Wrote this post on social media.
Happy 25th birthday, IRUVAR.
You came on Januray 14, 1997, and forever changed the people who liked Mani Ratnam’s films into two camps:
The first said: “he used to be such a good storyteller who made such heartwarming films… I wish he made movies like MOUNA RAAGAM again”.
The second said: “you transformed his DNA forever and made him a great ‘experimental-mainstream’ director whose failures are more cinematically interesting than many other filmmakers’ successes”.
(I, of course, belong, to Camp 2.)
Either way, I think both camps will agree on one thing: that you remain a landmark.
Posted in: Cinema: Tamil
Baradwaj Rangan 
Sri Prabhuram
January 15, 2022
Strange that I haven’t seen this film yet. I’m planning on binge watching every Mani Ratnam film (including this one) in anticipation for Ponniyin Selvan. However, I do think AR Rahman’s songs are fantastic (especially Narumugaye and Kannai Katti Kolladhey).
(The only Mani Ratnam films I have seen so far are Raavanan, O Kadhal Kanmani, Kaatru Veliyidai and Chekka Chivantha Vaanam.)
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vijay
January 15, 2022
this already seems to be a good year for film writers as I can see the following coming:
30 years of Rahman
30 years of devar magain
20 years of kannaththil muththamittaal
40 years of Moondram pirai
and so on…
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MANK
January 15, 2022
I think it was Dil se more the Iruvar that divided the MR camp. Iruvar was still a very classically made film, and most of the ‘missing links’ were due to censorship.
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Sundar Rajan
January 15, 2022
More than anything Iruvar was such a gutsy project.
Hats off just for that!
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RK
January 15, 2022
I believe Iruvar/Iddaru is MR’s best work so far. I saw it 10 years after it’s release and was stunned. But at the time of release, joke was there were only iddaru (two people) in the theatre to watch 😀
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Voldemort
January 15, 2022
From sharing your reviews and pieces from the blog on your social media, to sharing excerpts from your social media here, you’ve come full circle saar.
Also, saw on your Instagram that you now do reels as well. How sad is it that you decided that writing isn’t a popular option anymore in this ADD era, and 30 second long content is the future. I understand that you need to do things that are relevant to the era but it is deeply saddening that a wonderful writer like you is not writing. That no one reads these days and that writing is a slowly dying art is sadder.
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Rakesh MN
January 15, 2022
Whether commercially successful or failed…all his movies always have an aspect which everyone could relate…backed up by some soul warming music…I just watch all those masterpieces time and again…
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Anand Raghavan
January 15, 2022
BR,
Heard that there had been significant censoring after which the film was relased back then and ARRs BGMs were used to fill the muted dialogues, and it in fact elevated certain scenes. Did you get a chance to know what portions got chopped off?
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KayKay
January 15, 2022
I saw this a week apart from Minsara Kanavu. While the latter went down easy like honey, Iruvar was a far more interesting but less easily digestible concoction. I remember an argument I had with a friend who claimed Iruvar simply doesn’t work if you didn’t know it it was a heavily fictionalized account of the MGR-Karunanidhi relationship. For me, this foreknowledge works AGAINST the movie frequently because you go in with these expectations which Mani Ratnam dashes with glee throughout. Purely from a cinematic standpoint, you expect the Friends Turned Political Allies turned Bitter Rivals arc to crescendo towards some epic showdown, which never happens. As a charismatic movie star turned charismatic politician, the usually charismatic Mohanlal is uncharacteristically subdued. And the less said about how far removed the Ash character is as the Jayalalitha stand-in, the better. Revathi and Gauthami are sidelined as the spouses who are all too aware their husbands have taken on younger mistresses. Said mistresses (Tabu and Ash) are also eventually forgotten as the script loses interest or outright expresses it’s confusion on what to do with them. It falls on the brilliant Prakash Raj, who is simply mesmerizing as the Karunanidhi figure, to keep your interest focused when the meandering screenplay doesn’t.
Rahman’s soundtrack has grown on me through the years but to be honest, it got 1/25th the playtime of my Minsara Kanavu CD, both released almost at the same time. Though the gorgeous semi-classical Narumugaiye is a keeper in any decade.
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Yajiv
January 16, 2022
@Sri Prabhuram: Oh man, I’m really excited that you’ll be able to experience his earlier work for the first time. Do try to go in chronological order if possible!
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praneshp
January 16, 2022
@sri prabhuram you’re in for a treat. Only thing I’d suggest is to space things out and enjoy each movie for a while, and maybe read br’s book in parallel.
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theeversriram
January 16, 2022
Iruvar is a fabulous example of Mani Ratnam’s mastery over film-making process, every technical element in the movie is top notch: casting, cinematography, music, editing, etc. Where the film falters is devoting too much time to MGR-Jayalalitha portions with two & half songs as well. And somehow the movie doesn’t authentically capture the Dravidian movement or politics well inspite of entire movie being against that backdrop.
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Siddharth Subha Venkat
January 16, 2022
@Sri Prabhuram Hope you get introduced to Director Mani Ratnam’s films soon!
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Macaulay Perapulla
January 17, 2022
Upon first viewing, I was dazzled by Iruvar. Upon second viewing, I found that the way Mani handled the evolution of the social justice movement in TN was simply too shallow.
As BR says, “Mani is more a humanist” and doesn’t probably have the instincts to go into the psyche of the social justice movement. Much like Kannadasan’s “Vanavasam” memoir made a parody of the social justice movement, Iruvar, at some places makes a caricature out of the social justice movement and makes it seem as if everything was just about the individual and their ego battles.
Which is also a valid criticism that is backed by a lot of analysis of the history of Dravidian movement by western scholars. If my memory seems right, and I may be wrong, I don’t think BR also asked any question about “content” (as opposed to “form”)of the film: What was Mani’s understanding of the Dravidian movement? Mani does talk in the early parts of the dialogue about how they were fascinated by witnessing the political movements in TN. But, I don’t think they got too deep into giving us a sense of what Mani really thought about the social justice movement.
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brangan
January 17, 2022
Macaulay Perapulla: IRUVAR is the last film I would recommend to anyone who is seriously interested in Dravidian politics just as KANNATHIL is the last film I would ask anyone to see for a depiction of SL’s civil war.
Mani Ratnam is first and foremost a “humanist” who places relationships first. He then poses “what if” questions by bringing in a backdrop. For me IRUVAR is — like the title suggests — about two men, two friends and their arcs.
Because of our knowledge of these two men, we may assume there should be more about the movements they belonged to. But this is not really an “external” (i.e. political) movie but — like all his films — an “internal” one.
And also the beginning of a very stylised and formal period of Mani’s career — the screenplay for example is in short vignettes, etc. The earlier Mani Ratnam would have shown how Kalpana died. Here, we just see the long road snaking before us and the “sound” of an accident. And so on.
In short, this is a fictionalised version of real characters — like GURU or NAYAKAN. Mani Ratnam is taking a lot of real-life building blocks and constructing his own version of a castle. If you notice, the songs or dialogues are less like PARASAKTHI (for instance) and more like an MGR movie, where a whole party can be created in a song (“Viduthalai”).
That’s how I see it. (You may like the film, hate the film etc, this is just about what I think one should “expect” from it.)
Mani Ratnam is like David Lean. DOCTOR ZHIVAGO is not like the book. It takes a few scenes of politics from the book but the film is really about the relationships. And that’s perfectly fine by me.
I want to add that no feature film is capable of portraying entire political movements — and also want to add that ZHIVAGO was heavily criticised for its political ‘shallowness’ when Lean was not going there at all. 🤷🏽♂️
That said, it will be interesting to see an OTT platform take on a series that is actually about the Dravidian movement.
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shaviswa
January 17, 2022
I did not like this film much either. I felt it was neither here nor there. The relationship aspect of the two friends got drowned by the political aspects and the political movement part of the story was not explored at all.
I did feel that it went to too many places. The Aishwarya Rai arc (Jayalalitha) could have been avoided just like the Tabu arc being useless to the film. Avoiding these could have given more scope to how the friends fall apart. What they did after they fall apart. Did they ever try to reconcile at any point in time. These aspects could have made for a more engaging film.
Instead we were left with what felt like a collection of snippets from the lives of two friends turned rivals and foes.
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brangan
January 17, 2022
Sri Prabhuram: It will be interesting to see a series of notes from you as a “today’s generation” person, seeing the older films. Because I do know a lot of younger people (many of my students) who say things like “I don’t get the fuss around MOUNA RAAGAM,” etc. Which is – I guess – inevitable because films and songs “date” very quickly, especially with how much and how fast pop culture changes around us today.
You can post them here, if you like.
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Madan
January 17, 2022
Voldemort: Don Cavarcci and I joke that there are more writers today than readers! Another one, Ruskin Bond said that when he wanted to write, people scorned the writing profession but publishers were dying to get their hands on the work of anyone who wanted to write while today everyone wants to write but nobody is publishing.
My passion project will still see the light of day and not too long from now but it will only be a passion project, so to speak. Maybe – this is apt given your username – someone like JK Rowling will suddenly create a magic wave of interest in writing again. Because believe you me, people talked THEN about reading being a dying habit. Internet/social media isn’t the first ‘enemy’ of reading and TV was a long and tough foe for decades. And then, Harry Potter happened and all sorts of people who had never been interested in books picked up these fat 600 page tomes that I baulked at. Chetan Bhagat did the same in the Indian context and for all that I don’t like his writing, I am grateful for the efforts of anyone who gets people interested in reading.
It’s not all dark. The used book store in Vashi has somehow survived the scourge of the pandemic and I picked up two books there recently. And I wasn’t the only one buying even at that time, which being a weekday afternoon should have been a ‘slow’ time of the day. I say the same thing all the time in the context of music. As long as those of us who like it don’t sink into needless despair and just keep buying, we are chipping away ever so slightly at the ‘decline’. And if we love it that much, we owe it to ourselves to do at least that.
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MANK
January 17, 2022
Mani Ratnam is like David Lean. DOCTOR ZHIVAGO is not like the book. It takes a few scenes of politics from the book but the film is really about the relationships.
That’s an interesting point, but Lean had the added advantage that Zhivago is an ordinary civilian and a poet- very apolitical and a pacifist caught in the middle of a violent political revolution. So his treatment of the subject, which he narrates from Zhivago’s POV looks more appropriate. The characters in Iruvar are politicians themselves, and pioneers in a new political movement. So i would have liked to see more on how they affected this movement and vice versa.
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Macaulay Perapulla
January 17, 2022
Thanks BR for the detailed explanation. I totally get that movies like Iruvar are an “internal” movie that delves deep into the relationships in the universe (world-building) created inside the film. Maybe it is the times we live in.I find it difficult to watch the movie in 2021 without today’s political consciousness and examining what Mani must have thought about the political movement through the aesthetic choices he has employed in the film. It seems almost difficult to watch the film in a “depolitical” (if I can use that phrase) manner and simply look at it as a unique creation that has been made by a humanist.
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Satya
January 17, 2022
My uncle met his future wife at a screening of Iddaru (dubbed version of Iruvar in Telugu) in Ongole – that was their “futuristic” ‘pelli choopulu’, as Iddaru had a okayish run and procuring tickets were easy as part of plan to spend the whole day together. Unlike the film, they had a happy ending.
And I was told, that I enjoyed listening to “Sasivadane” as a kid who was yet to begin schooling.
Thank you Mani sir. 🙂
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Satya
January 17, 2022
“That no one reads these days and that writing is a slowly dying art is sadder.”
Many of us here, including you and yours truly, do want BR to write. But, everyone wants a happy ending and not all can afford to have one.
But I do think that writing will gain its glory again, though I wonder if today’s vulnerable egos would be calm reading anything disturbing, dismissing it as fiction alone.
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Sri Prabhuram
January 17, 2022
Yeah. There are quite a few major filmmakers whose works of art I haven’t seen before like Sanjay Bhansali, the Akhtar siblings, Aditya Chopra, Karan Johar, etc. Like Ratnam, they all have upcoming releases and I would like to see them before their new releases all come out.
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MANK
January 17, 2022
I never thought Aditya Chopra, Karan Johar and ‘Works of art’ will collide in the same sentence 🙂
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Madan
January 17, 2022
MANK: Reminds me of when Hey Ram was released and Khalid Mohammed asked Kamal whether it was a commercial film or art film. Kamal said it’s a film and a film is a work of art.
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MANK
January 17, 2022
Madan Really. I remember Khalid Mohammed’s review of hey ram. He gave a terrible review in which he massacred Kamal for his vanity and narcissism. And (not unexpectedly) he had good things to say about only SRK in the film.
And speaking of Hey Ram (or Virumaandi), it’s a kind of socio-political epic that Mani Rathnam is incapable of making
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Rajesh Balasubramanian
January 17, 2022
I hate all these 25 yrs, 20 yrs etc. I recently came across Azhagi’s 20 years. Man that film got released when I was in my college first year. I can’t bear the fact that the movie is 20 yrs old
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Madan
January 17, 2022
MANK: Oh yes, that he did. He interviewed him and all and stabbed him with the review anyway. Khalid would later meet his match in SRK obsession with Raja Sen who, when speculating about who could have played the titular role in an Indian remake of The Artist, went for, who else, SRK. Because Kamal doesn’t exist, hasn’t already done pantomime in Pushpak, right!
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KayKay
January 17, 2022
“Many of us here, including you and yours truly, do want BR to write. But, everyone wants a happy ending and not all can afford to have one.”
Satya, I always say, a happy ending is entirely in your hands.
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Satya
January 17, 2022
KayKay: I agree. And in this case, it is in BR’s hands.
