Spoilers ahead…
Let’s say you have the idea for a timeless romance, centered on Christian characters, about the “existense [sic] of love in heaven.” Would you name the lovers Charles and Diana, after the royal couple whose marriage spiralled into the very definition of a cautionary tale, reminding us that a lavish fairy-tale wedding is no guarantee against acrimony and adultery? Sinish Sreedharan, the director of Endrendrum, doesn’t seem to care. He announces, at the beginning, that his film is based on chaos theory, and he opens with a shot of Charles (Sathish Krishnan) moping by the seaside, as a computer-generated butterfly flaps its wings and lights on his shoulder. A voiceover informs us that it’s Good Friday, the only day of the year he looks forward to, because that’s when he and his mother make the pilgrimage from Coimbatore to Chennai, away from a father and husband who hates them.
We wait for this traumatic past to inform Charles’s actions, which come to involve murder and communicating with spirits from the afterlife, but we realise very quickly that the real chaos lies in the writing. We get scenes with friends (one of them an Ajith fan) and, alongside, two cops investigating a foul killing, but like Charles’s father, these characters could have been written out of the narrative and the film wouldn’t have turned out any differently. Much time is devoted to a comedy track involving a kid named Pappu and a bunch of students fond of reading Tamil porn novellas – this, to state the obvious, is not the diversion you want in what is essentially a supernatural mystery that revolves around Diana (Priyanka Reddy). It’s an encouraging sign that inexpensive digital cameras have opened the gates for young filmmakers to tell their stories, but technology can only help in the execution. The soul of a movie lies in something far more old-fashioned: a lot of time spent with some equivalent of pen and paper. If a butterfly flaps its wings in China, will Tamil cinema get better screenplay writers?
KEY:
* Endrendrum = forever
* chaos theory = see here
* afterlife = see here
* Ajith fan = see here
An edited version of this piece can be found here. Copyright ©2014 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
Baradwaj Rangan 
Vijayakumar
March 8, 2014
” If a butterfly flaps its wings in China, will Tamil cinema get better screenplay writers?” 😀
I also wish that there were screenwriters who would just write scripts and directors who use scripts written by people who can actually write.
LikeLike
Arjun
March 9, 2014
Nothing more annoying than pseudo-science in Tamil movies. And I think it is Kamal Haasan who opened the floodgates in this regard. I can never forgive him (despite being a fan) for his half-baked pseudo-science based spouting in Dasavatharam and now, Vishwaroopam. The least our already ill-informed and superstitious masses need is pseudo-science to confuse them more.
“We get scenes with friends (one of them an Ajith fan) and, alongside, two cops investigating a foul killing, but like Charles’s father, these characters could have been written out of the narrative and the film wouldn’t have turned out any differently. ”
Wow, so after superstar and ulaganaayagan, Ajith is added to the list of pop-culture references in tamil cinema?
LikeLike
Vasisht Das
March 9, 2014
this indulgent tradition of story-screenplay-dialogues-direction credited to one person seems to be a uniquely Indian fetish.
it’s almost as if, you won’t be taken seriously unless you contrive to project the Renaissance Man in you. does anyone on the planet equal our unique specimen, the world-famous-in-TN genius T.R. (aka T.Rajendar), the composer, singer, dialogue/screenwriter, lyricist, choreographer, cinematographer, editor, producer, director, rhyme-regurgitater and (gasp) actor, when he is not busy being a politician and star-father? (let’s not quibble about the allegation that often, he is also the best / only audience for his movies).
and then there are wimps like that Spielberg guy who mostly directs movies written by other people, like for eg., actual screenwriters! Ptchah.
the number of acclaimed directors from the rest of the world who don’t write their own movies is large. and why should that be surprising when we don’t automatically expect this multi-tasking from professionals in other creative fields?
a treatise on this dr.rangan?
LikeLike