Category Archives: Kollywood

Kannathil Muthamittal

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I watched Kannathil Muthamittal when a number of people recommended it to me after I worked in refugee camps in Sri Lanka. I think that my experiences there have really coloured my view of the film as I do focus more on Shyama’s story and less on the main characters. That said, I think the story is well told and the actors all do a good job – it’s just not the story I wanted to see.  It’s a classic Mani Ratnam film with strong female characters, great cinematography and attention to detail, so it’s no surprise that the film won six National Awards.

The film opens with the wedding of Shyama (Nandita Das) and Dileepan (J. D. Chakravarthi) in their village located in northern Sri Lanka. Despite this happy start it’s not long before Shyama is pregnant and on a boat heading for a refugee camp in India while her husband is missing, presumably fighting for the LTTE. Once she gives birth in the refugee camp, Shyama leaves her daughter behind and heads back to Sri Lanka to try and find her husband.

From here the film skips forward in time to introduce G. Thiruchelvan or Thiru (Madhavan) and his family, as seen through the eyes of his adopted daughter Amudha. Convincingly played by P S Keerthana, she appears to be a typical precocious 9 year old; playing with her friends at school, teasing her two younger brothers and very definitely the princess in the family. The story of her adoption is told in flashback and shows the development of the romance between Thiru and Indra (Simran).  I really like this part of the story as the two leads play their parts well and the intertwining of the adoption story and the romance is really sweet.

After she is told by her father on her ninth birthday that she is adopted, Amudha becomes moody and withdrawn and finally demands a chance to meet her real mother in Sri Lanka. For some inexplicable reason her parents accede to her demands and the family head off to the war-torn nation, although they did have the good sense to leave their other two sons behind.

The scenes in Sri Lanka make me cry every time I watch this film. I have seen the same mix of resignation and total despair on people’s faces that is shown here when a village is evacuated. I worked on the East Coast and regularly travelled between LTTE and government controlled areas. The incredibly young soldiers with their automatic weapons shown in the film is very much true to what I experienced and for me this total realism clashes with the more idealistic search for Shyama. Mani Ratnam wisely doesn’t attempt to explain any of the conflict, only showing its effects on Indra and Thiru as they realise why Shyama left her baby behind.

Amudha becomes bratty and rude as she deals with her feelings of alienation from her family and as a consequence I lose much of my sympathy for her. I also disagree with her parents’ decision to try and find her birth mother, no matter how essential it is to the plot. However both Simran and P S Keerthana convey their conflicting emotions and fluctuating relationship well and Indra’s  inner conflict as she worries about her two sons left behind in India is effectively depicted. Although Amudha is irritating the young actor does hold her own against the more experienced cast and it may be more due to the over emotional story that I lose interest in her search. Madhavan’s character, although impressive in the beginning, seems to have little impact in the latter half of the film and Prakash Raj is wasted in his role as the doctor taking the family around Colombo. So while I enjoy the first half of the film, the second half tends to drag with the adoption story and the peripheral action is more engaging . Some of Amudha’s rebellion in this section could have been cut without losing the feeling of her isolation and separation from the rest of the family. The ending is also a little disappointing but Mani Ratnam shows restraint in not turning the final scenes into melodrama, which could easily have occurred given the subject matter.

What I do like about the film is that it looks beautiful and is well shot by cinematographer Ravi K Chanran. Lighting is used to good effect as the early scenes in the family home are filled with warmth in contrast to the rain and grey skies in the later part of the film. While the background score of the film by A. R. Rahman is both beautiful and haunting, some of the songs are a little intrusive. The story doesn’t really need dance numbers and they seem to interrupt rather than move the film forward.

This isn’t a film I particularly enjoy watching, probably more because of the memories it evokes, although I can see why it won awards and I do think it’s generally well acted. It’s just that I would have preferred to see more of Shyama’s story and less of the family drama.  3 stars from me, mainly for the first half.

Temple says: This is one of the first Tamil films I saw a few years ago, and I was prompted to pick it up because of the storyline and for Madhavan.