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Sri Prabhuram
January 17, 2022
I know, but I still would like to check out those films soon.
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sai16vicky
January 17, 2022
My two cents on ‘Iruvar’: https://twitter.com/sai16vicky/status/1482279894419898370.
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Anu Warrier
January 17, 2022
@Voldemort – you echo my thoughts. 😦 I really, really, really miss BR the writer.
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Cathy
January 17, 2022
Speaking as a person who doesn’t speak Tamil and understands very little of it and also someone who started watching Tamil movies because of her husband who is from Chennai, I really liked Iruvar. It was perhaps one of the first Tamil movies I watched (much later in the 2000s) not for any star appeal but by word of mouth. Its a solid, well made movie with a great script. I liked it much more than many other MR hits. Obviously I was not looking for a biopic or a near accurate depiction of the Dravidian movement. (And how wonderful was Prakash Raj! I wish someone would write a post on some of the best performances of Prakash Raj.)
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We get veto
January 17, 2022
@BR, I feel like we should’ve gotten a vote before you decided to end written reviews. Naanum edo oru phasenu paata, oru reviewvum kaanum. We will put kaa and not watch anymore po. To add insult to injury, you’ve stopped responding to our blog whining.
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Yajiv
January 17, 2022
@Satya: Wow, I didn’t realise BR was providing such services 😀
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Yajiv
January 18, 2022
Is it unusual that I belong to both camps? I enjoy Mani’s early (more melodramatic) work like Anjali and Mouna Raagam, just as much as Iruvar and beyond. It’s only his very recent films that have disappointed me. Hopefully PS-1 can change that.
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Anuja Chandramouli
January 18, 2022
As long as those of us who like it don’t sink into needless despair and just keep buying, we are chipping away ever so slightly at the ‘decline’. And if we love it that much, we owe it to ourselves to do at least that.
Bless you Madan! Can’t wait to read your passion project!!
As for Iruvar, the music was all kinds of amazing but the movie itself is yet another overrated MR creation complete with a half – baked screenplay, a lot of pussyfooting around a dicey subject, and a laughably bad performance by the talentless wonder, Ash Rai making her debut in an entirely unnecessary double role while real talents like Mohanlal, Prakash Raj, Tabu were wasted in an insipid film that wasn’t remotely worthy of their potential.
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K
January 18, 2022
What surprises me the most about Iruvar is Prakash Raj’s performance.
In 1997 Mohanlal had close to 20 years of experience in acting and he was a 2 time national award winner. Hence Mohanlal giving an awesome performance is not surprising. But Prakash Raj was less than 3 years in the film industry and had done hardly 10 films. But he was given an equally important role and he was a perfect foil to the 20 year seasoned actor. Iruvar and Maniratnam are the major reasons for Prakash Raj becoming a complete actor.
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madhusudhan194
January 18, 2022
Trust Anuja to come up with the most polarizing response in a Mani Ratnam film related thread.
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vijay
January 18, 2022
At this rate, we may soon have “15 years of BR writing about Mani rathnam and Iruvar” in his blog …:-)
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vijay
January 18, 2022
“And speaking of Hey Ram (or Virumaandi), it’s a kind of socio-political epic that Mani Rathnam is incapable of making”
MANK, maybe Mani is not interested in making those kind of films? We need to give him the benefit of doubt. Iruvar was more like a highlight-reel of the character arcs the two characters went through. If somebody did’nt know who MGR/Karuna were they may have bene left totally cold by the movie. Personally, my problem was with the dual Ash character, with Ash lookalike resurfacing again later in the film, especially when none of this happened in real life. It did’nt add much to the film. It’s almost as if Mani could’nt get enough of Ash and gave us a hint of his latter day Ash obsession in her debut film itself.
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We get veto
January 18, 2022
@anuja I largely concur on Iruvar with you except I didn’t buy Prakashraj’s performance one bit. But why gotta do my girl Ash like that?
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MANK
January 18, 2022
I read somewhere that the film was originally titled Aanandan, after Mohanlal\MGR’s character, then after Karunanidhi and DMK came back to power (in 1996, i guess) when the film was still in production , the title was (or had to be) changed to Iruvar to give both equal weightage. Even the script had to be altered, and changes had to be made during the editing. I believe Kalpana’s death scene is like that more out of compulsion rather than by design- it feels so abrupt and sloppy that it must have been cooked up in the editing. I would really like to see a director’s cut of Iruvar, if all those stories of censorship\political pressure induced trimmings and changes are true. Mani could sell it to Netflix now.
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Voldemort
January 18, 2022
Madan : Yes, I agree that the end of book reading has been long predicted, but this time, it might be real. The need for instant gratification is reaching new highs everyday and sadly, no one has the patience for a 600 page book, (except if it’s non-fiction, I think). We will sadly not have another Rowling or a Chetan Bhagat. Chetan Bhagat’s popularity was at a time when his target audience, the youth did not have access to cheap internet, and even his recent books don’t sell that much, though that is also because he is considered a joke and reading him is “uncool” now. For someone to achieve the level of worldwide popularity that a Rowling for example did, they would have to be a YouTuber or even, heck an Instagram influencer. Book writing, in fiction at least, if not non-fiction, would sadly not make the cut anymore. It would not totally go away, yes, but it will definitely shrink in size.
And I wasn’t the only one buying even at that time, which being a weekday afternoon should have been a ‘slow’ time of the day. I say the same thing all the time in the context of music. As long as those of us who like it don’t sink into needless despair and just keep buying, we are chipping away ever so slightly at the ‘decline’. And if we love it that much, we owe it to ourselves to do at least that.*
Amen to that. And good luck for your book, really looking forward to it!
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vijay
January 18, 2022
MANK, but just to play the devil’s advocate here, maybe after somebody lobbed a bomb into his house after Bombay, Mani chickened out a bit and cut out his socio-political commentary? This, plus possble pressure from the K family who were in power during 1997. I have heard that we saw was avery edited version. Its amazing then that even this version has many die-hard fans.
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shaviswa
January 18, 2022
I agree with Yajiv
I like many of his earlier works like Mouna Ragam, Nayagan, Agni Natchathiram, Roja, Bombay. I kind of like Thalapathi (though not as much as the others in the previous list) and Thiruda Thiruda too.
Iruvar – I liked it in parts, but can’t say I enjoyed the film.
Dil Se – I detest.
Alaipayuthae – liked most parts of the film. The climax I felt was a bit convoluted and unconvincing.
I actually love Dumm Dumm Dumm (not his direction but produced and written by him)
Kannathil Muthamittaal, Aitha Ezhuthu – Detest category.
Guru – I did not like this film at all
Ravanan, Kadal – “you must be joking” category.
OKK – I actually liked it for the most parts. Dulquer and Nithya Menen were wonderful in this film.
Kaatru Veliyidai, Chekka Chivantha Vaanam – I detest category
Let me see what he has done with Ponniyin Selvan. Now this is a different film. I have probably read the original novel by Kalki more than a dozen times. I know the characters in and out and the dialogues too. I know every minute detail of the story. It is going to be tough to watch a watered down, compressed narrative of that story. But I am open to get surprised by how he handles this.
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sravishanker1401gmailcom
January 18, 2022
Voldemort and Madan : Astounding comments from the Iruvar of you (bad pun)! Really enjoyed reading them.
300 books are published daily (@AnujaChandramouli can correct me on this) which is why I think BR has done the right thing. Mario Puzo has echoed similar sentiments to Voldemort and Madan thorugh his character Ernest Vail in ‘The Last Don’.
Writing a book is an enterprise doomed from the beginning and one should embark on this for the sole purpose of achieving closure in one’s own mind. Having written it, it becomes more than your child and you cease to be objective about it.
Having said that, I’m waiting eagerly for Madan’s passion project.
I’m already thinking of a series of cartoon gags on the archetypal newbie author
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sravishanker1401gmailcom
January 18, 2022
Voldemort : Alas! You’re bang on target
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Aman Basha
January 18, 2022
I always thought the title Iruvar was reductive; I see it as a version of Thalapathi, where the Rajni character is MGR and the Mammootty character Is Karunanidhi. Although Prakash Raj has a greater role and great performance to match up to it, Anandam had the greater focus (both characters have mistresses, but Aishwarya gets greater emphasis while Tabu is wasted).
The complaint here is about how such prominent political figures and this important political movement are essentially de-politicized, but given the political pressure and censorship, I don’t think there was any other way. Even then, we see with Prakash Raj’s poetry, that he espouses revolutionary politics and Mohanlal a more populist politics (sort of Sanders vis-a-vis Trump). Even the Tabu and Aishwarya characters exist so as to display their hypocrisies, and the hypocrisy inherent to politics. Prakash Raj abandons the wife who stood by him during his struggle and Mohanlal abandons the woman he saved for pleasure/power/youth.
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Rahini David
January 18, 2022
Liking Mouna Raagam to Thalapathy and not the more recent works is the actual default. It is not an outlier position at all, IMO.
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K
January 18, 2022
The working title of Iruvar was Anandham
Even after its release Tabu referred to the film as Anandham and not Iruvar, when she was speaking about her tamil movies in one interview
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Rajesh Balasubramanian
January 18, 2022
@MANK – Actor (/Director) G.Marimuthu in an interview (@13:04) said how these people butchered Iruvar movie. I don’t think they will have negatives now. Just an e.g. The Roja movie quality in Amazon Prime is so bad
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lapogadnan
January 18, 2022
Shaviswa: First half of Kadal is Mani Ratnam’s best. The second half is easily his worst other than CCV (I have not watched Kaatru Veliyidai).
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Empty Musings
January 19, 2022
I have often wondered when I stopped enjoyed MR’s movies and after reading your post I can say with confidence that it stated with Iruvar. Even Bombay, which was emblematic of MR’s poor/simplistic understanding of politics, was relatable for the human story it told. From Iruvar onwards, even that relatability was lost. Short, uneven dialogues, atrocious monologues in chaste tamil that school skits have done better and the absolutely unconvincing human relationships were not experiments I looked forward to. Unfortunately MR is convinced that these experiments work and hasn’t stopped since. I shudder to think what he has in store in Ponniyan Selvan.
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brangan
January 19, 2022
Empty Musings: I shudder to think what he has in store in Ponniyan Selvan.
Why “shudder”? 🙂 Why not just ignore the film and watch something from a filmmaker more attuned to your tastes? I mean this very seriously. If you decide a writer or a filmmaker does not work for you, you should move on. Life is way too short to be spent angst-ing about creators who do nothing for you!
lapogadnan: Even in the second half, there are at least three major scenes I would count among his best. Unfortunately the semi-romantic track and the heroine keep getting in the way. For instance, as much as as I love ‘Moongil thottam’ as a song (and the lyrics, too), it was a complete waste of five-odd minutes on screen at that particular point in the film…
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MANK
January 19, 2022
Personally, my problem was with the dual Ash character, with Ash lookalike resurfacing again later in the film, especially when none of this happened in real life.
Wasn’t there rumors that Jayalalithaa looks exactly like MGR’s first wife?
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Ravi K
January 19, 2022
MANK: “I would really like to see a director’s cut of Iruvar, if all those stories of censorship\political pressure induced trimmings and changes are true. Mani could sell it to Netflix now.”
Given the dreadful state of Indian film preservation, I doubt the original elements are in good condition, if their location is even known. But at the very least it would be great if the script was published.
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vijay
January 19, 2022
Empty Musings, you can maybe then watch the “other” Ponniyin selvan, made as a web series with IR scoring music. Looks like it may even release before Mani’s version
https://www.newindianexpress.com/entertainment/tamil/2021/jan/14/a-ponniyin-selvan-web-series-with-ilaiyaraajas-music-2249809.html
Once again our makers all get inspired to work on the same idea around the same time..
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sravishanker1401gmailcom
January 19, 2022
@Anuja Chandramouli wields the pen like a scalpel! Here cometh a Dorothy Parker!
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Empty Musings
January 19, 2022
BR: I take your point. I don’t any more actively seek MR’s movies. It was just a commentary on how his movie making style has evolved to the point where it does justice to neither the ‘human’ part of the story nor the backdrop against which the movies are set.
I should have clarified that the ‘shudder’ part of my comment relates to the handling of Ponniyin Selvan specifically. If Iruvar is any indication, MR cannot do chaste tamil (that he is clearly uncomfortable in anything other than urban middle class tamil is a different matter). Combine that with our actors, who don’t think acting extends to mastery of language and diction and we have a disaster waiting to happen.
vijay: Thanks for the link. That looks interesting.
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therag
January 20, 2022
I feel MR bashing has almost become a meme on this blog. It is obviously not wrong to dislike his later films but I don’t think he gets enough credit for the risks he has taken in his films, although he gets plenty of brickbats for the risks he didn’t take.
I, for one, much prefer the humanist method or whatever you want to call it. In fact, much as I like films like Virumandi and Hey Ram, I feel KH always goes overboard with the violence in his films.
Dil Se – This film deserved plaudits simply for bringing up the North-East conflict and all the resulting ugliness not to mention that it hinted pretty early on that 50 years of independence may not have been all that fruitful for certain sections of people. People still don’t get the North-East angle and write it off as a problematic stalker film but the Ladakh portion of this film ranks among MR’s best for me.
Kannathil Muthammital – The SriLankan Civil War is a touchy topic even today. How many other (even remotely) mainstream filmmakers made a movie on the war? It has some amazing set-pieces, relationship moments and a very moving climax.
