They are easily some of the most original and vibrant in India, perhaps the world.” Karun was hoping to startle cinephiles, trying to draw the attention of our huge and varied movie-going public to a new kind of Indian cinema, one that was different not just from Bollywood but even from the independent multiplex Hindi film. And what he had in mind, I’m sure, was a film like Naan Kadavul—or any of the other dozen Tamil films from the last couple of years.
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Naan Kadavul brings two very strange worlds together: the netherworld of the aghori and the hidden world of maimed beggars. |
I saw Naan Kadavul last February and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. There’s nothing quite like it in Indian cinema. Its director, Bala, is known to surprise with every new offering (his last film Pithamagan was about a band of outsiders—a graveyard caretaker, a ganja seller and a conman—and the unusual friendship they forge) and I was prepared for something different, but not what I saw.
I’ve seen the film a few times now, and with each new viewing it grows more fascinating. It’s a difficult film to write about, defying synopsis and explanation. Naan Kadavul brings two very strange worlds together: The netherworld of the aghori (members of a Hindu sect who live at cremation grounds, eat dead flesh, meditate on corpses and beg with bowls made from human skulls) and the hidden world of maimed beggars. You’d think the result would be bizarre and sentimental but it bursts with wit, energy, unique characters, striking scenes, uncanny casting (non-actors who outshine professional ones), real emotions, darkness and light.
Naan Kadavul is just one example among several recent Tamil films that point to a quiet but exciting revolution unfolding in contemporary Tamil cinema: an unexpected move towards believable, intelligent and strongly scripted storytelling.
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Eeram |
What is just as remarkable is their success at the box office. These films signal a clear shift within mainstream, formulaic Tamil cinema. They don’t come with labels like parallel, arty or offbeat—this is commercial cinema with songs, dances, stars and romance. Yet they use this masala framework to tell fresh stories—half romantic, half realistic.
The new Tamil films range from intense, gritty dramas (Paruthiveeran, Subramaniapuram, Kadhal, Veyil, Katradhu Tamil MA, Polladavan, Nadodigal, Yogi) and stylish, edgy thrillers (Anjathey, Saroja, Pachaikili Muthucharam, Eeram, Akku, Achchamundu! Achchamundu!) to nuanced, feel-good stories (Kalluri, Autograph, Abhiyum Naanum, Poo, Pasanga).
“What distinguishes the new Tamil cinema is its ability to give up the almost obsessive sensuality of earlier Tamil cinema (of, say, a Bharatiraja or a Balu Mahendra) to enter the realm of disgust, or Bibhatsa, as the ‘Natya Shastra’ would define,” explained K Hariharan, filmmaker and scholar, and a fan of this new aesthetic.
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Achchamundu! Achchamundu! |
“They have the audacity to kick the viewer out of the moth-eaten politics of a ‘Dravidian’ stupor to actually recognise and touch the hard grimy realities of Tamil Nadu today. These filmmakers have the courage to deny the viewers the simplistic heroics of a typical ‘Vijay’ or a ‘Rajni’ movie and shift the emphasis onto the politics of the Tamil landscape.”
Hariharan said these new films have proved that the only way to keep Bollywood and Hollywood at bay is to move deeper into the Tamil hinterland and possibly touch the basic chord of Tamil identity. “Having met some of these filmmakers, I can confidently say that they have not gone about doing this with a game plan but got their teeth into it out of sheer passion and conviction in their own experiential reality.”
The themes in these films are usually tough-minded explorations of life in villages and in the underbellies of cities. The characters display a strong inner life (a quality often missing in formulaic cinema), are rooted in their culture and tradition but forced to break out of everything because of their personal choices — usually love or ambition. The story could be a bubbly romance, a rambunctious college comedy or an overwrought family drama but with undercurrents of something brooding, dark and disturbing.
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In Subramaniapuram, Sasikumar meticulously evokes what the city of Madurai would have looked like in the 1980s by using authentic period details. |
In Vetrimaran’s Polladavan, the hero, a young man from a lower middle class family background, looks for his stolen motorcycle. His search leads him to parts of the city he never knew existed, a sinister world of thieves, drug traffickers and hired assassins that operates smoothly just below the surface of the city. In an odd, provocative film like Raam’s Kattradhu Tamizh, Prabhakar, a young, bearded Dostoyevskian hero has an MA in Tamil but it gets him nowhere in life. He runs into classmates half as bright as him doing fabulously well, working at 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, Prabhakar narrates his tragic journey from idealism and rage to madness and oblivion. What this Tamil postgraduate has to say about the future of those who have given themselves to native culture and literature in an increasingly Anglicised society feels alarmingly true and painfully ironic. Kattradhu Tamizh is uneven, grim, violent and reactionary but full of conviction. And it still features a big star, Jeeva, right at the centre of it, and songs and romance too.
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In Subramaniapuram, Sasikumar meticulously evokes what the city of Madurai would have looked like in the 1980s by using authentic period details. |
Ameer’s Paruthiveeran (2007) stunned audiences with a brutally detailed depiction of clan wars in rural Tamil Nadu. (The film received a standing ovation at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival.) It is a vibrant, colourful but deeply tragic tale of two lovers forced apart by caste and a lingering family feud. Yes, it sounds like every other Indian movie from the last 100 years. The difference is that the director creates a small town life as lived deep in the heartland of Tamil Nadu with precision. Its strongest character is the heroine, Muthazhagu (an audacious performance from Priyamani, who won the National Award for best actress that year), the village belle who fiercely knows her mind and heart.
In one unforgettable, powerful scene, Muthazhagu returns home late after secretly meeting her lover. Her mother screams at her, asking her where she has been. Muthazhagu shrugs her off, hangs up her handbag on the wall, and sits down to eat her supper. Her grandmother, sitting in a corner, chewing betel nuts, smiles sympathetically. Her father rushes in, enraged, grabs her, pushes her against the wall and begins to beat her. The mother and grandmother try to stop him but he turns around and thrashes them. Then he turns again to continue pummeling his daughter. It’s not an unusual scene in our movies. What happens next, however, is unpredictable.
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Paruthiveeran is a vibrant, colourful but deeply tragic tale of two lovers forced apart by caste and a lingering family feud. |
When the father stomps out, the heroine takes her dinner plate, heaps food on it and begins to gorge herself. She asks her mother to heap more meat on her plate as she chews with great relish, her eyes teary but defiant. This scene unfolds 20 minutes into the movie and for a Tamil audience familiar with such casual patriarchal violence, the heroine’s cool defiance instantly signals something different, something new. She’s just been beaten black and blue, humiliated and spat upon, and she’s hungry? In some film theatres in Tamil Nadu, Paruthiveeran ran a full year.
By deftly weaving mainstream Tamil film and realism, these films seem more ambitious and entertaining than big budget films with iconic stars. The formula is reinvented, not thrown out.
Sasikumar (once assistant director to Ameer), made an impressive debut with Subramaniapuram in 2008, another gritty entry in this new wave. He took the experiment to the next level by setting his story in the 1980s, meticulously evoking what the city of Madurai would have looked like then by using authentic period details. Subramaniapuram revolves around three shiftless friends who accept petty criminal assignments from a local politician. When their deep loyalty to him is rewarded by betrayal, they plot to kill him.