Thiru (Madhavan) fell in love with the idea of giving Amudha a home and family, and I always feel that if Indra hadn’t agreed, then someone else would have been procured to play wifey. His decisions all revolve around what he wants – the way he courts Indra, the adoption, telling Amudha and persisting when it was clear she wasn’t ready for this birthday surprise, and on it goes.  The job of explaining and reassuring was left mostly to Indra, and she had to bear the emotional burden of seeing her little girl in torment as she herself struggled to cope. Simran is lovely as Indra, but her character is surprisingly weak considering the way she met Maddy, and her being a news anchor. I expected more backbone, but the women in Mani Ratnam films are often written like this – a strong outline and not a lot of finer detail to make them seem more real.

I was adopted and my mother told me every day, long before I even knew what words were, so it would never come as a shock to me and to make it clear that ‘adoption’ isn’t a dirty word. My perspective is coloured by that and while I can understand the bratty Amudha wanting to know her own story, I will never understand her adoptive parents taking her into a war zone no matter how much she sulked.  Still, the treatment of her story in terms of her developing understanding, the legal adoption process, and the fallout once the truth emerged was handled in a much more credible manner than many other films with orphans scattered around the streets, under cabbage leaves, going free to a good home.

The prologue was excellent in setting the scene, but beyond that Shyama and Dileepa didn’t really fit. The context of the Sri Lankan conflict added another dimension, but also made the second half of the film too dramatic and improbable when they went looking for Shyama. So although a fascinating and moving topic, here it is just used as a background for the  family weepfest.

The soundtrack works well in the film, but I find the songs bland. The picturisations are beautiful, most are very stylised, however I can only take so much fabric blowing around and children running on the beach. They suit the mood of the film, but having seen them before, I made a cup of tea during a couple of songs this time. I felt the same about the story device for the flashback – the handwriting and drawings became a distraction and took my focus off the action. Pretty visuals just aren’t enough to keep the film on track.

When Mani Ratnam wants to belt you over the head with a message about peace, unity, love and what makes a family, he can make Bono seem subtle. I give it 3 stars.

Aaranya Kaandam

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Aaranya Kaandam should come with a warning – an excess of fake violence, actual real life violence against chickens and naked Jackie Shroff. Yes really! Jackie Shroff takes his clothes off in this film.  We have no idea why the organisers of the Indian Film Festival decided to choose this film over many other excellent Tamil releases this year. Perhaps they wanted to see Jackie with his kit off, but why we all had to suffer is a mystery!

The film is a long (too long) tale of double crosses by Pasupathy (Sampath Raj) when he is caught between two rival factions of gangsters. One gang is led by the aging Ayya (Jackie Shroff) and Pasupathy starts out as his more adventurous and able lieutenant. Ayya resents his younger henchman and when Pasupathy organises a drug deal through a corrupt cop to steal cocaine from a rival gang we know it’s all going to turn out badly. Adding to the mix are Ayya’s mistress Subbu who wants to escape, Kaalayan who manages to stumble across the drugs, his competent little son Kodukkapuli, and the other gang leaders Gajapathy (who has an impressive pair of ears) and his brother Gajendran.

Although the overall story is interesting there is too much time spent setting the scene and explaining exactly who is who.  First time writer and director Thiagarajan Kumararaja seems to have been heavily influenced by films such as Traffic and Pulp Fiction where there are a number of apparently unrelated threads which come together to form the climax of the film. But while he manages to  bring the various storylines to a more or less satisfactory conclusion, they don’t all work as well as each other. In addition to the pacing problems, there is a heavy reliance on gimmicky edits and lighting effects that lose their impact through over use. The actual cinematography was excellent, and the street and interior scenes were saturated with colour. Again, we suspect some of the highly stylised angles and use of colour filters was influenced by films like Traffic but it lacked structure so it looked a bit too try-hard.