Raavanan – Was Pa.Ranjith really the first director to subvert the Ravana character, or look at the epic with a different lens? This movie is surprisingly well-liked as evidenced by the number of Youtube views for the movie. The Hindi version is admittedly subpar but Vikram really made the Tamil version work. I am positive Raavanan would have been a blockbuster and raved upon release if MR had shown the police brutality on screen rather than leave it to the audience to infer. I think BR in his review mentions how the lush cinematography and production design does not help the film. Looking back at the pretty heavy themes it dealt with, I actually think it was the right decision and pretty gutsy of Mani. Give any other filmmaker the script for Raavanan (including the good ones like Vetrimaaran) and it would have been an orgy of violence. MR has my respect and my money for not succumbing to that low-hanging fruit, instead making the audience work for it.
YMMV.
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Thupparivaalan
January 20, 2022
Even if MR does everything he can, Ponniyin Selvan is going to be very divisive. Fans of the books including my mom are already puzzled by the casting choices – arunmozhi varman and vandhiyadevan are supposed to be younger than Jayam Ravi and Karthi. And of course being an book adaptation MR has to pick and choose which will inevitably leave lot of fans on original disappointed.
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Anand Raghavan
January 20, 2022
Is it because Mani Ratnam’s approach of not giving away much to audience and expect them to decipher, there is a perception of disconnect with them?
This complaint was not there in his earlier films?
One more observation is that first half in many of his movies are much better than 2nd half.
The Simran-Madhavan flashback and the climax in KM was expertly done by him
Reg. dialogues in PS, read somewhere, it would not be in Senthamizh but at a level where everyone can understand, not sure what is that though…
Curious to know what parts of story finds place in adaptation and what parts are dropped..
And being a pan Indian movie, it will be a challenge to take names like Pazhuvettarayar, Azhwarkadiyan, Kadambur Sambuvarayar etc to North Indians. But market business needs a pan India movie for huge budget.
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Thulasidasan Jeewaratinam
January 20, 2022
I concur, the whole MR bashing has become so synonymous with analysis that one could simply find how shallow the entire bashing is if one spends more than 5 minutes combing through the whole analysis provided by the ones bashing. I don’t think antagonizing anyone helps in understanding why MR’s entire filmography, including and especially post-Iruvar, receives so much flak.
I think BR himself sums it up better than I do. In his writing on Kaatru Veliyidai, BR explains how MR does less for more in terms of writing up VC’s characters during his introduction, only for the person seated behind to BR to sum the whole introduction as “mirror shot”.
One could only gasp. On the one hand, film enthusiasts, reviewers, and even filmmakers are engrossed in their own conception of how films should be, how art should be, and that anything that sits beyond that range is an outlier. We then complain that MR has changed. Have they at all? People get so worked up with how lightly MR touches about Dravidian politics, Sri Lanka ethnic Tamil genocides, Kargil War, the Bombay riots and so and so forth. But is that what really Mani Ratnam set out to make? Yes, yes, we can’t sense what the author is trying to tell us, I get that, I really do, what after 10, 20 years of witnessing a filmmaker, are we still lost? Is Kannathil Muthamittal about the ethnic Tamil genocide and the resulting Civil War, or is it about a child’s query about her own origins and her quest to find her true mother, as her mother increasingly becomes frustrated at the lack of control over her?
There’s a beautiful parallel here. Anyone following Mani Ratnam’s oeuvre would immediately recognize how different Kannathil’s Amutha’s introduction scene here is. In fact, her voice-overs throughout the entire film and the her selfishness is epitomized by those same VOs. Everything she remarks of her surroundings are related to her. From the way she introduces her parents and relatives, right up the the flight scene midway in the film, where she speaks of her first ride on the plane – everything is through and through about her, UNTIL of course, she arrives in Sri Lanka. We stopped hearing much from her VOs (completely gone if I’m correct), as her control over herself spirals out of control. The suicide bombing, the overhearing of her brother complaining about her, the child soldiers – everything reinforces her to think if all her life, the paradise in Chennai was only a dream. Was she privileged in that sense? Has my life always been privileged, she confronts herself? Afterall, she wanted to be here.
As the situation around her confronts her, Amutha turns inwards and becomes more erratic. She marginalizes and fights with her mother a lot, she runs away from her and turns away from her, she puts up more fights, and this peaks during the military’s confrontation with the rebels in the park. Amutha, increasingly becoming hostile as the situation turns against her, begins to protest and vows to not leave the park as the fighting escalates. This results in her mother getting shot. Mother! Oh yes. Pay attention to her arc as well. Indira’s first real sign of frustration seeps through when Amutha goes missing the first time. Notice the conversation in the car, at what Indira hints when she says, “She feels like crying, and it’s her problem” and that Thiru should just focus on driving the car. Why does she feel this separation from her husband? Wasn’t it their child that just went missing, and if anything Thiru should feel the same too right? Then why does Indira feel this resentment? That’s because, unlike Amutha, who only began feeling marginalization as the story progresses, Indira was always marginalized. Bear with me here. What was she marginalized by? By Thiru’s idealism. As simple as that. That’s why her anger is with him, and not the child at first.
Yes, you can construe it as a simple dialogue that any wife phrases at a husband when angry, but this is where you need to work hard to digress it. Indira was always the casualty of Thiru’s idealism. She loves his for his idealism, although it wears her out, though she never spells it out. When she banters with her while cycling during their flashback, he cuts her short. When she yearns for him to intercede during her marriage arrangements with a fellow prospect, Thiru’s idealism prevents him from doing so, causing her to proceed with it. When Thiru admits his love, notice how he constructs it parallel as to Amutha needing a mother, eventually earning her frustration at how his idealism inches her away from the true desire in his heart. When they marry and have a family, Thiru hosts meetings with his wards in the house. Anyone familiar with that situation knows how frustrating it can be for the wives to see their husband occupied by those under his tutelage rather than with her.
If it hadn’t been for Thiru’s idealism, Indira would have never agreed to let Amutha know the truth about her birth. She complains later if she didn’t raise Amutha right, but what is Indira’s parenting compared to Thiru’s idealism. So, you can see this as an anger over the truth reveal itself. Like Indira’s father, we sigh at what urgency Thiru could feel at letting his child know that she isn’t his. Thiru’s idealism not only defines him, but wears us out, and one could also imagine how worn out Indira might have been although she defends him against her own father. NOTICE right away when they arrive at the station, how MR constructs the shot. A shaky over-the-shoulder (we’re following her!) as Indira scrambles through the station, before a new CLOSE reveals Indira’s face, staring at a direction. Reverse on a long FULL on Amutha, clinging to a pillar, slow to let it go. They exchange glances. PAY ATTENTION to how Amutha doesn’t shift, she stands her ground and doesn’t move yet. More glances. The station staffs wears her bag onto her arms. And then, MR RACKS FOCUS (does anyone even know how beautiful this rack focus is) to Thiru, who exchange glances, and the smiles. Amutha runs to him, as he urges her to come.
Thiru’s idealism may have worn out Indira, but not Amutha apparently. This is a groundbreaking revelation in their mother-daughter relationship, and in fact, you can trace their conflict right from here. It was Thiru who insisted and told their daughter the truth (Indira sat out of this), yet the price was Indira’s to pay. The bedroom scene after this conceals another set of frustrations Indira feels. Also, side note, anyone even paying attention to the single MASTER shot MR employs to tell the whole story, first by marginalizing Indira, and then as Indira routes around the bed and sits in the front, a small RACK FOCUS to centre Indira, as the daughter leaves her father’s clutches and clings to the mom in an act of asking forgiveness. All in one shot. As my cultured friends would say, “Whattabeauty”. This is a strategy Indira’s employed all her life. Any fight, she puts up a front, and her daughter reconciles by coming to her. Very soon, she’s gonna realise this won’t work. When Amutha runs away the second time, as she stands with Thiru and Indira on a blank bank of sands on the coast that separates India and Sri Lanka, as Thiru promises Amutha that he’ll help her find her mother, notice the triangular composition there, with Indira in the centre, because her reaction is the most important.
She looks down, as Thiru speaks to Amutha. Indira sighs when Amutha asks where her “mother” is. Indira goes even further, possibly to extinguish this ember of doubt completely, and suggests that the mother Amutha is searching might be dead by now, prompting a hand on Indira’s shoulders by Thiru. Thiru intercedes, vows to bring Amutha to see her mother, when Indira is sitting just in the centre. Notice Simran’s performance. She doesn’t say a word to protest (knowing full well that protesting against Thiru is pointless), but see her face, contorting between a mix of anxiety, worry and disappointment. Thiru’s vow is an acknowledgement that there’s a real mother besides Indira shocks and surprises Indira to such extent.
Thiru’s idealism again triumphs over Indira’s concerns and worries. When they travel in the car in Sri Lanka, Indira begins to space away from her mother. She introduces her mother as the not real one, and when travelling in the car, she moves away from the back seat to the clutches of her father in the front seat. Similarly, when Indira goes missing and chats with the suicide bomber, Thiru is missing again from the picture, because of his idealism and career choice. As a wife, Indira can’t do much, but search for herself. In fact, she doesn’t even make this an issue (the fact that she has to do and bare things alone), and wades through and searches on her own. She’s may come to face the fact that her husband’s idealism is preventing him from ever being her’s completely, but her resentment stays.
Post-explosion, Indira rarely stays away from the clutches of her father. A fight at Dr. Herold’s house confirms this growing antagonism, and Indira herself words the growing gap between her daughter and her during their bus journey. Part of the gap is a result of Indira as well. As her daughter spirals out of control, her life spirals too. As the possibility of another mother looms in the horizon, Indira grows defensive. As Thiru confirms this and brings her to Sri Lanka to find her mother, Indira increasingly grows controlling. She can’t bare to let go of her daughter. All of this peaks again, during the military confrontation scene in the park. Knowing full well of the danger ahead, Indira cautions the whole team, and the resulting chaos results in a bullet wound for Indira. What was merely a mental pain now climaxes into a physical pain. A full circle. Yet, at the end, as Indira realizes holding onto her daughter as she spirals away from her clutches isn’t helping anyone, she decides to “let go”. She urges Dr. Herold to drive to the park again, and when both parties eventually meet and sit on the bench, she doesn’t cling onto her daughter, but instead urges Amutha to inch closer towards her real mother instead.
How ironic it is that when Indira tries her hardest to hold Amutha, Amutha spirals away, but when she gives in and lets fate decide, Amutha comes back to her naturally. I haven’t read a single piece on Kannathil that even mentions this arc, let alone discuss the shot-making and the artistic choices MR chooses to make throughout the film.
I could talk and write similarly about Kaatru Veliyidai too, which itself is one of the pinnacles of Mani Ratnam when it comes to shot-taking, blocking, scene choreography and pacing. I’ve yet to see any articles pointing out how the postures of the lead and the blocking of their movements and the camera composition is similar when Leela utters her love for the first time and during the time Leela has to kick out VC from their family dinner. In fact, the dialogue is even the same. In the first, Leela inches towards VC as he dons a shirt behind the mirror of the wardrobe. As she utters her love, he pretends to not hear it, just to coax it out of her again, and again, until they both laugh and love. Although this is a happy moment, a line, a surface, the wardrobe door separates them.
This isn’t just MR overdosing on his mirror shots. This is MR saying that even in the happiest of moments like this, there’s something between them, and VC has to lean forward, away from this physical separation, to accept her love. Flash forward to the fatal family dinner scene, as Leela pulls VC out, he questions if she’s asking him to “get out” and urges her to repeat it again in front of him. Look at that blocking, and notice how they’re essentially the same, except there’s now nothing between them, but it’s an unhappy moment, and he’s pretending to not hear her again just to coax the truth from her again. How else could one present a relationship always destined to doom any more beautiful than this, I don’t know.
This film is full of breathtaking artistic decision making, and I can’t fathom how people are dismissing this film based on the fact that VC is misogynistic. Of course he is. Even Aditi, in an interview, says how MR wrote and saw him that way. He’s an asshole, who has to earn his forgiveness, and see for himself how undeserving he is of her love, and how he has to, now physically, “cross seven seas and seven mountains”, a pledge that seemed easy during a ballroom dance party, not but not so easy after being a POW and hurtling through a desert.
I honestly wonder sometimes. As viewers and consumers of art, have we gone lazy? Have we decided to settle for less and accept it? Films aren’t entertainment, and will never be. Films must undertake the task to do more, to make the viewers crave for more, see more, yearn for more. This appetite can be encouraged and fed through real artistic choices throughout the film, through choreography, cinematography, writing, direction, acting, music. Somehow, we’ve come to settle for less. Anything we don’t understand, we think it’s bad.
Anything that requires us to think, we think it’s bad. If Last Year at Marienbad came out today, I wonder if we would still sit down, let the film pour over us, and speak to no one for days until we realise the impact the film had over us. Today’s generation, with information available at the breadth of a second, has forgotten the ability to space out and think. To stop searching and speaking, and to think truly, for once. We consume everything and everything, and leave nothing to interpretation. We analyse and “decode” (as if films are all puzzles to solve and obtain one objective answer from). We jump too quick to meet the films’ makers and ask what they think. Were we right to think of their particular choice of shot during this particular scene?
Yes, I’m also criticizing BR’s own Deep Focus program, which strikes me as too early to sit down and discuss anything. If anything, we shouldn’t know what they thought about at all. But that’s not how commercialism works. Just like how video reviews earn higher viewership than writing, inviting directors to talk and discuss their films to bare bones like dissecting a corpse also rakes high viewership. This isn’t a criticism of anyone in particular. This is the state of things, status quo.
Next time, after watching a film, don’t live-tweet. Don’t think either. Don’t speak. Don’t listen to anyone speak. Let it wash over you. I assure you that your words will remain in your mouths when you come back to it three days later. Let it sit for a while. Think about how you felt. What shot struck you right. What shot made you feel differently. Did something irritate you? Why? Think? What made you feel what you felt? Was it the choice? Was it the music? Was it the particular angle the camera was in? Or were you just plain sick and having hot fever during the viewing?
