of the movie is anything but funereal. As is only to be expected, Selva and Kosi fall in love – with Sandhya (Pooja) and Saro (Padmapriya) respectively. (Both heroines perfectly bring out the contrasting kinds of love they share with their men; Selva and Sandhya make shy eyes at each other, while Kosi and Saro can’t stop bickering for a second.) These three relationships – the heroes with the heroines, and with each other – are presented with such warmth, love and good cheer that we take these people to heart. We know Kosi and Selva are orphans brought up in the slums, so if they weren’t taught right from wrong as kids, we want them to learn soon enough so they won’t get hurt. We want them – and their movie – to have a happy end.

It says a lot about the acting and the writing that we end up caring so much. Arya is clearly a big star now. When he first appears on screen, he gets not only claps and catcalls and whistles, but... paper confetti. (That’s when you know someone’s really a big star.) He has a muscular screen presence and he’s perfectly cast as the more aggressive of the duo. Bharath, on the other hand, is the meek one. (If you’re in the mood for movie association, you could think back to the films that Kamal and Rajini starred in together, films like Moondru Mudichu or Aval Appadithaan, where Rajini was the aggressive one, Kamal the opposite.) At first I thought Bharath’s dangerously close to repeating himself so soon after the meek one he just played in Kaadhal, but he’s also deaf-mute here, and his character triggers the most unexpected twists in the screenplay. There’s a scene where he’s escorting his girl to her house, and she stops, having reached her destination, while he keeps walking, unaware that she’s no longer by his side. It’s just one of the many wonderful vignettes that show us that these killers are only human.

Could Pattiyal have been better? Sure! In a story this true to life, I could have lived without the masala sound effects. (Selva’s head turns to the right; the soundtrack goes whoosh. He looks left; whoosh again!) There’s one dreadful attempt at comedy, involving an actor who’s playing hard-to-get and who’s paid a little visit by our boys. Yuvan Shankar Raja’s songs are unimaginatively shot. (The composer gives us a sprightly number sung by his father that somehow integrates Chitra Singh’s sentimental solo from Saath Saath, Yun zindagi ki raah mein, and Aadaludan Paadal Kettu, MGR’s raucous bhangra hit from Kudiyirundha Kovil.) And there are times the story seems to forget about secondary characters – like the co-worker who harasses Saro – only to bring them back long after we’ve forgotten they even existed.

But you know the movie is working when such things don’t matter much. At the end, what Pattiyal represented to me was not just a good story affectingly told, but a pointer that Tamil cinema has come a long way in its representation of real people. Kosi and Selva are from the slums, and when Kosi faints, Selva sees a pot of water nearby. In an earlier film, he’d have cupped some water in his palm and sprinkled it on Kosi to revive him. Here, he just drops the pot on Kosi’s head. The gesture gets laughs, all right, but it also gets it right. The people here look and feel real. They’re rowdies, yes, but not one person has a scarf knotted around his neck or a big, fake mole on his cheek or wears a lungi propped up by a studded belt or speaks in that exaggerated Madras-thamizh lingo that Kamal Haasan uses in every other comedy of his. You’ll also be happy to know that not one person answers to the name of Jambu.


AGARAM MASALA
teakada.com - February 27, 2006

You can see a love for the language in Madhavan’s new potboiler, but you can’t see much else.


Picture courtesy: sify.com

Thambi is Madhavan’s attempt at casting off his oh-so-sweet image and becoming a rough-tough, masala-movie hero. (If S Ve Sekhar were to describe this transition, he’d probably say: from Jangri Young Man to Angry Young Man.) So that means his character lives someplace where everyone else is severely hard of hearing. It probably isn’t a coincidence that his nickname, Thambi, actually stands for Thambi Velu Thondaiman. He’s a thondai-man, all right – every utterance of his threatens to shatter the speakers over your head. And then there’s the eye thing. Each time he stares down the bad guys, you cower in fright that his eyeballs are going to pop out of their sockets and land in your lap.

With that voice and with those eyes, you know you’re in regular dishum-dishum territory – unfortunately, this is also Vijayakanth territory. You can see why Madhavan signed on to do this; he probably wanted that big, massy hit that’s been eluding him since Run. But after watching his class acts in Anbe Sivam and Kannathil Muthamittal and Nala Damayanthi and, especially, Rang De Basanti, I just couldn’t see the actor in this part. Oh, he does try, but, as I said, this needed a Vijayakanth to fully put it over.

With Vijayakanth, you wouldn’t mind an action scene like the one here, where the hero punches the baddie so hard, his extended forearm vibrates like a fleshy tuning fork for some five seconds after the baddie has bitten the dust. Hell, with Vijayakanth, you’d probably demand a refund of your ticket money if this sequence didn’t exist. A title card early on describes Thambi thus: peranbum perunkobamum kondavan. With Madhavan, you wish there’d been a little more peranbu – with love interest Pooja (Vidyasagar gifts them a beautiful duet, Sudum nilavu) – and a little less perunkobam.

But that anger is what Thambi is all about. Thambi is angry because of reasons we don’t learn about until well into the second half, and his anger is directed at the local thug Sankarapandian (Biju Menon). So every time the latter tries to disturb the peace, Thambi stands in his way. What’s interesting here – and the only thing that saves the movie from becoming a complete cliché – is that Thambi is actually something of a pacifist. The bad guys, unfortunately, won’t listen to his words, so that’s why he lets his fists do the talking. Will Thambi be able to get his message of peace across? Will the bad guys see the error of their ways? Does the sun rise in the east?

Director Seeman has been getting a lot of acclaim for his dialogue, and I must say he goes to town with fiery declarations such as this one: “Maanai konnaa jail, manushanai konnaa bail.” (Somewhere, T Rajendar is smiling.) Want more? A character says, “Lanjam vaanginen, kaidhu seidhaargal. Lanjam koduthen, vidudhalai seidhaargal.” (Somewhere, Mu. Karunanidhi is smiling.) Why, Seeman even quotes liberally from Bharathiyar’s Pudhiya Aathichoodi! The film’s publicity material – the posters and hoardings – showed us Madhavan simmering under block letters proclaiming achcham thavir and roudhram pazhagu, and even in the movie, as Thambi goes about practicing his martial arts, the background is filled with chants of udalinai urudhi sei and yeru pol nada.

But an interest in the language is one thing, an ability to integrate that into involving cinema is quite another. Had half the effort in the dialogues gone towards the characterisations, we wouldn’t have wondered what actors like Vadivelu and Manivannan and Chandrasekhar are doing here. (If their scenes had hit the cutting room floor, we’d still have ended up with pretty much the same movie – okay, maybe with one-and-a-half chuckles less.) Seeman tries to build Thambi up by having him wear a Che Guevara T-shirt and quote from Gandhi and Anna, but there’s a different hero that Madhavan is begging to be compared to. There’s a part where Thambi is thrown into barbed wire by the bad guys, and it’s exactly like in Sathya, when the bad guys toss Kamal Haasan into barbed wire. Now that’s the kind of hero I was hoping Madhavan would want to become – not Vijayakanth.