Review: Karthick Naren’s “Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru” is a subpar thriller that comes undone.

Forgive my condescending tone here, but Indian cinema has rarely produced superior thrillers. By ‘superior’, I mean ticking off the three things that make them such a delight: cleverness, technique, and tautness. Whoever is entrusted with the task of delivering one needs to be clever while plotting them, needs to tell them right, and keep them crisp. It’s a delicate job. And in the case of Indian cinema, filmmakers have rarely succeeded.

I find a majority of Indian mystery-thrillers a bit of a slog to sit through. They are too oversimplified for me, too sloppily plotted. If one misses a detail, they need not worry. Indian filmmakers are in the habit of including a short montage at the end where pieces of the entire mystery come together, in the chronological order, for the sake of absolute clarity. I, for one, detest this habit of theirs. Mysteries need to come together in the head; putting them together on-screen hastily at the end indicates that either they – the filmmakers – weren’t too confident of their technique – which then leads us to question why they decided to tell it the way they did in the first place – or they think the audience isn’t bright enough to figure it out themselves. It does the genre, the audience, and also themselves a great disservice.

Debutant Karthick Naren’s Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru isn’t a slog to sit through, at least not in the beginning. It’s told mostly in flashbacks by a crippled ex-cop who revisits a most puzzling case: on a rainy night some years ago, there was a murder, an accident and a kidnapping, and these three events are mysteriously connected. Naren jumps from incident to incident, from clue to clue, and his stylish approach might seem a little bewildering at first (why do we need to know at what time the clues are discovered?), but we understand why the film is structured so when it finally begins to unravel. It’s exciting to watch the suspense being cleverly amped up, but it is also worrying because Naren tries to tell too many things at once. Things are a bit jumbled, but not too. Amusingly, at one point, the ex-cop says to the new recruit, “So, tell me everything that has happened so far, in the chronological order,” and the youngster obliges. It’s a relief to know that the filmmakers are thinking of their audience.

Here, I must bring up a recurring problem that is as vexing as it is common in Indian mystery-thrillers: too many twists. Too many twists. A mystery is as much about surprising the audience as it is about telling it right, without using sly means to get the intended effect. The number of twists that can be stuffed in it without making it look like a mockery is but irrelevant.

In the case of Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru, we eagerly await its conclusion where that one link connecting the three independent strands will be revealed. But, such is not the case. In fact, it comes apart when it should have soared. For in the last fifteen minutes of the film, a dozen or so twists are packed till it looks grotesque. We are not given enough time to register them, for they come rapidly, one after the other. It’s stunning, but not in a good way. Yes, there was a murder, and yes, there was a kidnapping. And an accident, too. They were all connected, as we guessed. But, nothing is as we thought it was; the film undergoes an abrupt transformation. Now we are suddenly watching a different film. Manipulating the audience by hiding crucial plot points to reveal them all in the film’s thunderous climax is a sign of a subpar imagination or just laziness.

It’s such a shame, it really is. The payoff isn’t particularly rewarding, though some who measure the greatness of a mystery by the number of twists it contains or its ability to confound them in one deceitful way or another will applaud it.

A couple of amateurish mistakes notwithstanding, there are flickers of promise in the way Naren goes about doing his job. Some moments in the film are executed with a flourish (the accident, shown aerially in slow-mo with Naak Pe Gussa playing in the background, is my favorite), something we don’t see in a debut film, something we definitely don’t see in a film directed by a twentysomething. But I just wish it didn’t succumb to the foolishness of wanting to leave the audience dazed. It was managing quite well for a while there.

(Not For Reproduction)

Review: Vetrimaaran's "Visaranai" is a chilling work that deserves high praise.

A few years back, I watched a compelling Argentinian film on television, Israel Adrian Caetano's Chronicle of an Escape, which told the story of a bunch of youngsters who are kidnapped by the secret military police and chucked into a detention center outside the city where they are routinely tortured for 'names'. The names of more youngster who are suspected of being 'anti-government', or just simply names of other people. If they don't croak, they will be subjected to various forms of torture till they do.

