2019, Tamil, Amazon Prime, 8.5/10 IMDB, Directed by Vetrimaran
South-slanged, slow paced story on inequalities of the 60’s, portrayed through the eyes of a poor farmer with a painful past, strictly saved by the scintillating performance of the lead male and few strong supporting artists.
The story opens with a murder of an alpha male by a teen boy. The boy is protected by his father, escapes into the dense forest nearby and their family is left distorted. The tales and flashbacks of the father, narrated in the course of saving his son from the claws of the enemy’s family, before they could surrender alive into the hands of the law, is what the rest of the movie is all about.
Now what is so intense about it, you may wonder, given the digital world that we live in. The uniqueness about the movie is that, the story that is placed in a plot that is four decades old, is treated with respect by an intrinsic director and an immensely talented actor, who lures us, into that era of helplessness, in a jiffy.
I haven’t read the book, ‘Vekkai’, published in 2012 by Poomani, on which the movie is based. Hence, my views are contained only to the movie’s content. The recent chart buster Pariyerum Perumal addressed the caste inequalities of the past and Asuran addresses the inequalities in land wealth associated with the rich and the poor, where caste seems to play it’s dirty card, this time much subtly.
Dhanush, is mostly in the character of a man in his middle age and the actor is so convincing with his body language and fatigue dialogue delivery. This is no doubt a huge milestone in his acting career. May the actor be blessed with good health to mane similar challenging roles in future. He does make you brim with pride.
The director scores in every frame, from the wild boar hunt in banana farm, to the red sand stunt in the interval block, from the slippering of the villain, to the slipper humiliation in the flash back. These are only few of the many highlight moments.
Contrarily, the slipper humiliation was a tad bit less gripping to that of the urinating humiliation scene in Pariyerum Perumal.
The climax advice, echoes your memory, from Devar Magan- ‘Educating the kids is the only measure to pull them out of the vicious cycle’. Again, it was bettered through Mari Selvaraj’s characters in Pariyerum Perumal.
Almost all supporting characters are staunchly noteworthy. Each character is like flicking through couple of pages of descriptions from the author, that keeps running in the back of your mind. Their body language, their costume, their slang, their comfort zone in playing the character were commendable. All credit primarily points towards the director for casting and extracting the best of best from them all.
Manju warrier emotes organically and might be a good choice, but the sync with the tamil folks would have been better by many folds, if it was a talent from tamil industry. Actor Karuna’s son, Ken, has a meaty debut role and he pulls it off.
Actor Pasupathi with his seasoned skills, makes you grow fonder of him and makes you long for the industry to utilize this real life organic farmer, on to such sane challenging roles in the future.
Prakashraj, after a hiatus, rocks with his natural performance as a senior lawyer protecting Dhanush and sparing his son from law.
There is some disjoint feel that runs throughout the movie and it forbids you to root for the characters as we did for Kathir in Pariyerum Perumal, Karthi and Kalaiarasan in Madras, Dinesh in Visaranai.
We have walked many million miles all these years, away from communal riots and societal inequalities in land wealth and caste. Just when the wounds are healing, it’s unfair to poke through the same wound in reminding the pain of those societal inequalities of the past.
The movie might have been partly set to address the current scenarios with a positive notion rather than dwelling in the past, licking old wounds that are nearly healing.
The generation that soars to overcome inequalities in this modern era, through education and qualification, need not be constantly reminded of the origin of the mistakes by the Britishers, the landlords and affluent upper class that swindled the land from the uneducated masses, is my humble opinion.
But on the other hand, for the generation that is not aware of such humiliating inequalities that even existed, this must be second in line to Pariyerum Perumal.
Also, these kind of movies might prove a walk down the Memory Lane to warn the Nethas, to remind them to stay away from the root causes of the past riots and never to rekindle them for personal or political mileages.
An intense watch, that strangely doesn’t glorify killing, even when it’s all about killing and revenge.
Kudos Dhanush.