The soundtrack is a mish mash of musical styles and sounds. We think this might have been meant to create an art house feel, but really it sounds more like someone bought a world music CD and used that instead of going to the trouble of composing anything special. Like the gimmicky editing the music became intrusive and sometimes detracted from the scenes, often simply because it was too loud.

The story of Kaalayan and his son is rather laboured and the inclusion of some rather nasty cock-fighting scenes with lots of lingering slow motion shots and buckets of gore was quite unnecessary. A lot of this could have been cut without losing any of the backstory in our opinion.  The child actor was fairly effective, and the audience certainly responded to his performance.

Sampath Raj puts in an impressive performance as the man trying to work his way out of a difficult situation. He has a good hero run, and puts it to use frequently throughout the film.

We know that traditionally anyone who is Jackie’s friend in a film seems to be marked for a horrible death or at least significant misfortune so we were expecting the wheels to fall off for Pasupathy. Jackie Shroff grunts his way through a series of inexplicable grimaces and as we mentioned decides to bare all. Thankfully there is pixilation but just not enough of it. Jackie Shroff himself may have preferred a larger area of pixilation as frankly it appears there was not all that much to be covered up! It’s not surprising that Subbu wants to escape from his early morning coughs and gurgles as well as the obvious horror of naked Jackie. Ravi Krishna is the gullible Loser who gets caught up in her plans for flight. Both he and Yasmin Ponnappa in her debut role turn in good performances despite a hackneyed plotline.

What does work is the dialogue, which seems snappy and funny despite the overuse of swearing in the subtitles. According to our Tamil language expert the characters weren’t actually swearing most of the time, so it seems strange that the subtitles decided to include as much profanity as they did. Especially when it seemed that every second word out of the kid’s mouth was something that our parents would still disapprove of. Maybe they knew there wasn’t enough plot to last the distance?

Temple says: This was a bore and a disappointment. The entertaining moments were few and far between, and the direction wasn’t focussed enough to make the incident heavy plot stay on track. I quite like Sampath Raj and if the story had been better balanced, this might have been a good gangland thriller. As it is, it’s a mess. I give it 2 stars – for Sampath Raj and so the torture of the poor roosters wasn’t in vain.

Heather says: While I didn’t find this film boring, it really wasn’t pleasant to sit through. There was a lot of really unnecessary violence of the gruesome and graphic kind, and the rooster fight scenes were totally unwarranted. Jackie Shroff was a real disappointment, although I didn’t have high expectations from him anyway. I can think of many actors who would have played this role much more convincingly – although all preferably without the nude scene! There were some good moments hidden amongst the carnage, some reasonable performances from a number of the actors, and even some good comedy. But not enough to save this film from collapsing under the weight of all the various plot threads. 2 stars from me.

Athu Oru Kanakalam

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Athu Oru Kanakalam has all the right ingredients to be a good film, but despite an acclaimed director, an interesting storyline and impressive performances from the cast it doesn’t all come together as it should. The film begins by exploring the issues of class and the pressure of social expectation which is interesting and engaging, but then it loses direction after the interval and the end is basically a disappointment.

Srinivasan (Dhanush), nicknamed Cheenu, is the only child of middle class parents and spends his days lazing around with his friends after finishing his degree. He is lazy, spoilt and petulant seemingly as a result of his mother’s indulgence. His father Ganeshan (Delhi Ganesh) is a strict disciplinarian with a tendency to violent outbursts as he berates Cheenu for his apathy and lack of enthusiasm with job hunting. Cheenu insists that he is nothing like his father and is obviously afraid of him, but as we see when he is out with his friends, he has exactly the same violent temper and tendency to strike out when he is angry. Cheenu’s mother is sidelined throughout the film and rarely gets a chance to speak. Mostly she is helpless and unwilling to intervene between father and son.

When his parents go away for a few weeks, the family maid Satya (Kalai Rani) is unwell and sends her daughter Thulasi (Priyamani) in her stead. Cheenu and Thulasi were friends as children and while Thulasi is obviously still attracted to Cheenu, he initially doesn’t recognise her. Although younger, Thulasi is more mature than Cheenu. She is also very aware of her social status and despite her attraction to him acts like any proper young servant girl should. On the other hand, he behaves like any typical young man when faced with a pretty girl, and his gauche reactions seem very natural.

