2022, Tamil, Directed by Vishal Venkat
A tale that beautifully unravels the sensitive dependence of a ‘small cause’ that result in a ‘large effect’. It echoes the ‘reluctant retrospection’ in the lives of young adults, four to be precise and more promisingly attempts to establish that there is a solution to every man-made chaos.
We are familiar with the pattern of work of the upcoming debutant director, after viewing the intriguingly cut trailer. And thankfully the premise keeps you invested, solely for its character establishments, leaving you inquisitive.
The four youngsters from different societal strata end up in an ‘entanglement’, through an incident, in which each of the youngster is correlated in one way or the other. Each character is carefully generated with an unique set of traits and a circle of friends and relatives. The maker kept the curiosity alive as their interaction doesn’t happen up until the last half hour of the film. Even though these group of people don’t interact, they do share spatial proximity. An individual can’t be described independently because he or she is only reacting to the same incident, in a different way, from their own ‘retrospection’.
The strength of the maker lies in his attempt to keep the pace and the milieu of these four families as distinctive as possible. The screenplay perfectly percolates through the essence of the story and as a proof we have seamless overlapping incidents from different perspectives.
The seasoned actor Nassar, simply devours, his never seen self restraint ‘temperate’ role. Since his role is the fulcrum that is essential in showcasing the reactions of the other characters, it ought be at its best and it simply is. The actor brings to life the mind of the elderly who are caged in the name of ‘old age’, a space that is devoid of anything interesting.
Out of the four protagonists, Ashok Selvan’s and Manikandan’s characters are the formidable ones as both are convincingly transformative in their respective character arc and are astoundingly performed. The other two characters which interferes with these main characters with their physiological actions are no less to the lead characters, as they are focal as well.
The implicit characterization which makes the viewers relate to similar real life humans and incidents, were the strength of the maker and the convincing actors. The annoying tone and the choice of words by Ashok Selvan’s and Manikandan’s were spot on.
The ‘Retrospection Journey’ that every human does in any given ordeal, the endless guilt trips, the undying repentance, especially when we discover that the tiniest effort from our end might have saved a mighty catastrophe- we as viewers could relate to every facet of the stroy telling.
When we learn to ‘Pause’ a little, in the midst of our deadline-filled furious lives, when we learn to ‘Listen’ more than we hurry to ‘Speak’ every last bit of information that our brain possibly processes, when we learn to ‘Own-up’ to our mistakes graciously, when we ‘Stop scaring’ our own lives, trying to burn a strip on our cat-selves and pretend to be tigers, when we learn ‘Not to explain’ our clean conscience to others around us, we are destined to continue our journey as a responsible race.
A crisp editing would have done more good to the film. The ‘dying trend’ of repetition of sequences as a call for justification, seemed excessive as the viewers have evolved more the director gives credit for.
The Sahithya Academy Award winning Novel by Jeyakanthan and the 1977 Directorial by A. Bhimsingh based on the novel in the same name, are two big names to live up to and the crew of 2022 did do a genuine attempt.