And then, if you need, watch the film again. Forget what people are saying. The rest is noise. When I watched Pulp Fiction, I didn’t find anything about it. Three days later, I wanted to rewatch some scenes that made me feel exhilarated. One month later, and for the period of three months after that, Pulp Fiction was all I ever spoke to anyone, even to those that never watch movies ardently. When I first watched Personal Shopper, I felt the incredible urge to watch and read writings and videos that broke down, analysed and critiqued the film to understand it better. I successfully resisted the urge.
I couldn’t understand what the whole film was about, a bundle of themes emerged in my mind when I watched, but it wasn’t coherent thoughts. And the end, I couldn’t sum up anything, but I didn’t wanna say anything yet. Three four days later, while driving, I finally smiled at having understood what connected all the parts together. I’m once again resisting the urge to spell it out for anyone. My interpretation doesn’t have to be yours, and vice versa. What the film leaves you thinking it entirely up to you. Sometime, you will walk out not understanding the film at all. When I watched Inherent Vice, it was only after three times later did I knew I wasn’t supposed to understand anything at all. Be okay if you don’t understand somethings. These are films.
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brangan
January 20, 2022
Thulasidasan Jeewaratinam: I am glad someone spoke about two shots of MR that are masterpieces of emotional cinematography.
The rack focus in KANNATHIL (without a word of dialogue, Madhavan steps in between mother and daughter and the “enphasis” changes). How easy it would have been to put lines into this sequence and “explain” it to the audience more easily.
And two, the dinner-table single shot in KV, which is a masterpiece of choteography and one of Ravi Varman’s greatest achievements. Yet, notice how MR breaks this single shot when he wants to show a close-up. Anyone else would have hated to cut at that point, but MR and Sreekar Prasad decide that we need their faces at that point and that is more important than the technical achievement.
I have issues with KV’s second half, but this, I just love 🙂
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brangan
January 20, 2022
Thulasidasan Jeewaratinam: On one level, I agree with you. And some filmmakers do say no, they don’t want to “explain” – let the viewer get whatever they want.
But this show is just my hope that at least the few people interested in cinema learn how things are done. I’m guessing it is watched mostly by students and the film community, unless it’s a MASTER or something.
It’s just our way of emphasising that cinema is not just something you watch while munching popcorn — that even the “commercial films” have very serious artistic decisions made in them.
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vijay
January 20, 2022
while I can understand why Iruvar did’nt work much at the BO, the fact that both Kannathil muthamittal and the entertaining Ayudha yezhuthu did’nt do much better is always puzzling. Nothing abstract about these films like Dil se. Some folks comlplained that ayudha ehuzhtu kept coming back to the same shooting scene on bridge missing the point that it was sort of a bridge between the 3 main characters in the film and a different or novel narrative structure to show events that partly happened in parallel but from different perspectives, and confluencing at the same point, acting as atake-off for the rest of the film. Kamal’s Virumandi also had the same comments unfortunately(they are showing the same scenes again and again blah ..blah but atleast it fared better because of the milieu it was set in.
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krishikari
January 20, 2022
@thulasidasan That was an fantastic comment/essay. Thannthil remains one of my favourite films of all time purely because the way it started with the lush jungle river scene was so beautiful. I did feel confused and later annoyed by it’s lack of political stance afterwards however.
Next time, after watching a film, don’t live-tweet. Don’t think either.
Yes! I like this sentiment but at some point if a film is important to you you just have to talk about it and discussing it with others who are interested can be quite rewarding whether you agree or not.
I would side with those who say MR’s film are politically shallow or even conservative and right wing (I’ve read that and can’t disagree) I can see the point about them being humanist and not about politics at all, but then why does he choose political backgrounds so often?
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vijay
January 20, 2022
we need “deep focus” for films like No country for Old men or Mullholland drive.Are there youtube channels/programes for Hollywood films? I am not a fan of movies that leaves things very open-ended in your head leaving room for all sort of possible interpretations or deals with too many supposed themes that run in parallel.(eg. is No country about the new order taking over? or is it about how chance or fate dictates everything in life? or is it about how evil the world could turn out to be? or..and so on) Once you get the central theme the individual components, the scenes, the choices made therein, it should all come together in your head leaving you with a feeling of post-orgasmic contentment. Else the experience feels incomplete. Kind of like watching an India-Pak nail-biting ODI back in the 80s only to have the darn power cut off in the last 2 overs.
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vijay
January 20, 2022
Thulasi, the movie first has to work at the surface level before you go digging into the subtext or the technical aspects, right? If the scene doesnt engage you at all for whatever reason, why would anyone care whether its a rack focus or a soft focus that’s used? Technical details come later. If I did’nt like a tune for whatever reason, the fact that I come to know later that the song is set in a very rare raga,is not going to change my opinion of the song. Its just a technical detail that I may note and file away. Something to discuss about in movie/music geek forums maybe or for my trivia compilation. Liking/dislike a scene or a film has lot of factors going into it, and working at a sub-conscious/instinctual level that it is often difficult to say, this was there and thats why i liked thisscene..or this technical aspect was missing and thats why I did’nt like that scene and so on..
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brangan
January 20, 2022
vijay: the movie first has to work at the surface level before you go digging into the subtext or the technical aspects,
I would disagree about subtext (for me, that cannot be separated from the text), but I agree about the technical aspects.
But the scene that Thulasidasan refers to is saying what it has to say using the language of cinema and not the language of words. So in this case, the technical aspect is integral to how the scene plays out.
krishikari: did feel confused and later annoyed by it’s lack of political stance afterwards however.
I am genuinely interested in what “political stance” is needed in a film about a girl looking for her birth mother. What should Mani Ratnam be taking a stance on?
Madhavan and Prakash Raj have a frustrated conversation about the futility of war. Plus, the first woman they identify as the mother says she has never left this village because her children are buried there.
How much MORE of a political stance do you need in a domestic drama about a child who insists on meeting her birth mother?
This is a genuine question.
Even in IRUVAR, there is the backdrop about the Dravidian movement — but ONLY as much as it concerns either Prakash Raj or Mohanlal. Because the story is about their RELATIONSHIP.
How does this make it “shallow”?
Now, say, if Amudha questioned her half Indian/ half Sri Lankan identity as an adult (like in PARIYERUM PERUMAL) and had Mani Ratnam failed to address the war or take a stance, then I totally get your complaint.
But how can you expect a moviemaker to make the movie YOU want? For reasons that appealed to him, Mani made KANNATHIL. If it does not work for you, fine — it doesn’t.
But how can you demand a “stance” in films that have politics only in their backdrops?
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vijay
January 20, 2022
“I would disagree about subtext (for me, that cannot be separated from the text), ”
But did’nt you like Madras, despite accusations of not getting the Dalit subtext? And I believe in Hollywood/european films there could be many more examples when you first started watching them. What I mean(and maybe subtext may not be the right technical term) is the layers hidden beneath which are not obvious the first time around to a few in the audience. But that doesnt prevent them from getting the film and enjoying(or disliking ) it at another level.
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vijay
January 20, 2022
I was responding to Thulasi’s comment that how could people bash something like KM when it had such use of rack focus etc. etc. There are many factors at play while watching a film, how you process the acting, how you think the dialogues was(in Mani’s earlier films this was a sore point sometimes), your inherent like/dislike for the actors involved etc. etc. So its difficult to argue that just because a few scenes had a particular technical aspect embedded in them, everybody should be liking them. Well somebody may not be liking it precisely for the same reason..it may have across as gimmicky to them. I liked that scene personally, but am just saying..
In Iruvar, the camera keeps doing a 360, hovering around the chief characters during Prakashraj’s speech after Anna’s demise with a 5/8 rhythm pattern thrown in by ARR, cutting off the speech. Some may think that added to the scene’s dramatic appeal and was a different way to portray an usual speech scene, while a few others may find it a bit gimmicky and would have preferred to hear out Mohanlal/Prakash for a few more lines.
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krishikari
January 20, 2022
I am genuinely interested in what “political stance” is needed in a film about a girl looking for her birth mother. What should Mani Ratnam be taking a stance on?
But how can you demand a “stance” in films that have politics only in their backdrops?
I don’t want to say what he should say, only that he should say something! about the justice or injustice or the helplessness of the people or their bad choices or noble choices or something. What is the premise? neutrality is very offputting for ME.
The tamil tigers are fighting for a cause, this mother has left her child for a cause. So is the cause, the reason they are fighting, merely a backdrop to make the film look important? What I’m saying is that for me personally the political backdrops in some Mani Ratnam films feels like scenery. He could just put a green screen and project any war, and the story would be the same. If the politics are irrelevant to him and the human drama of a child looking for her mother is what’s important then why choose the Sri Lankan Tamil war as the setting? there are are so many other non-political scenarios where he could have set the domestic drama of a child looking for her mother and it wouldn’t feel like something important is missing.
Yes, BR you are right it is my personal feeling that leaves me with a dissatified feeling when I see these films. I am not “demanding” a stance, I am not in any position to demand anything obviously. As an audience member his political wishy-washyness leaves me feeling uneasy with the films. It doesn’t work for me and i’m just saying why it doesn’t work for me… the political backdrops feel shallow because MR has shown no connection with them after the opening scenes.
It’s also possible that I haven’t understood it well or am misremembering it. I have these impressions from when I watched this film which was quite some years ago. Maybe due for a rewatch.
The only MR film that really worked for me 100% was Mouna Ragam. Revathy was just amazingly well directed and allowed to be a real person. No grand political backdrop needed.
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Madan
January 20, 2022
Comparing technicality in movies and music doesn’t work well IMO because the two mediums are so different. Both cinema and music may be subjective but cinema is less so because the actors are enacting some version of reality and speak in a language widely understood by some large linguistic group with the other technicians all working to mount a visual image that we are fully equipped to relate to. Music nominally has words but really speaks to us through its own language of melody, harmony and rhythm. And add to that thousands of nuances about the tone of the singers or musicians, the intensity or dynamics, so on and so forth and the scope for interpreting the same piece of music differently is immense (so that talking technicality can come across as seeking an objective crutch to justify one’s subjective opinion). When reactions themselves can be widely divergent, the objective nuts and bolts of music have little persuasive value in argumentation. I have heard Mandram Vandha described as sounding laid-back and chilled out. To be fair, the reaction came from a person who does not speak Tamil. Still, to say my mind was blown by that description is an understatement. And that’s just one example.
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Madan
January 20, 2022
I meant to say w. r. t cinema that the technical aspects are correlated to the quality of the final product. There are differences in audience reception because ultimately everyone brings their own subjective baggage which includes their cultural background, their exposure and interest in cinema and even their attention span or mood during the viewing itself. But the technicality is there for a reason. Whereas music is literally like a bunch of engineers putting together an engineering marvel for them to gush at and then hoping that at least one non engineer will agree with them. That’s why there’s so much more insular sounding nerd talk when it comes to music because it can become a bottomless rabbit hole once musicians start talking about music.
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Eswar
January 20, 2022
BR: KANNATHIL is the last film I would ask anyone to see for a depiction of SL’s civil war.
BR, I think it depends on what one wants to know about the SL civil war? The civil war is not only about the politics and the big names occupying the headlines. It is also about the effects of war on faceless people. Kannathil Muthamittal can be disappointing for anyone looking for the politics behind the war. But the movie depicts enough what the war would have meant for those hapless civilians.
Two other works which show the effects of war but not the war itself come to my mind.
Karthik Subbaraj’s short film – Katchipizhai
John Boyne’s book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
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praneshp
January 21, 2022
@vijay: maybe we should blackmail Thulasi into making a channel? That was the best bit of writing in this blog in almost two years.
Not sure if you’ve come across this now defunct channel before: https://www.youtube.com/c/everyframeapainting. The creators have a new series out on Netflix. Not exactly a deep dive on one movie, but they focus on creators/styles.
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shaviswa
January 21, 2022
I do not expect MR to get into the politics or the social aspects in his movies. They are effective backdrops and make the situations that the characters are in interesting and relatable.
However, in my opinion, the biggest issue in later day MR movies is they do not engage me as much as his earlier films did. Even a movie like Anjali, with it’s weak storyline, was more engaging than a Kannathil Muthamittal or Katru Veliyidai. These films were boring. You just don’t feel for the characters at all.
In Kannathil Muthamittal, Madhavan’s character came across as very phoney. His idealism seemed very forced and unrelatable. And the child’s character in that film was also pretty annoying. I felt more than a few times that all that Simran has to do is to give that child one tight slap to make her quiet. These films are difficult to sit through.
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shaviswa
January 21, 2022
And Raavanan……I cannot understand what MR was even thinking when he made that film. It was so so so horrible.
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Karthik
January 21, 2022
Thulasidhasan That was a fantastic breakdown of the scenes in Kannathil and KV.
As much as Iruvar is a sort of inflection point in MR’s filmography, it is in some ways also an extension of what he started in Roja, where subtext was more pronounced, backdrops drawn from real events, milieu of socio political significance. But what separates Iruvar from Roja/Bombay/Dil Se/Kannathil is that in these other movies, the smaller world of the characters and their conflicts was well established, and it provided a familiar vantage point to look out at the bigger world and its conflicts outside. But Iruvar didnt have that separation. The inner and outer worlds were so blended together that it isnt easy to look at these characters without the backdrop. Add to that, the “fly on the wall” style of looking into a reimagined universe kept the film at a distance. But Mohanlal’s acting was a tour de force, without which all the snippets of staggering filmmaking would have hung in mid air.