It was easy to spot that Vetrimaaran's harrowing Visaranai, inspired from M. Chandrakumar's novel Lock Up, a true-life account of what he went through when he was jailed for two weeks, has a few parallels with Caetano's film. It opens with four Tamil migrant workers getting scooped up by the police one day for no real reason and taken to the station, and instead of being given answers, they are introduced to their newfound nightmare with a round of relentless, meaningless beating. Their cries go unheard. Their questions remain unanswered. When one of them tries to scamper, he is smacked across the face with a steel bucket. The resounding thunk is enough to send shivers down the spine. But the only difference between this film and Caetano's film -- which was also based on a true story -- is that the bad guys there had traces of goodness in them. And the good guys had hope.

In the first fifteen minutes, the mood is created with expertly built tension. A second round of carefully controlled bone-crunching beating follows. Then a third. Then a fourth. (The sound design is absolutely top-notch.) In between a round of whacking, they are untied and made to walk around the room just to prevent clots from forming in their legs. Their questions don't change. The cops want them to confess, but they are not given the details of the trumped-up charges they are being held for. They have no idea what they are supposed to have done. They are left to guess, which scares them even more. The punishments meted out to them become increasingly sadistic, almost playful, with the cops treating them like puppets. A ghastly kick in the face is an answer to an angry question. The dinginess of the station and the gloominess of their cramped cell signify the hopelessness of their situation.

Visaranai makes us cynical without ever resorting to tricks that filmmakers usually use to do so. We don't get out-and-out evil caricatures as the bad guys (the film does come close to creating one in one of its most brutish sequences), but quiet, mysterious ones. Strange as it may sound, their evilness has a justification. To them torture is just another way of life, a routine. A beating, though shocking, lasts only for a short period of time. They know when to stop. The film reinforces the idea of them being human by turning them into machines during the torture scenes: to them, it is a chore that they must carry out. They are not settling a personal vendetta against the victims, so the beatings are largely emotionless. This detail stands out among the many, many little ones that make up this miraculous film.

But what works in Visaranai's favor is the layered screenplay by Vetrimaaran which keeps unravelling through twists and turns, never letting the film become hackneyed. The first-half is mostly about the time the quartet spend in the police station, but it crosscuts between another sub-plot that simmers away gently and emerges as the core in the film's second-half. Each sequence has a purpose, even the ones where the protagonists are thrashed black and blue, because we need to be in a particular frame of mind for what the director has up his sleeve. Paranoia seeps in without invocation in the film's second-half, one of the film's smaller but significant achievements and a sign of how marvelous the film's screenplay is.

And then Visaranai has those occasional touches of irony and symbolism. The victims are assigned the task to clean a police station of the filth ahead of a puja, a detail so ironic that it amusing. Or like how every road leads to a police station from which they never seem to escape. Or that bit where they get stuck in a swamp and the police eye them silently like hawks. It is probably indicative of the flawed justice system the film seems to indict; we cannot escape it. The system will find a way to get back into our lives in some way. In a way, it is like a maze without an exit, as the protagonists learn with time and so do we.

Ultimately, Visaranai is a significant achievement. It tells us about the deeply sown seeds of corruption and power play between the levels in the system. It remains a work of great finesse. It doesn't ever impose or manipulate. And surprisingly, for a film with unsettling amounts of violence, it is never unwatchable. In the scene where the polite request to clean the police station is made to the victims by a cop they like and trust, we see a slight fear and unease creeping into their faces. It is a look of disillusionment. To them, it doesn't matter anymore who the good guys are. They don't trust anybody, especially a person is in a uniform. That look skillfully sums up what the film was aiming for.

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Review: M. Manikandan's "Kaaka Muttai" grapples with tragicomedy like no other film in recent memory.

