Beyond old Kollywood

This is another posting about movies.I couldnt resist posting this from The Hindu,

“Kalloori” is the finest Tamil film of the year. After “Kadhal”, Balaji Sakthivel could have easily made an ambitious film with big stars, but he chose instead to do something smaller, on a more intimate scale. You have to admire him for it. There are few false notes in “Kalloori”, a film about three years in the life of nine college friends. Character, plot and dialogue are flawlessly rendered, staying faithful to its small town roots, never once betraying its authentic rural sensibility. The actors look uncompromisingly South Indian: every face here reminds us of real people and there’s no attempt to airbrush the actors and make them movie-handsome. Sakthivel maintains a fine, calibrated balance between the formulaic and the artistic.

“Kalloori” is only one example among several recent Tamil films that point to a very quiet but exciting revolution taking place in contemporary Tamil cinema: an unexpected, astonishing move towards realistic, intelligent, strongly scripted storytelling. Ram’s “Kattradhu Tamil” and Ameer’s “Paruthiveeran” are also remarkable instances of a new kind of movie in Tamil. What is just as remarkable is their modest success at the box office. In some ways, a film like “Kalloori”, deftly weaving Kollywood and realism, is more ambitious and more entertaining than a big budget film with stars. Is this the new Kollywood?

New wave

What these new wave of Tamil films seem to be doing is to fuse the energy and entertainment of a mainstream film (without its formulaic excesses) with the complexity and sensitivity of an art film (minus the excessive artiness). Mani Ratnam invented it in “Nayagan” and perfected it in “Aayitha Ezhuthu”, but it took all these decades for a newer generation of filmmakers to follow his genius. Other recent examples in this new wave are: Thankar Bachchan’s “Pallikoodam” and “Onbadhu Roobai Nottu”, Vetrimaran’s “Polladhavan”, Nishikant Kamat’s “Evano Oruvan”, Padma Magan’s “Ammuvaagiya Naan”, Gnana Rajasekharan’s “Periyar”, Vasanta Balan’s “Veyil”, Selvaraghavan’s “Pudupettai” and Cheran’s “Thavamai Thavamirunthu”.

Suddenly, it seems there is a new Tamil audience, a young audience, willing to see new things. The big Deepavali releases, “Azhagiya Tamil Magan”, “Vel” and “Machakarran” for instance, seem un-entertaining and even tame to a new Tamil audience now used to a cinema that is more inventive.

The Tamil New Wave is also characterised by style, personal filmmaking, a minimum song soundtrack (with songs in the background rather than lip synched and danced to) a shorter running time, no parallel comedy track (the comedy arises instead from within the plot) and themes that are sharply observed, tough-minded explorations of rural life and life on the mean streets. The characters here are rooted in family, culture and tradition but are forced to break with everything because of their personal choices — usually love or ambition.

The significance of these films is not for Tamil cinema alone. Their influence is already being felt through the rest of Indian cinema, signalling to filmmakers that our formulaic movies can be reinvented.

Already paralleling the Tamil revolution is a new kind of Hindi movie, evidenced by “Hazaaron Khwashien Aisi”, “Black Friday”, “Omkara”, “Iqbal”, “Page 3”, “Mixed Doubles”, “Rang de Basanti”, “Dus Kahaniya”, “Khoya Khoya Chand” etc. Except their themes are urban, looking at sex, adultery, relationships, work pressure, crime and everything else that contemporary living throws up. If Tamil movies depend too much on a rustic milieu, Hindi movies lean too much on the urban. Both cinemas need to crossover.

How exactly did this new cinema come about? Had its young audience, now exposed to better cinema from around the world, begun to tire of the more formulaic, fantasy-driven films? Or was it the young directors themselves who now desired to tell new stories in new ways?

The frontrunners

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when this film revolution in contemporary Tamil cinema started, but I’d like to mark two films as possibly having inspired and kick started this new wave:” Autograph” and “Kaadhal”. Both films were artistically made, entertaining, and — most crucially — huge box office hits. It must have startled the Kodambakkam industry to see two intimate love stories with no stars winning such a huge audience.

Balaji Sakthivel’s “Kaadhal” and Cheran’s “Autograph” signalled two things to Kollywood’s aspiring younger directors — that there was an audience for character-driven, strongly scripted, low budget movies, and that there were bold producers and passionate filmmakers willing to risk telling more realistic, intelligent, personal stories.

