How to make mainstream cinema: What Bollywood can learn from these three Tamil films
From ‘Meiyazhagan’ to ‘Kottukkaali’ and ‘Vaazhai’ — Tamil cinema, like other film industries in the South, knows its larger cultural role. It is for the people, and about them
A man in his 40s reluctantly goes back to his hometown after two decades. He reconnects with long-lost relatives, an old love, drinks chai by the road, and rides a cycle in the silence of the night that envelops a sleepy town.
These images are from the Tamil film Meiyazhagan, directed by C Prem Kumar. Arvind Swamy of Roja and Bombay fame plays the film’s protagonist Arulmozhi — the most tender man in Indian mainstream films this year. Little moments make up Swamy’s Arul: A gentle tap on the shoulder by someone from the past, his daily ritual of feeding parrots and pigeons, his mornings as a cricket coach, his banter with his daughter. Arul is not afraid to cry, laugh his heart out, be vulnerable, and admit he is wrong.
The film also stars Karthi, a popular Tamil actor, and was produced by his brother, Suriya. In a recent interview, when asked if the film met expectations box office-wise, Suriya, who is a reputed actor and producer himself, said the numbers did not matter for a film like this, before going on to say he made “25 per cent profit on the budget”. Suriya asked: “Who knows what truly defines a film’s success?”
Between the noise of Rs 100 crore collections, fan wars and stardom that seem to dominate conversations surrounding film today, especially Bollywood, Suriya’s statement came as a breath of fresh air. It also points towards a culture of collaboration that seems to be taking place in the constantly evolving mainstream Tamil cinema, which has been able to strike a balance between staple masala high-octane fare and more subtle, imaginative and character-driven filmmaking.
This year’s releases are proof enough of the variety that the industry has to offer.
In August, Vikram — with a reputation for going to great lengths to embody his eccentric characters — starred in Pa Ranjith’s Thangalaan, a magical-realist story of Kolar gold mine workers in the 1800s. While the film got a mixed mandate, it was praised for its world-building, technical finesse and politics.
Then in September, we got Vaazhai, director Mari Selvaraj’s meditative semi-autobiographical story about banana plantation workers. The world is a Tamil Nadu village in the 90s, and the “hero”, a precocious teenager. This is a film with its politics firmly in place, speaking of poverty, hunger, and cycles of exploitation. At the same time, it is a thing of beauty. Cinematographer Theni Eshwar shoots rural landscapes — from cows to water to fields — with freshness and patience. The final sequence that forms the core of the tragedy at the heart of the film is again technically supreme — shot in black and white, at night, with ample usage of close-ups. Music director Santosh Narayanan’s final ballad mourning the dead is haunting, the kind that lingers far after the film’s credits roll.
The film, which would be dismissed as unglamorous for Bollywood, ended up making Rs 40 crore — showing a culture of audiences and filmmakers in constant dialogue.
In October, Tamil cinema also saw the release of P S Vinothraj’s Kottukkaali — its English title is Adamant Girl — which did the rounds at film festivals such as Berlinale. The film talks of a family taking their “possessed” daughter to a seer after she falls in love with a man from an oppressed caste. Anna Ben plays the protagonist Meena with resolve and resistance. The actor’s calibre here is on display — she only has a single dialogue in the entire film. The film, with its usage of single-takes, is a searing depiction of patriarchy-induced suffocation, caste, mothers and daughters, religion and superstition. The film was produced by Sivakarthikeyan, who has just delivered a mega-hit in Amaran, a film on Ashok Chakra awardee Major Mukund Varadarajan.
The year seems to be ending on a great note for the Tamil audience. We have Suriya’s big-budget spectacle Kanguva, also starring Bobby Deol, on November 14, a film which, by the trailer, looks like a desi Game of Thrones. There is also Vetrimaaran’s Viduthalai: Part 2 in December, a film about a police constable and a separatist leader.
Recently, Tamil Nadu Deputy Chief Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin, whose production and distribution company worked on Vaazhai and Amaran, remarked: “Does any other language in any North Indian state have a vibrant film industry like in South India… Almost all the languages spoken in the North Indian states have given way to Hindi. As a result, they have only Hindi films — Bollywood — and Mumbai is extensively producing only Hindi films now. Not Marathi films, not Bhojpuri; Bihari, Haryanvi, and Gujarati film industries receive far less attention as compared to Bollywood.”
In southern India, he argued, film is a means of cultural preservation and resistance.
The political implications of the DMK and its ideology aside, Udhayanidhi’s statements point towards one thing.
Tamil cinema, like other film industries in the South, knows the syntax of its films and their larger cultural role. It is cinema for the people, about them, rooted in their lives, issues and aspirations. And there is also room for experimentation, quality, finesse, and political dialogue within that mainstream space.
After courting the NRI in the 1990s and the nationalist post-2014 with its string of “historical epics” and unidimensional “war films”, and now returning to tired-and-tested old tropes (Singham Again, Bhool Bhulaiyaa) Bollywood, which is going through a rough patch of unimaginative writing and recycled storytelling, needs to ask itself: Who are we making our films for? And who is making our films?