As far as his post 2010 films, mainly the three failures Raavanan, Kadal and KV, I see that as being very different from the rest of his oeuvre. Those were films that tried to get deeper into difficult characters, its a discomforting zone that requires a fairly high threshold for writing and acting, and any gaps or shortcomings in those two can not be overcome by visual artistry. I loved the dinner scene in KV too, but in the scene that followed at the tarmac, even though it was beautifully shot (almost like a counter point to Nallai Allai), neither the lines nor Karthi’s acting worked for me. Add to that, we have to then mentally fill in the scenes we saw earlier of his character’s prison life, which is fine if all you want is a logical thread of crime-punishment-repentance, and not an emotional one. But the real tragedy is that the intensity that was built up in the dinner scene gets extinguished too quickly.
Rather than a post Iruvar, its really the post 2010 phase which I think of as a very different phase, where the films feel like a collection of great scenes rather than a wholly fulfilling experience.
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rsylviana
January 21, 2022
@Thulasidasan Jeewaratinam: Absolutely Love Love Love your post ! Especially of your decoding of Indira’s arc in Kannathil Muthamittal.. Only a person who loves cinema and art more than life itself can even start to write out such a nuanced take like yours.
I’m not sure, how you may take this but can you do a similar decoding of Aditi’s arc in Kaatru Veliyidai too? Especially what culminates in her professing her love for VC at THAT moment. I’d kill to know what Leela was thinking when she decides to confess her love AND make love to VC right after he has taken up his assholery to a Level 100. Believe me, I have tried watching the movie a couple of times more for my liking, for various reasons, and have ardently read every other post/article that has taken Leela’s side but I’m still at sea when it comes to that scene.
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Thulasidasan Jeewaratinam
January 21, 2022
Not just them, but nearly every film by MR is a treasure trove, worth analyzing and questioning. Every single artistic choices he makes throughout his films, whether plotting/screenplay decisions, cinematographic decisions, editing decisions, casting, lighting – everything begets the kind of furious all-encompassing analysis that young filmmakers shower the films of David Fincher and Quentin Tarantino with. You can analyse his screenplay decisions in films that are often spelled out like Iruvar, or you can notice and study them in his simplest and subtle films like OK Kanmani, which traces the arc of a young lover-boy that confesses early on to never be able to be the kind of doting husband of an ill wife, only for him to profess again that he can also be the kind of doting husband of an ill wife next room to them, all the while after tricking us into thinking that Nithya Menon was the protagonist of the film. Notice how she doesn’t change, she carried scars, but she was also susceptible to changes. She was the first of them to get frustrated at D Salman’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge how painful their separation is.
Tracing along range of subtlety, Ravanan is on par with Pissasu about a very deep form of love that’s rarely even discussed between characters. For a starter, watching Ravanan must have been a confounding experience. There you are, watching forty or fifty minutes so in, as Vikram is being spun around and around on a small circular raft, as he poses A. Rai a dilemma, asking her to stay. You must have turned around, wondering – “Wait, there’s love already?” Yes, for us audiences who have been used to the usual dancing around trees during 60/70s, and the stalkery courting habits of our modern protagonists, we wonder – is there a void, that needs to be filled with courting, chatting, and love proposals? Afterall, Siddharth and Trisha had two dating sessions in Aayutha Ezhuthu before their first kiss.
But, that’s where you need to dig deeper. The love was already there, from the moment Rai leapt off the cliff. You can see it tremble and struggle in Vikram’s eyes as he saves her, and regains his breath when she survives. Ten minutes ago, he wanted to shoot to kill her. Now, he’s happy that she’s alive. What happened? He tells Prabhu that he’s never met a woman like that, one that doesn’t feel fear in the face of death. Prabhu, aware having never seen his brother ‘shaken’ like that, refutes and hides behind his ignorance. What about the scene, where Vikram “MASTURBATES”, yes, you read it right. It’s almost a scene filled with strong Freudian currents without an phallic thrusts. Vikram stands alone in a cave-like setting, imagines her falling again, and again. What was first a serious expression grows into a smile, and later a cunning sly and wide smile, as Vikram, through his performances hints at the kinds of imaginations his delirious minds is making us. She ‘turned him on’ by jumping off a cliff. No woman has ever done that to him. His sister jumped, yes, but into a well. This is different.
So, he decides, to have his way with her is to tempt her into this game of offering her a chance and stake at escaping, only to see how she defies him. He knows he’ll win in the end, but the sheer pleasure at watching her try to match him move for move is well evident in Kattu Sirukki song. Later, when Vikram spins on the boat, as he asks her to stay, I noted how it’s probably only the third time that Mani Ratnam shows them having a conversation together, but their relationship is already deep, and well-bedded with dilemmas. To have her is to go against his principles and violate her. Yet, this “agni pazham” causes such a stir in him. When he realises his games don’t work anymore, if I’m correct, in their fourth meeting together, near the large sleeping statue, as Vikram overhears Rai’s plead to Gods to give her strength to distinguish her husband and Vikram. This is only the fourth time they’re together on the screen for the duration of the film, mind you, yet MR has already left us with so many tangles in their relationships. A further demonstration of how often Vikram shifts between the boundaries of a good man in the eyes of Rai is how MR frames their shots. Instead of following the usual 180 rule, MR actually crosses the line pretty often. Their matching eyelines across all the shots is the reason that prevents you from realizing it.
In CCV, MR crosses the 180 line as well, a lot, mind you. But here, I think it’s less of a tool of the story but more of a tool the master has grown comfortable with. Again, the whole 180 is just a guidance, so the extent to which people hold towards it religiously is quite telling. CCV is also full of ‘deep focus’ shots, the kind of shots where foreground, middle-ground, and back-ground is fully in focus. Whether you’re affected by this or not, the feat of using this technique seamlessly, while integrating that many characters in the frame at once, is a feat of itself. To note, watch the scene where all three sons visit their father, or during the uncovering of their mother’s bandage scene, or the scene where Jyothika forces herself into the car as Arwind Swami prepares to leave with the car only for Jayasutha to intervene. For 180 breaking, I can’t remember much as I’m writing this, but notice Vijay Sethupathi’s conversation with Simbhu after he frees them from the latter’s clutch.
If I’m correct, MR has sorta adopted this to be his default on staging conversations, and I think Ponniyin Selvan might have more. Alaipayuthey is rife with long-staged MASTERS that flows so smoothly through expert blocking, and so is Iruvar. A scene where Mohanlal goes to ask for a ministerial post to Prakash Raj is shot from top angle, with camera above Prakash Raj, slowly dollying or zooming in (I can’t remember), and the next following shots are all slowly creeping in, either zoom or dolly. I know it caught my interest so much that, although it has been years since I saw the film again, that shot stays in my mind. So much movement with just two people, sitting on the chair. Just like how Ravi K Chandran said, during the chat with BR, where he speaks of how much MR just accomplishes in the climax of Kannathil Muthamittal using just two benches.
How many filmmakers are still adept to block scenes like that? I know Vetrimaran and Mysskin can, but their long takes are easily noticeable. Super Deluxe’s two long MASTERS is a classic example that long takes aren’t just about fashionably following through a character as he walks through the environment. The way the worn down DOCTOR came to be in different positions and different places in the halls everytime Ramya struts up the hallway spells out expert blocking.
But Super Deluxe is also a film rich in many things. When the film came out, many articles and videos propped up, explaining, “decoding”, and analyzing the ethics of the story, the sharpness of the story, the wow factors, the casting and among many attributes, the cinematography as well (“saturated” was the only word going, by the way). After a long time, I recently caught up with the film again, and two moments made me think very deeply for long. One was after the cloning process, one of the friends remarked which Gaaji is going to belong to who. A decision has to be made. What follows is the simplest economy of shot building.
1) THE ALIEN WONDERS, GLANCING, BREATHING DEEPLY AS SHE REACHES FOR HER POCKET.
2) CLOSE ON HER FINGER, SHOWING A COIN.
3) COIN FLIPPING IN THE AIR.
4) LONG STATIC SHOT, OF BOTH GAAJI ALREADY HUGGING.
The first shot was about movement, and the second was also showing a movement, and the third was also a movement, but the fourth was a long static pause. This is rhythm. This sort of barebones understanding of craft is what lacks in our pool, both as viewers and makers. This is what makes this 10 second shot so enticing. This ‘feeling’, this ‘mood’. When the filmmaker is out to make a film and edits his film, he may want to convey a mood, but he can’t just whisper to his editor to say, “Give me a mood”. He has to know what to say, where to cut, why cut here and not there, and in the end, for you to feel the mood. This sorta pause came visible to me only after I had watched about four Kiyoshi Kurosawa films, notably Pulse and Cure, both which is rife with these kind of pauses. Movement, movement, and then pause. This is rhythm. We can also get rhythm when we inverse this in editing. Pause, pause, movement. Pay attention to scene where once the TV falls on the head of a lead character, after a certain moment, we have THREE SHOTS.
We have a STATIC SHOT, observing Samantha approaching the dead officer on the ground, SLOWLY. The key here is SLOW. VERY SLOW. She inches towards him, VERY SLOWLY.
NEXT SHOT, Faahadh Fasil, while chained to the car, SLOWLY moves his head, VERY SLOWLY, watching her. NEXT SHOT, Samantha SLOWLY SLOWLY inches towards the officer on the ground, her hands extending, and just as she getting very close –
CUT TO A LOUD SOUND, SOUND OF THE HANDCUFFS COMING OFF. VERY FAST. In fact, NOTICE HOW FAST FAAHADH LOOSENS THE CUFFS OF HIS HANDS AND DASHES AWAY and TOWARDS THE OFFICER.
PAUSE. PAUSE. PAUSE. MOVEMENT. This is rhythm. David Lean does something like this too.
How often as we studying this as we watch films these days? The kind of shallow contempt and consensus of our critical discussions about films is largely disappointing. We labor over whom to like and whom to not. We now “LIKE” a filmmaker, and otherwise. Now, the film has to “WORK ON SURFACE LEVEL” and we must “LIKE THE FILM, OR THE SCENE” for us to engage with the technicalities in the background.
I wish to address this as adequately as I can, but Satyajit Ray has already answered this way better than I can, so I’ll just quote him. In his essay, Ray writes of Godard (everyone’s favourite director to bash about)
“‘I DON’T LIKE Godard’ is a statement one frequently hears at film festivals. Now, I don’t like Godard too. But then, ‘like’ is a word I seldom use to describe my feeling about truly modern artists. Do we really like Pablo Picasso, or Claude-Michel Schönberg, or Eugène Ionesco, or Alain Robbe-Grillet? We are variously provoked and stimulated by them, and our appreciation of them is wholly on an intellectual level. Liking suggests an easy involvement of the senses, a spontaneous ‘taking to’, which I doubt if the modern artist even claims from his public.
Godard has been both dismissed summarily, and praised to the skies, and the same films have provoked opposite reactions. This is inevitable when a director consistently demolishes sacred conventions, while at the same time packing his films with obviously striking things.
Likewise, Godard has scenes in his films which begin to suggest a human involvement. But they are inevitably cut short or developed with deliberate illogicality, as otherwise they would be ‘conventional’ and, therefore, out of key with the rest. In more than one Godard film, key characters have been killed off by gunmen at the end, and there have been no logical reason for such obliteration.
Now, to a mind attuned to the conventional unfolding of plot and character, such things may well seem upsetting. But one can never blame Godard for thwarting expectations, for he is careful to establish his credo from the very opening shots. In Une Femme Est Une Femme, there is a prologue in which some of the main sources of the film’s style are actually named in screen-filling letters. Vivre Sa Vie states clearly in the credits that it is ‘A Study in Twelve Scenes’ and Masculin Feminin calls itself a film in fourteen fragments.
The trouble, really, is not with Godard, but with his critics—or, at least, a good many of them – who are constantly trying to fit a square peg into a round whole. With any other art, I would have said with confidence that Godard would win in the end. But in the ruthless and unserious world of commercial cinema that he has to operate, I have my doubts.”
Ref: https://www.cupblog.org/2013/03/12/satyajit-ray-on-jean-luc-godard/
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brangan
January 21, 2022
krishikari: I don’t want to say what he should say, only that he should say something! about the justice or injustice or the helplessness of the people or their bad choices or noble choices or something. What is the premise? neutrality is very offputting for ME.
But where is he being neutral? He is clearly on the side of the Tamils. He shows how the Sri Lankan army invades a village and displaces all the Tamils there. (your point about “helplessness of people”) He shows Madhavan talking about the futility of war. (Your point about “justice or injustice”.) He shows the birth mother choosing to stay back and fight the Tamil cause. (Your point about “noble choice”) He shows The Sri Lankan army attacking Tamil fighters in the park scene. He gives us the scene where Keerthana runs into Tamil girls her own age, holding weapons — hinting that this might have been her life had she been born there.
And best of all, he has Simran question Madhavan about the political implications of his writing a story about Amudha. “Why don’t you do something about her? Or is she just story fodder for you?” And this is what sets them on the entire journey.
Look, I don’t want you to like this film or anything 🙂 Hate it all you want. But I just don’t see this accusation of not taking a stance. And I definitely don’t see this as just “scenery”.
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madhusudhan194
January 21, 2022
@Krishkiari: “I don’t want to say what he should say, only that he should say something! about the justice or injustice or the helplessness of the people or their bad choices or noble choices or something. What is the premise? neutrality is very offputting for ME.”