Sakthivel brings a documentary naturalness to the acting in “Kalloori”, especially with Hemlatha as Kayal, who can actually make you forget she’s acting. He coaxes an achingly beautiful performance from Tamanna; a complex, intense performance I have not been able get out of my head, one that heralds a major star. “Kalloori” is admirably restrained, subtly humorous and scene-by-scene enjoyable.

Ameer’s “Paruthiveeran” stunned an audience with a brutally detailed depiction of clan wars in rural Tamil Nadu. The first Tamil film to evoke small town life precisely: the festivals, rituals, locale, characters, and dialect. Its strongest character, fascinatingly, is a woman, Muthazhagu (an audacious performance by Priyamani), the heroine who fiercely knows her mind and heart. The scene where she eats with a ravishing appetite just after being sickeningly beaten by her father reverses everything we’ve seen in our movies about women and patriarchy.

Unpredictable

If “Kalloori” is the best Tamil movie of the year, “Kattradhu Tamil” is the most underrated. Ram’s film is original, unpredictable, disturbing and provocative. Prabhakar (Jeeva scorching as a bearded Dostoyevskian hero) has an M.A. in Tamil but it gets him nowhere. He runs into classmates half as bright as him doing fabulously well working for BPOs, while those with a degree in the arts and humanities are marginalised into obscurity. Working as a young Tamil teacher in Chennai for a poor school, Prabhkar narrates his terrifying journey (to Karunas, usually a comic sidekick, who does a superb about turn as a character actor) from idealism and rage to madness and oblivion.

What this postgraduate in Tamil has to say about how irrelevant those who have given themselves to Tamil culture and literature have become in an increasingly Anglicised society feels alarmingly true and painfully ironic. “Kattradhu Tamil” is uneven, dark, and violent but also full of conviction with an uncompromising vision.

The only aspect that slightly mars many of these offbeat Tamil films is their tendency for dark, morbid, violent endings. They seem to interpret any realistic portrayal as necessarily ending in tragedy, almost to say: realism equals tragedy. “Paruthiveeran”, “Kattradhu Tamil” and “Kalloori” also make this error. What they don’t realise is that after soaking in the despair and struggles of these characters, what we in the audience want to see is the triumph of these characters (however small that might be) over their fate. We want to see is Veeran and Muthazhagu, Muthuchelvan and Shobana, Prabhakar and Anandi take flight, escape the past and find a new life. Surely they’ve earned it.

Through the last decade and a half there have been other one-off films that were also intelligent and artful, but because they popped up sporadically and were not, unlike the new Tamil movie phenomenon, part of a gathering movement, they never achieved sufficient momentum to make a strong impact and change the idiom of contemporary Tamil cinema. But they nudged the revolution closer: Films such as Durai’s “Mugavari”, Susi Ganesan’s” Five Star” (his “Thiruttu Payale” is also noteworthy for the way its dark hero stays faithfully in character right up to the end) Suhasini Maniratnam’s “Indira”, and Ameer’s “Raam”. And then, more recently, there have been these other little, deft entertainers — romantic dramas and comedies where the emphasis is not on being realistic or authentic but in being charming and believable: Priya’s “Kanda Naal Mudhal”, Azhagham Permual’s “Dum, Dum, Dum”, Radha Mohan’s “Azhagiya Theeyae” and “Mozhi”, Vasanth’s “Yei Nee Romba Azhaga Irrukkai” and “Poovellam Kettupaar”, and Cheran’s “Mayakannadi”.

Smart and stylish

Even the new wave of Tamil gangster films — “Pudupettai”, Mishkin’s “Chithiram Pesuthadi”, Linguswamy’s “Sandakozi”, Vishnuvardhan’s “Pattiyal” and Vetrimaran’s “Polladhavan” — and thrillers — Gautham Menon’s “Kaaka Kaaka” and “Pachaikilli Muthucharam”, Igor’s underrated “Kalaba Kadhalan”, Vasanth’s “Satham Podaathey” — have a new grittiness and edge to them, and are smartly written and stylishly crafted.

There is plenty that is still disturbing about even new Tamil cinema: endless violence, obnoxious attitude to women, and ingratiating tropes. What is cause for celebration, though, is that this vibrant new cinema in Tamil is not at its culmination but is just beginning. Already in “Kalloori” there is no violence, no caste politics, and no item numbers. It certainly feels like Tamil cinema has finally grownup, turned a corner, and gone beyond old Kollywood.

You can also check the story at , http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/01/13/stories/2008011350150500.htm