I have always found movies about slum children or people who dwell in the slums to be slightly manipulative. Often in such films we are subjected to repeated and exploitative shots of the dreadful living conditions in the slums as a means to invoke empathy, and how this small world has been preexisting discreetly while we walk past it everyday. While Slumdog Millionare resorted to brash exploitation to stir up the compassion needed to invest into its story, Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay offered a more realistic and subtle picture. 

It comes as such relief, then, that Kaaka Muttai, one of the more extraordinary debuts one is likely to see this year, neither glorifies nor exploits poverty for sympathy, but tells an uncommonly charming story about two slum boys yearning to taste a luscious pizza with a lot of heart. In the process, as is inevitable and in a way obligatory also, it delicately emphasizes on the discrimination between the rich and the poor in India, and how the people involved deal with it. 

It's a tragedy, naturally, but director M. Manikandan is too shrewd an artist to fall for that stereotypical trap. He sidesteps the despair in his tale and shifts his focus to the optimistic bit, thereby delivering an uplifting adventure that has a gloomy undercurrent we rarely have to confront. It is a film that celebrates morality in a cruel world, and conveys this through the shenanigans of two boys obsessed with a snack that even the people who can afford to munch on it consider to be harmful.

It is the perfect recipe for a quasi-preachy film that would have characters delivering routine sermons, but Kaaka Muttai rebuffs that approach entirely. Through humor and heartbreak and tenacity, it teaches us a bit about the world we live in, a bit about us, and it never slips into the melodramatic territory. It is predictable, yes, but the most notable triumphs as far as films are concerned are those that follow a path from the outset that is foreseeable till its conclusion, yet it manages to win you over. Kaaka Muttai is one of those films. It reflects a world that we know, is inhabited with characters we might have met at some point in our lives, but it is its honesty that eventually sways.

While also commenting the effects of globalization on the country and on the mindset of its people, Manikandan's dense debut switches tones rather skillfully as it oscillates between tragedy and comedy. It's a film about a mother's desperation to bring her family together and her diminishing hope, about how she tackles the absence of a father figure in her sons' lives. It is a film about her concealed sacrifice. But at its core, it is a film about entrepreneurship. It's a film about the naivete of two lads when the odds are stacked against them and how they beat it with their steadying optimism. These layers form an exquisite blend that drives the narrative. Each scene is put to good use to sculpt either the characters or the plot, and with each passing moment, Kaaka Muttai reinvents itself. In many ways, that is a rarity. 

The allure of Kaaka Muttai, like most great films', lies in the little throwaway but carefully handled details. In one the scenes deep into the film, the boys unknowingly turn up in dapper clothes only to come up against a catastrophe, and their mother washes her feet on their brand new clothes as a means for salvation. In another, possibly the most vivid of all sequences, a rich kid offers them each a piece of pizza, which they initially gape at but then reject it as they take the offer to be an unfounded insult. The rich kid's confusion is both funny and evocative, for he's completely oblivious to what his actions have led them to feel. After all, he was doing that in good faith. It is marvelous how many perceptive details are crammed in each scene, and how relevant they are in shaping our impression of the characters. Perhaps, this is one of the copious things that I would go back to the film for.

But this film wouldn't have worked half as well if it wasn't for the fabulously understated performances. Admittedly, I'm not as well acquainted with contemporary Tamil cinema as I would have liked to have been, but this committed ensemble only enhances a fine script. The young actors at the heart of this coup have such a strong screen presence, it feels awkward to even imagine for a second who could have played their roles if they had not, and their scenes with Iyshwarya Rajesh, who plays their mother, are doozies. There is no better actor here; only actors who complement each other like actors should. 

My only gripe with Kaaka Muttai is that the story goes slightly awry in the second-half, almost surrendering the logical consistency it maintained throughout for some needless drama. But looking at the bigger picture, it isn't something that would tarnish the joy that it bequeaths to us. Some of the finest Indian films in recent years have been debuts, and Kaaka Muttai proudly upholds that tradition. It is absolutely wonderful.