There is a line in the film that says there is no winner or loser in a war. It is just a prolonged period of suffering (neenda naal cancer) for both sides involved. There is only death and destruction. Children lose their innocence and turn into militants. There’s years of trauma that can never be served any justice. That is unpardonable regardless of which side you belong to. THAT is the film’s / Mani Ratnam’s politics. I don’t think this is neutrality. This is Mani Ratnam telling both sides to go fuck themselves and their ideologies and let the future generations live and grow in peace. That IS a political stance. Whether you find it agreeable / fashionable is a different thing. Whether Roja or Bombay or Dil Se or KM or even Kadal, this stance comes across loud and clear. This is what BR refers to as Humanism.
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Madan
January 21, 2022
“What I’m saying is that for me personally the political backdrops in some Mani Ratnam films feels like scenery. He could just put a green screen and project any war, and the story would be the same. ” – Well, that used to be an accepted technique of filmmaking/storywriting. Maybe it just doesn’t feel so palatable to you now in light of the current discourse but making a film about individuals against a backdrop of turmoil is a well worn technique and not something Mani alone practices. To some extent, VVC did the same with Shikara. Yes, he does show the brutality of the exodus and sides with the KPs but the story is essentially about ONE KP couple and their romance against the background of Kashmir, not an infotainment about Kashmir delivered through VVC’s prism. And I am going to disagree big time and say I prefer that approach. If I want to learn about Periyar movement, Bombay riots, Kashmir exodus etc etc I watch documentaries or read articles about these topics. I don’t look to films for THAT and it doesn’t matter to me what say Mani’s judgment on these topics is. Because I am not here to evaluate Mani the person but to enjoy the films he makes as a great filmmaker. These are just general examples by the way; Bombay was definitely a film where Mani ultimately took a side though, again, he framed the film as a Hindu-Muslim couple caught in the crosshairs in a fight they wanted no part of in spite of their own respective religions.
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Madan
January 21, 2022
Said another way, this is also why I prefer filmmakers like Fincher or Scorsese by far to Spielberg. If Fincher ever made a film based on Civil War, he will find a way to make it interesting. With Spielberg, you get a high production value schoolboy skit on civil war performed expertly by DDL, Tommy Lee Jones & co.
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krishikari
January 21, 2022
Look, I don’t want you to like this film or anything 🙂 Hate it all you want.
BR I don’t hate it. I actually loved most of it, in the theatre I was entranced by the images. Loved but not completely and unreservedly, but there are enough genuine moments to love.
I take your point, he does take a stance but somehow the war depictions felt very neutral and distant to me as if he didn’t have a stake in it. With some film makers I can feel their personal attachment to the story in the film and with others I feel there is a more generic connection, MR sets his films in Ladakh, Bombay, Sri Lanka, a variety of war “backdrops”. I feel he goes for a pan-indian scale which is fine and I suppose we do need films at that level.
@madhusudan True. He does say war is futile and people suffer in all his political films. I don’t think I can really express why i think such sentiments often sound shallow.
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Satya
January 21, 2022
For all that mattered at the end, Kadal felt like a fairy tale when I think of it. The reason why I use the word think here, is because of the central conflict: how a man associated with the bhava ‘sagara’ has to oscillate between the God and the Satan for existence. No matter how ‘beautiful’ that film looks, Kadal is the equivalent of Aishwarya Rai for me – I can’t take my eyes off her and yet cannot appreciate when she tries to ‘act’.
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Nappinai (@Nappinai2)
January 22, 2022
“Especially what culminates in her professing her love for VC at THAT moment” – I would love to hear what Thulasidasan and others have to say.
If you buy into the story that Leela can love VC before that fight, I think then you can see why she says what she says at THAT moment. In a sense, it’s the truth that’s staring back at her and It’s clearer for her to see after what transpired before. You can see this dynamic play out in real life as well between couples after a nasty fight.
What surprised me though is the calmness with which she says those words. There’s no fear for herself or anger on him. What follows this confession, shows the extent to which this guy is self centered. He not only asks her to repeat the words, because that’s how he’s wired but also there’s no self doubt or loathing on his part.
I loved KV’s characters and thought they were so coherently fleshed out that you could just sense how this was going to play out. I wanted that man to earn his redemption because there’s this Leela who loves him. Also, it’s one thing to love an asshole but what to do if you happen to be one and want to do better for the person you love? As a contrast, I really didn’t care for the Arjun Reddy character, to me he was just being a brat wasting his talent. I suspect this is because I only see his POV.
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Karthik
January 22, 2022
Asking what is or whether a movie should have a political stance is different from this point:
there are are so many other non-political scenarios where he could have set the domestic drama of a child looking for her mother and it wouldn’t feel like something important is missing.
This to me is more interesting, actually. Why set this story in this backdrop?
There’s two ways I look at this. The simple answer— one that also applies to all of MR’s “political” backdrop films— is that the conflicts in the characters’ story are amplified by the bigger conflicts in the backdrop. So there’s a grander emotional payoff.
The other answer is more subtextual. Kannathil Muthamittal is told from a child’s perspective, a child abandoned by her birth mother. That child symbolizes a populace that’s been abandoned by their motherland. When Madhavan takes note of her, his action is a purely self serving one, much like the politicians who “use” the Srilankan Tamil issue for personal political gain. So when Simran asks him that question, that to me is a very loaded question (are you just campaigning on the “Tamil” issue or are you actually going to do something about it). Even later, when he proposes, she asks him if he’s marrying her just so he could adopt Amudha, which is also a political question— Are you striking an alliance for your own personal agenda? Once they’re married, she is the new mother/motherland of the abandoned child/populace— quite unsurprisingly Simran’s father is a state servant, and one who’s responsible for admitting refugees. The parallel runs through the movie which ends on a bittersweet but hopeful note— today you cannot be with your war torn birth mother/motherland, but…
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krishikari
January 22, 2022
@karthik That’s a real analysis of question I had. Very insightful way of looking at it and now I changing my opinion of these settings being shallow backdrops!
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Macaulay Perapulla
January 22, 2022
“If I want to learn about Periyar movement, Bombay riots, Kashmir exodus etc etc I watch documentaries or read articles about these topics. I don’t look to films for THAT and it doesn’t matter to me what say Mani’s judgment on these topics is. ”
@Madan You are bringing up an important point that makes me further reflect on the times we live in. On 14th January 1997, when Iruvar was released, I was 12. During those times, to the best of my memory, filmmakers were not expected to take political stances. They were not forced to be shoehorned into suffocating “Us Vs Them” categories. It’s only when films went to extremes, there were sharp reactions (“Fire” comes to my mind, or the other allegorical movie that was made with one “Kaveri” girl being chased by one Tamil male and one Kannadiga male comes to my mind). There were a lot of political voices. No doubt about that. But, we were as a collective, not “politically conscious”. We weren’t in a state of eternal cultural war as we seem to be today, thanks to social media. And so we could be far more empathetic to humanistic creations like Iruvar, or Kannathil Muththamittal.
If either of the two were released today, each side of the political spectrum would have torn the movie to pieces, creating an unnecessary furore to earn brownie points in their respective sub-communities. And so today, when I see those old movies like Iruvar, I sense a nostalgia of a much lesser judgemental past, and naturally, today, I am looking back, wondering, if there were subtle political undercurrents, subtexts that I completely missed back then. That has been my experience when I attempted to watch the movie in recent times. And that’s where my original comment was coming from.
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Madan
January 22, 2022
“We weren’t in a state of eternal cultural war as we seem to be today, thanks to social media. And so we could be far more empathetic to humanistic creations like Iruvar, or Kannathil Muththamittal.” – Right and this also ties in to why I think it is futile for the filmmaker to wade into the argument unless that is in any case his goal and conviction OR it is something so clear cut that taking a stand about it is almost non controversial (Jai Bhim). What would Mani gain by taking a stand anyway and, say, side with either MGR or Karunanidhi? He will get torn apart for it by one of two opposing factions and any discussion on the merit of the film itself will be overshadowed by debating his opinion itself. I think of a filmmaker as inseparable from his device of choice – the camera. He is just observing the characters and scenery he has created and his quality comes through in how well he captures them at work.
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vijay
January 23, 2022
Karthik, the subtextual take is what YOU make out of it, or what you think it is. What I was telling BR is that the movie has to work at the text level first. Even if I did’nt draw parallels between Amutha and the Srilankan Tamils in my head while watching the film, it should still engage me. I should be convinced as to why a character like Madhavan would go to the trouble of adopting a child given his character sketch. is he empathetic enough? Have the scenes before that hinted us of this trait? and so on..
BTW, Mani’s format of love in the backdrop of war or riots goes as far back as Casablanca. Maybe even further back.
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vijay
January 23, 2022
BR, is it possible to reduce the time-lag between submitting a comment here and when it actually appears? I understand it may be a big ask given your schedule, but if it can be done it may improve the spontaneity of discussions a bit more. I lose interest by the time responses to my comment are posted here. But at the same time I realize we don’t need a twitter like quick-trigger syndrome here as well. So it’s a judgement call, a tricky one maybe.
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brangan
January 23, 2022
vijay: I can turn off moderation for a while and see. Anyway, it’s not like there are very abusive comments here (heated yes, abusive no). If things get out of hand, I will go back to the moderated version.
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ItsVerySimple
January 23, 2022
A man pleading his abductor to set him free, a man pleading a woman not to sacrifice their love for a larger “cause”, a child pleading her mother to return to her – these are personal stories. If these protagonists do the same to terrorists, militants and broadly, persons who wage war against the state, are they still personal stories? May be. But unfortunately they do not stop with that. They eventually have that Conversation. The conversation that usually happens in a dark corridor between the Personal Story and Political Story departments at the back of Madras Talkies office, between the protagonists whose insights into these conflicts are never established or cleanly wiped off from the narrative and the terrorists, where they question the terrorists’ motives, the outcomes and their intentions.
In Roja, the weakest film in the list, the protagonist could have been abducted by a group of alien monkeys or a gay boss who had a crush on him and the film wouldn’t suffer much, but the choice made makes room for a difficult conversation about the politics involved. It is easy and valid to not discuss the politics of it but Mani Ratnam never avoids it and that is issue. The protagonist will always ask the terrorist – why? In Dil Se, his best film in my opinion, Meghna atleast gets equal footing to despise the protagonist for his stupidity, his guts, his arrogance, his happiness, the privilege of distance he has from her life and trauma but she is still asked the same questions – do you want to do this to innocent people? (do you want to leave me and die is a personal question, this one is not). In Kannaththil Muththamittal, even though the protagonist is a kid, she is a Mani Ratnam kid, so she will ask her mother – when will the war will be over? In an embarrassing directorial decision, a cut to Shyama looking questioningly at all of us – the world, the UN may be, the Sri Lankan Government whose excesses are never mentioned (and probably not relevant to this film), her own terrorist organization whose motives and excesses are never mentioned (and probably not relevant to this film). Can the writer-father, whose works the terrorist cadre seem to recite by heart, answer his precocious kid convincingly? But then the same writer-father has a ridiculous conversation with his Sinhalese friend where he asks – why this war? and why is still going on? The friend replies -The West wants to keep selling weapons, that’s why. The writer never challenges this opinion, so we cannot vouch if he has any insight into this conflict.
Other than the terrorists who are put in these spots to explain the motives and provide solutions, does anyone in his films have any insight into these “backdrop” stories? Can these difficult questions be answered without wading into the politics? I don’t think so. Can Mani Ratnam have these awkward conversations in his films and still bail himself out saying he is only making a personal story? I don’t think so. Can one at least make these films without this bad Conversation? Yes, please.
Would we get a Mani Ratnam film in which a protagonist falls in love with, say, an army man who oversaw the excesses that Meghna describes to have happened in North East? We got Kaatru Veliyidai – the army man is toxic, sexist, narcissist but we can only read into this angle if we want to. Well, it is a film about a toxic army brat who was a Kargil POW and is also dedicated to… Kargil War heroes? Let’s not get into all of that now. (But I really liked the film except the ending). May be someday we will see that film but my guess is we wouldn’t.
Is this an attempt to humanize the terrorists? (may be and also – they seem to be really patient and generous with these protagonists anyway). Is it a coincidence that the protagonists always end up demanding these terrorists to explain? Are they stand-ins and speaking for the state? Do any of these protagonists have an arc of coming to terms with the lives of the people they are dealing with or even gain any insight into their lives other than servicing their own “personal” story? (Only Ragini in Raavanan does but that’s for later). Can we read into the “politics” of these recurring themes? I think we can.
Only Raavanan, which I think is his best film in the last ten years, fairs better – where Ragini continues the Mani Ratnam tradition of a clueless, upper-class/caste lead character questioning an outlaw (on behalf of her husband who handles law) and the revelation aids her personal story in some way and the tables are flipped. (I suspect this was rather incidental as this particular version or a variation of the myth might have interested him as we have seen all other versions done to death. If there was no “love story” between Ragini and Raavanan we do not know what kind of film we would have got). But we are not dealing with any bigger political story here as he carefully strips off any context to Raavanan’s story and keeps it pretty generic. I think it is still a very bold film and Trads and Rayta together will make sure to ban it if it is releases now.
Iruvar, too, spectacularly fails in this aspect. The idea was doomed from the beginning. In a state like TN where the political rivalry is binary and legendary, in a country where censorship was (and is) rigid, it was a bad idea to begin with. And he went to great lengths to get a lot of the detailing accurate and mirroring the real life characters – the situations, time periods, life trajectories, even the number of women involved – but not to give any real insight into their friendship or the how they won each other over in politics is a total cop-out. The “personal” aspects work very well in the sense that they are usual emotional beats done well and the rest of the history just goes on, on the side, like a brilliantly mounted visual spectacle just for the sake of it.
In short – there is a lot of merit in the criticism about the politics in his films, I think. He can have his plate of personal story and eat it with his choice of a political flash-point pickle but it definitely ruins the experience a bit if not it as much as it aids it.
