“Poojai”… Where Hari turns auteur and… nah!

Spoilers ahead…

Midway through Poojai, I had a frightening thought. The director Hari is… an auteur. I know what you’re thinking, that this is what happens when you watch way too many of these films – but hear me out. If the definition of an auteur is someone whose distinct fingerprints are all over the film, then isn’t Hari one? Let’s examine Poojai. Scenes where the hero’s (Vasu, played by Vishal) voice becomes louder as he recites dialogue, so that he’s practically screaming by the time he gets to the last word? Check. Large families (with well-regarded actors like Sathyaraj and Radhika), and larger melodrama? Check. A background score that takes its cues from a jackhammer tearing up a road? Check. A swooping camera that captures the action from all angles, all directions, leaving you with the feeling of watching the movie from the inside of a washing machine in the spin cycle? Check. And most crucially, that vague feeling of scenes being fast-forwarded – some of it, sometimes all of it, goes by in a blur.

Poojai, thus, is very much “a Hari film,” which means it’s near impossible to write about it in any meaningful way. But a critic has a job to do, things to point out – and in that spirit, it must be said that Vasu, who makes a living as a loan shark, isn’t entirely uninteresting. He smokes and drinks, but he’s not a misogynistic creep. Before speeding away in his car, with sickle-wielding villains breathing down his neck, he turns to his girlfriend Divya (Shruti Haasan, whose beauty inspires the Keatsian nickname… Ooty Urilakizhangu) and snaps on her seatbelt. This, clearly, is a principled man. In a film of this sort, it’s inevitable that bodies will end up hurtling through windshields, but at least hers won’t be one of them. If this isn’t true love, then what is? Also, Vasu isn’t a man of the masses. He’s rich… like really rich. He’s the MD of a large concern in Coimbatore. He speaks Hindi effortlessly. He watches English movies. Someone unfamiliar with the Hari… uh, oeuvre could be forgiven for thinking that there’s an attempt here to accommodate a slightly different kind of “Tamil hero” within the confines of the star-driven masala movie.

But of course that’s never going to happen. Vasu may be A-centre in terms of his background, but where it matters most (and to the relief of the film’s distributors), he’s still B- and C-centre. Hence the bar song and the fight sequences that seem to take place in Krypton, given how miniscule a part gravity plays in the proceedings. Hence the “comedy sequence” where Vasu instructs his buddy (Soori) to bring Divya something cool from the fridge and the latter holds out… a bottle of beer. (Soori and Pandi try routines along the lines of the ones by Goundmani and Senthil, including a nod to the now-legendary vaazhapazham bit.) The story is something about Vasu’s family being threatened by a gang of contract killers, but does anyone really care? Poojai is so depressingly generic that it’s best summed up in the scene where the Pandi character refuses to go to a screening of Gravity because he won’t understand a word. And Vasu says, “Summa vandhu AC-la thoongu.” That’s another characteristic of the Hari movie. The movie itself doesn’t matter.

KEY:

* Poojai = worship
* Ooty Urilakizhangu = a potato from Ooty
* vaazhapazham bit = see here

Copyright ©2014 Baradwaj Rangan. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Posted in: Cinema: Tamil