Thalapathi (The Leader, India 1991)

Rajnikanth

Even watching this classic Mani Ratnam film on a terrible DVD with a degraded image and Hindi dubbing couldn’t diminish its power. Thalapathi represents the ultimate in Tamil Cinema during the early 1990s. Director Mani Ratnam, composer Illayaraja and cinematographer Santosh Sivan combine to present the superstars of Tamil and Malayalam Cinema, Rajnikanth and Mammootty in an epic gangster melodrama.

The outline narrative is based on the Indian epic narrative the Mahābhārata. I can’t pretend to be able to explain how the connection is made, but it is mentioned by several commentators. The film’s plot sees a teenage mother abandon her newborn baby during the Holi festival. The baby is later found by children and eventually brought up by a woman in a poor community. Twenty-five years later, the abandoned baby is now a man, a child of the community and fast becoming its protector and moral conscience. This is Suraj/Surya (Rajnikanth). In defending a woman, Surya beats up man who eventually dies from his injuries. The dead man worked for the local crime lord Devaraj (Mammootty), who recognising his qualities recruits Surya. The two soon become very close, saving each other’s lives at various points and gaining control in a community who fear the (corrupt) police and the threat of rival gangs. Devaraj and Surya are criminal and violent in retribution but they support the members of the local community. Surya becomes the man to go to for help – the ‘Thalapathi’ of the community.

The new power regime is then threatened by the arrival of a new District Collector, a young man (played by Arvind Swamy, later to star in Roja and Bombay) who is determined to ‘clean up’ the city. It is at this point that all the coincidences of melodrama come into play. Everyone turns out to be related to one of the other characters in some way and cross-loyalties are inevitable. At the centre of everything is Surya’s hurt at still being an ‘abandoned son’. (He rationalises the action of the mother he has never known by saying that he was a ‘black baby’ that she didn’t want.) ‘Mothers’ become important characters in the narrative, both in a functional and symbolic way. The audience knows that the narrative can only be resolved by violence and death. (The connection to the epic is partly in relation to the cross-loyalties to friends and families.)

The high melodrama is played out in terms of music, compositions, colours and highly choreographed dance and fight sequences. I confess that in the first half of the film, I found Surya’s excessive violence to be deeply disturbing. It occurred to me that the character was rather like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry – a fascist cop who was morally right but prepared to break every law and to punish the bad guys. I still thought this in part two but as the melodrama intensified, it did become more understandable if not more acceptable.

The real value of the film for me was simply to see Rajnikanth in action. This is his only Mani Ratnam film which seems a surprise. I can see why he is a superstar. He exudes charisma despite lacking the pale features, aristocratic face and toned body of so many Bollywood male leads and in this film sporting a mane of seemingly back-combed hair. Like the beefy moustachioed Mammootty, he could only be a superstar in the South. There is something warm and vulnerable about him. He cries and comforts small children quite naturally – and a moment later beats opponents to a pulp without blinking. 

I’m wondering now whether I can bring myself to watch Mani Ratnam’s earlier Nayakan, another gangster epic starring the other Tamil superstar, Kamal Hassan. Like Thalapathi, this sees a working-class boy take on rival gangsters and the police in another massively successful film. But the DVD that I rented looks unwatchable, so perhaps I’ll look for a better copy.

Kannathil Muthamittal (India 2002)

Keerthana and Simran as adopted daughter and her legal mother

The summer is a chance to watch some of my archive of videotapes and transfer those worth using to DVD. Kannathil Muthamittal (A Peck on the Cheek) is one of two films made back in Tamil Nadu by Mani Ratnam after his Hindi experience with Dil Se. The other was Alai Payuthey (2000), one of my favourite films that I have watched several times. Although my experience of Mani Ratnam’s work is limited, I’m reasonably confident in asserting that his films shot in the South are better than those made elsewhere in India. When I watch the Tamil films, I really do wonder why anyone bothers to watch the majority of Bollywood films. The cliché is that Bollywood represents a fantasy India constructed just for the vicarious entertainment of the cinema audience. By contrast, Mani Ratnam’s Tamil films deal with real social issues set in ‘real’ environments. I use the scare quotes to emphasise that Ratnam’s world is not a simple reflection of reality (which we all know is impossible on film) but that his construction of reality does draw on the experiences of families living in a recognisable world.

Kannathil Muthamittal tells the story of a child born in a refugee camp for Sri Lankan Tamils in India and subsequently adopted by an engineer/writer who marries the girl next door in order to qualify as an adoptive father. The couple then decide to tell the child about the adoption on her ninth birthday. Mani Ratnam reportedly based the story on the experience of American parents taking their adopted daughter back to the Philippines to meet her mother. The trip from Chennai to Northern Sri Lanka is much shorter, but much more dangerous. The combination of an emotional struggle within a family and an attempted reunion literally in the midst of guerilla war is potentially overwhelming. But Mani Ratnam knows how to handle it, as he had already demonstrated with Bombay (1995), set amidst communal violence.