In the space of the few days they have, they end up falling in love and into a committed relationship –this is the dream period of the film title. Balu Mahendra shows their romance developing in a song and doesn’t spend much time on it. It’s obvious they are in love and Cheenu is determined to marry Thulasi, we don’t need to know any more about it than that. This is a lovely song, and I’m sorry I can’t find a better quality version.

Cheenu tells his friends a little about his romance, but doesn’t introduce them to Thulasi and actually hides her in the bathroom when one of his friends visits. He seems ashamed of his relationship with a girl from a lower class. It’s hard to decide if this is also partly because he is trying to hide the relationship from his father as Cheenu is very well aware that he will not approve. The difficulties of an inter-class relationship are well explored and developed despite the initial romance not being given the same treatment, and the pair’s behaviour is realistic in this context. The development of Cheenu’s character here is convincing and Dhanush is believable as the young man realising that he will have to change his ways and actually get a job if he wants to marry against his family’s wishes. Priyamani is exuberant in her role as Cheenu’s lover and the change in her outlook as she realises the obstacles they have to face appears genuine and natural.

When Cheenu’s father does discover the relationship his reaction is predictable and dramatic, and Cheenu responds in kind. He vows to marry Thulasi despite the opposition from their respective families and the disapproval of his friends. It looks as if the romance may be the making of Cheenu but before he can follow through with his plans, he ends up in jail after a night out drinking with his friends.

When Ganeshan decides to teach his son a lesson and leave him in jail overnight his plans go badly wrong as Cheenu kills another prisoner and consequently receives a prison sentence for murder. I like the fact that although the prison term is obviously a plot point to keep the lovers separated, there is a strong emphasis on the consequence of violent behaviour. Despite the death being an accident, Cheenu has to acknowledge the result of his action and although unapologetic, he accepts that he has to pay for his mistake.

From such a promising beginning, the second half of the film loses the realism that kept the story interesting. The director starts to rely on prison clichés with brutal film guards, sympathetic fellow prisoners and a fairly ridiculous fight scene. Naturally there is an opportunity for Cheenu to escape just when he has found out that Thulasi is in dire straits and he absolutely has to go to her. Another problem is that Thulasi’s role is greatly reduced and she only appears on screen to cry and plead with various policemen and prison guards. Priyamani is wasted in these scenes and although she does her best there is very little she can do to make her character less of a caricature. The end is particularly disappointing as the film seems to be building up to a dramatic conclusion that never actually happens.

Despite the issues I have with the second half of the film, there are some good points. Dhanush does an excellent job of conveying the fear and trepidation of a young naïve man sent to prison. Cheenu’s interactions with the other prisoners are an interesting contrast to his relationship with his father and despite the clichés the prison scenes never descend into farce. There are quite a few jokes referring to the skinniness of Dhanush throughout the film, and most of the humour has a light touch. It is also good to see intelligent police officers who don’t search aimlessly for an escaped prisoner but actually investigate and have a reasonable plan to capture Cheenu.

The music by Ilayaraja is beautiful and haunting but is used mainly as a way to show some of the story: the childhood friendship between Thulasi and Cheenu, their romance and Cheenu’s relationship with his mother. One exception is the first song which is a bizarre item number with nothing to do with the story. It is purely an excuse for a skin show from Tejashree with some rather lewd lyrics (even in subtitles) and the film would have been improved by its absence.

I was disappointed in this film. While it kept my interest and was perfectly watchable, mainly due to the lead actors performances, it should have been so much better. I enjoyed seeing two of my favourite actors together and they did have an onscreen chemistry which helped make the romance more believable. While the film succeeds in the most part to be realistic it would have benefitted from a tighter second half and a more exciting climax – but perhaps that wouldn’t have been as true to life. Then again, it may just be that I’m not used to a Tamil drama actually having a (nearly) happy ending!  3 ½ stars