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Aman Basha
January 23, 2022
Mani Ratnam, AR Rahman, Ilaiyaraja, drop any of these three words in a thread and you’ve lit up the mega essay writer in everyone. (Mean this as a compliment, although I have yet to get through half the essays.
On that note, is Dil Se ARR-MR’s best album?
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madhusudhan194
January 23, 2022
I am wondering if this criticism against MR’s handling of political conflicts has always existed or has grown louder since the arrival of deeply opinionated films from the likes of Pa. Ranjith and Mari Selvaraj.
The lyrics of ‘Vidai kodu engal naade’ elaborate in a harrowing manner the sufferings of eelam tamils. It doesn’t play out fully in the film I think but that’s the closest Mani Ratnam comes to taking a side in the film. The entire film is a cry for peace. The film starts with Vellai pookal song and it stays true to that.
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Madan
January 23, 2022
“On that note, is Dil Se ARR-MR’s best album?” – I like it but my picks would be either of Thiruda Thiruda, Bombay and Alai Payuthey. Find it really, really hard to choose between them, they are all simply outstanding in different ways. Aging Lata on Jiya Jale is like ‘drishti parigaram’ as we say in Tamil for the Dil Se album.
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Aman Basha
January 23, 2022
@Madan: Always wondered Rahman would make Lata or Asha sing songs in Hindi, when he wasn’t bound by superstition like Rajshri or YRF were.
However, 90s Lata is still ok for me till I guess Jiya Jale, where the voice worked (as in I can’t imagine any other singer bringing the same heft). Veer Zaara was total torture, someday Shreya G should do a version of the songs on her own.
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Madan
January 23, 2022
@Aman Basha : I think for most composers, working with the Mangeshkar sisters was a matter of immense prestige, a proverbial tale to tell your grandchildren about. If I had to guess, Raja worked with both – and in Tamil at that – for the same reason and so did Rahman. They all revered Lata and Asha and deservedly so, just that by the 90s, Lata in particular was done. Asha was able to bring a lot of spunk to the Rangeela songs and I like them more now than I used to back then.
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Madan
January 23, 2022
And yes, I would love to hear Shreya G sing Tere Liye to wipe off the stain of Lata utterly ruining Madan bhaiyya’s song.
Jaizim Sharma gave a brilliant rendition of that song on SaReGaMaPa. It used to be up on YouTube but it’s gone now. In fact, it was that rendition that made me notice and admire the composition.
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Jayram
January 23, 2022
I actually don’t mind aging Lata on Jiya Jale. It’s the orchestration most specifically the morsing, percussion and bass which drives the song. Of course, can’t forget MG Sreekumar and the choir in Malayalam. BTW, MG Sreekumar still sounded quite young in the track.
Asha did much better in Rangeela.
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Karthik
January 23, 2022
the subtextual take is what YOU make out of it, or what you think it is.
Sure. I think I’ve indicated as much in my comment.
What I was telling BR is that the movie has to work at the text level first. Even if I did’nt draw parallels between Amutha and the Srilankan Tamils in my head while watching the film, it should still engage me.
I think that depends. I dont think I need to decode the subtext while watching the movie, but the fact that it exists makes a difference on how well the movie works for me. Adopting a child is an idea we all know about. One way to engage you in to this specific adoption is by pulling you into the characters’ story that you empathize with that experience. There is some of that here— but its certainly not the kind of slow, realistic filmmaking that Malayalam cinema does so well. But here, the broader context, and the connection between the specific adoption to that broader context adds a different emotional dimension to the experience. Again, this is not a universal experience, and what I feel/dont feel is as much a function of what’s on screen, as it is of me, and my expectations (or lack of them).
BTW, Mani’s format of love in the backdrop of war or riots goes as far back as Casablanca…
And so does the existence of bigger political subtext in characters’ smaller story.
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therag
January 23, 2022
Dil Se is my favourite ARR-MR album. Apart from the songs, the OST is out of the world. “Sitaro se aagey”/ “Vinmeengal thaandi” is one of their best collaborations.
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Aman Basha
January 23, 2022
On music, let me vent: K Pop is massively overrated, it’s sad to see people celebrate it while not giving any attention to some very good musicians in their home languages.
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Prat
January 23, 2022
@therag Uyire is the best ARR album IMO, too. Every song is a classic, and Santhosha Kanneere is the diamond in the crown.
I still use Uyire and Meenaxi to judge any new earphones that I buy.
And thanks for mentioning Vinmeengal Thaandi. One of the most epic and haunting songs ever!
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Madan
January 23, 2022
Aman Basha: Ha! Never heard, never been curious about it though in general, I want to start exploring Korean, Japanese and Chinese music.
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Eswar
January 23, 2022
Madhusudhan194: When I watched Kannathil Muthamittal, my awareness of the Sri Lankan Civil war was minimal. So I had nothing to complain about the movie. Since then, I have learnt a little more about the war. The mainstream discussion in Tamil Nadu often portrays the Sri Lankan civil war in black and white making it easy for people to take a stance. However, from what I have read, the war, its reasons and how it played out is a lot more intricate than that. Hence, I don’t think there is another stance one could take, neither then nor now, apart from what the movie did – ‘a cry for peace’. So I still have no complaints about the film.
Has the criticism grown louder now? Maybe, but I don’t think it is to do with the new generation of filmmakers. The opening up of social media and the increased access to the internet in the last twenty years has made it easy to express criticism more today. Also, the increased access allows consumption of that disapproval lot easier. An individual’s stance is more visible than ever before. Hence it feels amplified.
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vijay
January 24, 2022
“this already seems to be a good year for film writers as I can see the following coming:
30 years of Rahman
30 years of devar magain
20 years of kannaththil muththamittaal
40 years of Moondram pirai
and so on…”
…and 40 years of Mani Rathnam :-), no mean achievment this, most of his illustrious 80s contemporaries have retired or have been retired long back. Some of them have even sadly passed away. In this instant gratification twitter era, to still stay somewhat cisingle screen audiences, is quite something. Usually this kind of longevity is reserved for mega stars like AB or Rajni.. One thing that intrigues me how did he stay financilaly afloat thru all those commercial duds in the 2000s and 2010s? Was it just the brand value? He is known to be budget friendly, but still..
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Madan
January 24, 2022
“One thing that intrigues me how did he stay financilaly afloat thru all those commercial duds in the 2000s and 2010s?” – Maybe Guru and CCV respectively paid for the other duds?
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Madan
January 24, 2022
OKK did well too.
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sravishanker1401gmailcom
January 24, 2022
“One thing that intrigues me how did he stay financilaly afloat thru all those commercial duds in the 2000s and 2010s?”
The same way Spielberg survived all his post Indiana Jones duds
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MANK
January 24, 2022
40 years of Mani Rathnam must be celebrated, no question about it. There are very few directors in Indian cinema and particularly in Tamil cinema who not only affected such a tectonic shift as far as filmmaking is concerned, but also crossed language barriers and became a brand on their own. There may have been directors who could sell their films on their name alone before him ( Sridhar or KB) but I don’t think there was another director whom the masses could so closely & easily identify – like a Hitchcock or a Spielberg. The quality of his films may have been disappointing recently, or rather i would say they may not be providing me with the total satisfaction that his initial films provided (I think Kannathil Muthamittal was the last film from which i came out totally satisfied), but the quality of his filmmaking is still first rate. He may still be the greatest ‘film director’ Tamil film industry has ever produced purely from a filmmaking point of view. Even in a purely commercial venture like CCV, we find him experimenting with new cinematic forms and storytelling techniques. That cannot be said about the late-career films of a lot of great directors, in India or abroad.
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MANK
January 24, 2022
But Spielberg is a multi billionaire, I don’t think Mani is such a rich man. And even his hits are not blockbusters. They are films that just return their investment and maybe make a small profit. i don’t think he ever made such a hit big enough to pay for the multiple flops he had to endure. I think it’s still the brand value that the distributors are still willing to buy his films (but there are unfortunate incidents like what happened after the flopping of Kadal, when the distributors staged a protest outside his house demanding their money back) , and yes he is very fiscally efficient. Apart fro Tiruda Tiruda, and to an extend Iruvar, I dont think he ahs ever gone over budget on a film. Though he has made some very expensive films.
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Anand Raghavan
January 24, 2022
Are there any other directors in India who have stayed relevant and strived to make meaningful films for a period of 4 decades without big breaks ?
Reg. music, Thiruda-Thiruda would arguably be ARRs best not just in Mani’s combo but also in hi career thus far
Reg. politics, Rooja back then was seen as a patriotic film but in the current scenario would be panned as a RW narrative. Politics change and .ore so in an era of Social Media and sure audience of Tamil films in 90s were not looking for political sub texts as much they do today.
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Madan
January 24, 2022
“Are there any other directors in India who have stayed relevant and strived to make meaningful films for a period of 4 decades without big breaks ?” – Satyajit Ray. I am sure Mani would be proud to share this distinction with him. Basu Chaterjee nearly got there too.
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Madan
January 24, 2022
KB too but his output started to go down in the 90s and went on a long break after Duet. Sridhar gets to about three and a half though nobody regards his 80s and onwards work as memorable.
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brangan
January 24, 2022
vijay: I think the only comparison would be Yash Chopra, who had a five decade (and change) “relevant” career. In the sense that:
The only difference is that he was purely a script-level director, and like MANK said, Mani Ratnam is still breaking boundaries in terms of pure filmmaking.
More than Mani Ratnam’s ability to stage scenes, it’s his ambition to keep thinking out of the box while staging scenes that I really admire. How does he have that never-ending bag of tricks? After four decades, what still keeps him going, striving?
About why he is still relevant, I’d say it’s because his string of “well-remembered” films from MOUNA RAAGAM to BOMBAY really imprinted him in the minds of the public. And then future generations had films like ALAIPAYUTHEY and OKK and CCV and GURU.
I am not talking about the quality of the films, but the hit factor.
It’s like how a (male) star can have 5 or 10 flops but one big hit can wipe out the memory of those flops.
I think the newer-generation directors have helped keep his relevance alive. Like when Karthik Subbaraj talks about KANNATHIL or when GVM and VetriMaran talk about NAYAKAN…
Also, he is like Kamal in a way, because he never repeats genres immediately. So there is this curiosity about “what is going to be new this time?”
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shaviswa
January 24, 2022
@Madan
CV Sridhar lost his zing around late 60s when he started making movies like Sivantha Mann. And then after a string of flops he turned to MGR for Urimai Kural and what a grotesque movie that was from Sridhar’s standards.
After that he had a couple of decent films like Orae Naal Unai Naan. And that was it.
For me Sridhar’s movies were top notch when he was the star and his films were able to carry actors like Muthuraman, Ravichandran, Nagesh (early days for him), Srikanth, etc.
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shaviswa
January 24, 2022
Agree about Mani Ratnam @BR. Despite the fact that I have not liked many of his films in the last decade or two, I am still curious to see what he comes up with next. While on the one side I dread what he would do to my favourite Tamil novel Ponniyin Selvan, I am also curious to see how he is able to compress and stage this novel of epic proportions on the Tamil screens.
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Madan
January 24, 2022
“Also, he is like Kamal in a way, because he never repeats genres immediately. So there is this curiosity about “what is going to be new this time?”” – In a way, he has combined the best qualities of the two composers he worked with. The obsession with technical mastery of Ilayaraja, which makes connoisseurs a permanent audience for his work but simultaneously the avoidance of repetition and willingness to work with new faces and contemporary subjects like Rahman, which makes it fresh anew for a new generation.
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Aman Basha
January 24, 2022
We are forgetting Raj Kapoor. From Aag to Ram Teri Ganga Maili, an incredible record where we have Industry hits (Awaara, Barsaat, Shree 420), All Time Blockbusters (Sangam, Bobby, RTGM) and a flop which was a blockbuster in re-runs (Mera Naam Joker). Not to mention his two proteges were Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Manmohan Desai (the two pillars of 70s cinema). As a producer, his credits have Boot Polish and Jagte Raho.
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sravishanker1401gmailcom
January 24, 2022
@MANK : What I was referring to was that, for instance, Reliance Entertainment picked up the bill for ‘Raavanan’.
Mani Ratnam has been a highly responsible film maker where finances were concerned. As for those distributors who wanted their money back they should know what they were getting into.
Can I blame the stock market for my losses?
For awesome insights into the film financing, production process and screen writing I highly recommend Mario Puzo’s ‘The Last Don’.
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MANK
January 24, 2022
And then after a string of flops he turned to MGR for Urimai Kural and what a grotesque movie that was from Sridhar’s standards.
Urimai Kural was a favor MGR did to rescue Sridar from the latter’s financial problems . MGR helped him at a difficult phase of his career, after Sivaji Ganesan had turned his back on him. It was actor Rajendra kumar (who played the lead in Sridar’s dharti, the hindi remake of Sivanda mann), who insisted on Sridar to go to MGR for help .I would say Urumai Kural is still one of the better late-career MGR films, it’s not Sridhar’s best or even second best, but he still managed to put his stamp on the film; in the love story portions of it, music (“Vizhiye Kathai Ezhudhu” is ringing in my ears as i write this), song picturisation and its overall making itself. The film also didn’t have much of the political propaganda that was part and parcel of MGR films of the time. the film is technically pretty good compared to the really crude MGR films of the 70s. though the final result is similar to GVM making Yennai Arindhaal with Ajith, where an auteur director tries to mix his style with a mass hero and comes up short on both sides, but still you can find the maker’s fingerprints on most of the film. But Meenava Nanban was the real shocker. That’s a horrible film with absolutely no saving graces or Sridhar’s touches; it was more grotesque than MGR’s wig and makeup from the film. Sridar did bounce balk with Ilamai Oonjal Aadukirathu, but his best days were behind him by then.
