Eventhough
the movie is a year old, the National award function almost a month back where
it received the Silver lotus award for “Best editing” (KL Praveen and NB
Srikanth ) and Golden lotus award for “Best debut film of a director”(Thiyagarajan
Kumararaja ) prompted me to pen these words.
The movie begins on a
different note…… right when the credits start rolling with no BGM. Each shot
builds upon the previous one slowly and gradually. A group of likely gangsters
casually talking among themselves with a lot of daily life references and the
music blaring on the speaker in the background and an aged man with a
likely consort in a dimly lighted room.........
The characters then
start to unfold at a leisurely pace. The viewers get a peek into the savage
life of gangsters, Even the names are beastly
like gods in Hindu mythology…..Singamperumal, Pasupathy, Kodukapuli, Gajendran,
Gajapathy,The director has explored the various shades of each character thereby showing the various faces of humans.The tight shots used
extensively and intelligently have added to the intensity between characters.
Everyone
have done their parts commendably.Jackie Shroff as Singamperumal, Sampath Raj
as Pasupathy, Guru Somasundaram as Kaalaiyan, Master Vasanth as Kodukapuli,
Ajay Raj as Chittu,Yasmin Ponappa as Subbu.Especially Sampath with his commanding voice will definitely
be the most sought after actor for supporting roles in years to come.Jackie
Shroff‘s dialogue delivery and satires have the audience LOL. Guru Somasundaram
and Master Vasanth have performed like real world father-son duo and especially Guru's koothu-Pattarai experience has come to fore.It is a definite
break for Ravikrishna as Sappai.
The dialogues are intelligently written,
making the viewers think a bit and felt that he could be India's answer to Tarantino and Nolan.The cinematography is perfectly in tune with
the movie, showing the darker shades of human character and using natural
lighting mostly. Many live locations are used . Another plus of the movie is the
absence of jarring BGM for all shots normally associated with gangster movies except
a few zany ones for a few close ups.
The
real star of the movie is however, editing .The editing is very taut till the
last shot, making the viewer glue onto the screen one sequence after other without
wandering away from the crux of the story . It will definitely go down as a landmark
in the career of KL Praveen and NB Srikanth.
The
censor board demanding 52 cuts for a movie inspite after giving A–rating is the most
ridiculous a situation can get. The effort of a movie maker goes down the drain
every time.The idea of the creator is taken away from the audience, in the
thought that violence depicted is likely to instill bad behavior in the mind
of the audience, is totally ludicrous. If a movie is given A certification,it is
expected that the audience is mature enough to discriminate between the bad and
the good shown in a film. Vulgarity and profanity need a definite redefinition.
The censor board, still working on age-old ideas and archaic laws needs more
progressive minded individuals to prevent situations like these. (Trivia: The so called honorable Censor
board still functions under the The Cinematographic Act 1952 with a few
modifications ) .The censor board has never kept it’s laws in tune with the
modern world cinema. Films that have been censored in our country, run
uncompromisingly everywhere in the world vowing audiences and winning accolades at film festivals abroad. Cash –rich
television channels not promoting movies like these and on flip side promoting
senseless masala movies just for money is the biggest irony. Some people gave me a blank look when spoke about this film and did not seem to recognise such a film even
existed.Added to this, the movie also not doing commercially well, shows that
we still have miles to go as a mature cinema
audience and our movies being on par with world cinema. It is high time we recognise our own native content and try to move up the ladder in our evaluation of films.
But hats
off to Thiyagarajan Kumararaja for coming up with arguably one of the best and
original scripts in Indian cinema .But his real and biggest contribution to the movie
has been steering clear of any romantic, emotional scenes, opening dances ,
fights or any sort of melodrama from first shot to last, with rawness of humans
being depicted beautifully in all it’s glory and giving us a 100% true gangster
movie and at the same time remaining true to the words the movie starts with
“Yethu thevaiyo athuvey dharmam”
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