How does he do it? First, it is important to recognise that he has a conventional popular narrative approach. The adoptive couple are middle class with the resources to do things. Father is a production line engineer who conveniently has plenty of spare time to write short stories (using his wife’s name, ‘Indira’, as a pseudonym). But his wife is no stay at home housewife. She is a morning newscaster on a Chennai TV station. So far, so glamorous and the father is played by Madhavan, Mani Ratnam’s discovery from TV who has become both a Tamil and Hindi star. Madhavan is a likable presence and I think he plays the role well. Mother is played by Simran, who I haven’t seen before, but who I thought very impressive. The trick is to have this middle class couple played by attractive stars, but to create a mise en scène which doesn’t turn them into fantasy creatures. They have children who wet the bed and squabble, a grandfather and in-laws who behave normally and they live in a recognisable community. In many ways, Ratnam achieves what the best Hollywood directors often managed in the studio period – the creation of heroic characters who were in one sense ‘just like us’ and in another ‘able to do impossible things’.

But for this story to work, the child actor playing the child Amudha has to be perfect and Keerthana is. In the brief intro to the film as screened on Channel 4, Mani Ratnam described how he looked at many girls but chose Keerthana even though she had no experience (but her parents did). She then quite naturally became a high profile character on the shoot. Her performance is extraordinary. I’m sure some of it must come from sensitive direction, but the institutional apparatus of casting and preparing children for auditions must be important too. I strongly believe that this is something Hollywood could learn from the approach here, in Japan and often in the UK (at least for social realist films). Most of the time, I can’t bear to watch Hollywood children, who seem like tiny aliens. Keerthana as Amudha is sparky, sulky, excited, intelligent, vulnerable and assertive – a real, live girl with believable behaviour and emotions.

My main prompt to watch the film was the appearance of Nandita Das (who strikes me as a younger version of Shabana Azmi). She plays the birth mother, Shyama, in the prologue and again in the closing sequence – and she’s very good. Both Das and Simran are from outside Tamil Nadu. I mention this partly because Mani Ratnam’s script includes at least three references to skin tones. Indian film stars are generally light-skinned. Darker skin is a marker of both lower social class and also ethnic difference so that Southern Dravidians are generally darker. The subtitles inform us that Shyama means ‘black’, yet Nandita Das is noticeably ligher skinned than the other women. Back in Tamil Nadu the adoptive father’s sister wonders why he is adopting a ‘black baby’. The other use of language that I found intriguing was in the references to Chennai/Madras. At home everyone refers to Madras, but in Sri Lanka, father says that they have come from Chennai. I’m not sure what to make of this. Is it exactly the same as the decision to use Mumbai/Bombay or Kolkata/Calcutta?

The other reason why the film works so well is the combination of A. R. Rahman’s music and Ravi K. Chandran’s cinematography. I thought Rahman’s music for Guru was disappointing, but here he is on top form. The cinematography is just wonderful. It helps to have locations as stunning as those in Tamil Nadu, but I particularly liked the shot selection and especially the use of long shots. Although a different cinematographer was on Alai Payuthey, I thought the overall use of sound and image was similar.

Kannathil Muthamittal is available on DVD in the UK from Ayngaran.

Tamil film in the UK Top Ten

The Top 10 films in the UK for the weekend of June 16/17 included two Indian films. At No 6 the Hindi film Jhoom Barabar Jhoom registered a screen average of over £5,000 from 47 screens. There is nothing unusual about this as Hindi films regularly feature in the Top 10. However, at No 9 Sivaji represents what I think is the first Tamil (i.e. ‘made in Chennai’) film to register. Not only is it in the Top 10, but from only 12 screens with a screen average of over £14,000 it was easily the best earner of the weekend, beating all the Hollywood blockbusters. I rate this the most surprising result I’ve seen in many years of logging the chart.

Sivaji stars the veteran (57 year-old) superstar Rajnikanth in a story about a software engineer who returns from America to attempt to set up a hospital for the poor. IMDB lists the film as being partly shot in all four South Indian languages: Tamil, Kannada, Telegu and Malayalam. Distributor Ayngaran is the only outlet for South Indian movies in the UK and it must be delighted by its success, which as far as I can see is based on screenings in Cineworld cinemas in London. I confess that the movie sounds like it will not necessarily be attractive to UK audiences not steeped in South Indian culture and it is possibly not subtitled. Nevertheless, this is a breakthrough in revealing to UK film pundits that actually South India produces more films and sometimes has bigger audiences than the Hindi film industry based in Mumbai (i.e. ‘Bollywood’).

Sivaji opened in 15 territories worldwide and the diaspora audiences in Malaysia and elsewhere propelled to number 15 in Screen International’s worldwide chart.