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MANK
January 24, 2022
For awesome insights into the film financing, production process and screen writing I highly recommend Mario Puzo’s ‘The Last Don’.
Thanks for the reco Ravi sir. I have read only two books from Puzo: The godfather and The Sicilian. I was under the impression that rest of his books were not very good. I will check this one out.
That’s true about Raj Kapoor Aman. But RK had the added advantage of being a huge star in his prime, but yeah that does not diminish his accomplishments. And RTGM was the biggest hit of the year, i think he’s one of the rare directors (who had a 4 decade long career) to go out with such a blockbuster.
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sravishanker1401gmailcom
January 24, 2022
MANK: You’ll love ‘The Last Don’. Wonderful insights into the writing process and the writer’s mind.
In general all artistes have a peak phase. Hitchcock’s films AFTER ‘Psycho’ never reached the same heights. Like all famous impressarios he became a prisoner of his success.
“Success is nothing but delayed failure”
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Aman Basha
January 24, 2022
@MANK: A commercial record close to RK’s is Aamir, content driven blockbusters that were huge hits in China and other parts of the world.
Now that I think of it, your contention should be true of Raj Kapoor being the only director to go out with a huge blockbuster, I really can’t think of another.
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shaviswa
January 24, 2022
@MANK
Thanks. The film is Ilamai Oojaladugirathu and I confused it’s name with it’s iconic song. 🙂
How did I forget Meenava Nanban? ;( – Such a horror for the viewers.
And yes – I know that MGR did him a favour. But that was the problem. Because of his financial problems, he had to compromise and do films with MGR and that kind of became a blemish in his track record.
PS: By the way he has had duds earlier too – Kalai Kovil was a massive flop. But he had many memorable hits during the 1960s.
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Eswar
January 24, 2022
Vijay: One thing that intrigues me how did he stay financilaly afloat thru all those commercial duds in the 2000s and 2010s? Was it just the brand value? He is known to be budget friendly, but still..
I think it is a combination of these things:
Unbearable to watch is not equal to poor box office returns.
Box office numbers available to the public is not the same as the actual returns from a project.
A brand that provides contacts and opportunities.
Operating through one’s own production company gives control over many variables like what qualifies as an expense, profit and loss, and so on. It can also increase options to borrow money. I tend to think it is for this flexibility and control actors like Vikram Prabu, Atharva, and Vijay Antony produce their films.
Having a good understanding of the business side of movie-making, both financially and to execute a plan.
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Ravi K
January 24, 2022
To add to Eswar’s comments, he may have some films that underperformed, but never a Bombay Velvet level expensive flop. And even then, depending on one’s track record, it is possible to bounce back. Plus, Mani Ratnam has delivered bonafide hits like OKK and CCV even in his later period. At worst, a film of his will lose a little money or turn out less profitable than hoped. But the ceiling for success is still very high!
The budget of Ponniyin Selvan is reportedly 500 Crore. Not sure if that figure is just for part 1 or includes part 2 as well, but even so that is a high bar to clear for a project that probably doesn’t have much pan-Indian appeal. I guess they’re hoping that the combination of Mani, Aishwarya Rai, and lavish period epic will bring in non-Tamil audiences.
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Anu Warrier
January 24, 2022
@Thulasidasan, Karthik, It’s Very Simple – great mini-essays. I found myself agreeing and kinda-disagreeing at different places, but the three of you have given me much to reflect upon. Thank you.
@krishikari, so glad you asked that question that elicited that response from Karthik.
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Enigma
January 25, 2022
I was always curious as to why Mani Ratnam did not make more movies in the Hindi language considering that the subjects were pan Indian and were also set in the north.
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Filistine
January 25, 2022
@Enigma – I think he is not comfortable with the language. KV, for example, I felt could have worked better if it was made in Hindi, with probably a better actor. Karthi looked really out of place in that milieu.
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MANK
January 25, 2022
Raavan was a a Bombay Velvet level expensive flop in Hindi. Not only was it a flop, it was met with universal derision by audiences and critics there, especially for Junior Bachchan’s horrible performance. It’s Tamil version with Vikram was much more successful Since then Hindi film producers have stopped calling him; Mani himself must have realized that he is much more comfortable making straight Tamil movies than bilinguals. It has to be seen what kind of reception Ponniyin Selvan is going to get in the north (or even in the south).
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Aman Basha
January 25, 2022
@MANK: With Raavan, I think the basic concept of the film itself was flawed. All it did was make Raavan the shining hero and Ram the evil villain, there was nothing else unlike Thalapathi which too deviates from the epic.
Financially Raavan was just a flop, nowhere close to a disaster though it probably destroyed Junior Bachchan’s career. Mani was probably more affected with the (highly) unnecessary critical mauling, some calling it Mani Ratnam ka Aag and all. Dil Se had a restored reputation which Raavan or Yuva or even Guru don’t.
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Madan
January 25, 2022
I think MANK is just talking about how expensive in money terms the flop was and in that sense, it is comparable to Bombay Velvet. Raavan’s gross was 55 cr less than budget. For Bombay Velvet, the difference was around Rs.75 cr. Consider that Bombay Velvet cost more to make and came five years later during a high inflation era and Raavan is pretty much equally bad.
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Aman Basha
January 25, 2022
@Madan: From where are your figures from? Even Box Office India, with all their Bachchan hate, hatred for anything content driven, have it as a flop and that it made 28 crores nett on a budget of 55 crores. The total budget of both versions must not have gone over 70 crore even with a problematic production. The Tamil version did well too, so it really wouldn’t have been such a disaster.
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Madan
January 25, 2022
” From where are your figures from? ” – Wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raavan
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Madan
January 25, 2022
OK, I read it wrong. Worldwide gross v/s budget diff is just Rs.5 cr. So not a massive flop all said and done.
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Enigma
January 26, 2022
@Filistine, exactly. KV was set in the north entirely and should have been a Hindi language film. Not that would have made a difference to its box office results, but the market for sort of experimental/off beat films would be larger in Hindi. Also Mani Ratnam’s technical dazzle, film making skills are largely lost on the Tamil audience. A friend of mine once argued that Vikraman is a better director because he made kudumba padams filled with karuthu. LOL. I am not saying that Hindi audience have more awareness of the technical aspects of film making but as the market is larger you may find more people who are exposed to international cinema and would appreciate these things.
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brangan
January 26, 2022
Enigma: film making skills are largely lost on the Tamil audience.
Actually, filmmaking skills — i.e. form, the grammar of a shot and so so forth — are largely irrelevant to most cinema audiences, all over the world. I only keep bringing these things up here because there are some knowledgeable cinephiles in this commenting community and it matters to them. And of course, I bring it up in my reviews because it matters to ME.
I have given this example many times, but I’ll repeat it. If you and your friend go to a Carnatic concert and if you have not learnt or read about or heard or “know” the music, you will just be bothered about only one thing: “Is this 2.5 hour span of my life giving me any satisfaction?” Only if you “know” the music will you say things like “ah, look at that unexpected phrase in the raga (or some such thing). In the sense that you will be enjoying the music at two levels, the basic level and the technical level — because you know how to parallel process these two things.
It’s the same with most art. Say, you go to a book reading or poetry reading or it could even be an Amrita Sher-Gil painting on your wall. You might have studied painting and “know” why it is so special, but your friend might just look at it and say “nice colours, da” or something.
So what your friend is really saying (if I read what you wrote rightly) is that a Vikraman film gives him more “satisfaction” than a Mani Ratnam film — and that is because he is like most people in the world: an average viewer. (And I say this with zero judgement.)
But the difference between cinema and other art forms is that — because it is so democratic, and so “all around us” — people automatically assume expertise. You can see this from the lay Twitter commenter to the reviewers who gave all the credits for the cuts in MAANADU to the editor instead of the screenwriter.
So you will have people confidently commenting about how the screenplay needed this or that, when they actually know very little about screenwriting (and the problem they have might be due to a different department of filmmaking).
So I would not look down on your friend. Because cinema — almost all around the world — is not seen as an “art form” with rules and grammar and so forth. With an “art form”, everyone realises there is a certain amount knowledge you need to talk about it. Or even with science. Let’s say a Nobel Prize-winning physicist came to Chennai, the Hindu would send an informed science reporter. But with cinema, the attitude used to be “who is free to review this film?”
Actually, now, it is a little better. Thanks to YouTube and the many educational videos, at least some people seem to realise that a lot of things go into cinema and that it is an “art form,” the greatest art form we have now.
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brangan
January 26, 2022
As for KV, the minute I saw it, I realised two things: I liked a lot of it (except the action bits), and it would not do well — primarily because it is too “elite”.
We will accept a very similarly abusive Madhavan-Meera Jasmine relationship in AAYDHA EZHUTHU, because it is set in a generic North Chennai background. The sights, the sounds, the way people speak — everything is “familiar”, either because we have seen these people or have lived in these neighbourhoods or seen similar films or whatever.
Even with ROJA, the latter half is set entirely in Kashmir, but Mani Ratnam has taken great care to make us understand that the girl is a very recognisable and identifiable “Tamizh ponnu.”
But here, Aditi is from an upscale family in Delhi, Karthi is similarly from some North-settled Tamil family, there’s a lot of English (because of the film’s background), they dance the tango — everything is so different. And some people may like this, but the average viewer will not identify with this.
A friend once told me something that made me think a lot. The average Tamil viewer wants the hero to look like him (the goal is “identification”), but the average Hindi viewer wants the hero to look like Hrithik or Shah Rukh (the goal is “aspiration”).
So in many ways, KV lacked this identification factor, whereas CCV had a LOT of it. Even though we were seeing the lives of a super-rich family (huge bungalow, etc.), the people looked and talked and did things like “Tamil people”. (Note that when I say “Tamil people”, I am talking about the people we usually see on-screen, and not necessarily about real-life Tamil people.)
Plus, of course, it had a bunch of stars, action, etc. I was one of the few outliers on that. Many friends of mine said they had a good time.
The only way you can marry “elite content” and “filmmaking technique” and get away with it is when the story works at a super-basic level. BHOOTHAKALAM is a great recent example. Its craft is stunning. The filmmaking is excellent. Right from the first static shot, every frame is like a painting. It talks about “elite things” like “clinical depression” and so on. But the horror element unites all audiences. In the sense of even if you do not know what clinical depression is, the promise of scares binds all kinds of viewers.
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Madan
January 26, 2022
“Because cinema — almost all around the world — is not seen as an “art form” with rules and grammar and so forth. ” – The notion of an art form having rules also only applies now to art itself (painting) and classical music. Everything else, for better or worse, has been democratized/post-modernized and anything goes is the accepted norm.
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vijay
January 26, 2022
“It’s like how a (male) star can have 5 or 10 flops but one big hit can wipe out the memory of those flops.”
which of the current gen directors you think have accumulated such faith or brand value so as to restore the balance with a single hit after 5 or 6 flops.big stars have that always but generally I havent seen directors have that. KS Ravikumar had a midas touch in the 90s and 2000s box-office wise. But after a Linga/Kochaadaiyaan he is missing from the scene. Same with GVM whose target audience or base overlaps with Mani’s. A few flops and he is into acting.
The fondness for his Mouna raagam to Bombay phase may be limited to the 40+ age group. The current 20-something audience may be removed from that nostalgia and am not sure if a OKK or a CCV mild hit is enough for somebody to pump in 500 crore for Ponniyin Selvan..I mean, we are talking about a Baahubali type of project..somewhere Mani is putting his MBA skills to good use I think
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shaviswa
January 26, 2022
@BR
Agree with you on the comparison you made about how the same content is perceived differently by different people. Carnatic music is an excellent example there.
However even for people who understand the grammar, who appreciate the nuances, the performance or the presentation has to appeal at a certain basic level.
If the singer presents a song that does not appeal to the basic senses, it would be difficult to appreciate even if he throws in imaginative phrases at you. The raga or thala extrapolation will start to appear like mere gimmicks in what is otherwise an ordinary song.
This was where KV failed. The main story line and the characterisation were not just unrelatable, their depiction did not make the audience empathise with the duo. This is so unlike how in OKK – despite it’s elitist set-up (Bombay, game developer hero, architect heroine, living together) – there was something in how the story unfolds, how the characters develop which makes the viewer interested to see where the story is headed, what will happen to this lead pair, what will make them realize their love and stay together.
KV and other MR movies failed at the essential story level despite the craft he put into those films at a technical level.
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Madan
January 26, 2022
I am astounded to learn too that Ponniyin Selvan cost 500 cr to make. And I can’t see a roadmap to Mani recouping all that money. Maybe it was indeed an attempt to emulate Baahubali. But both Baahubali films put together cost Rs.430 cr, so even they fell short of what PS cost to make. No risk, no reward I guess, but the downsides if this bombs are vertigo-inducing. Mani better have something really good not just in a cinematic sense but something that is going to have bigtime mass appeal. He hasn’t done something like that since Roja and Bombay and they too were heavy films with a topical political background that hooked the audience in. PS is a whole other ballgame. It’s going to be about creating an imaginary universe and making a pan India audience connect to it. Doable but to say this is a huge gamble is a massive understatement. It would be something like Ilayaraja saying he is going to make an album that will outsell Thriller and him actually finding backers for that project.
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vijay
January 26, 2022
“But the difference between cinema and other art forms is that — because it is so democratic, and so “all around us” — people automatically assume expertise. ”
Not just this..but also the fact that somebody like Mani who has had such a long run is not himself formally trained..he did’nt graduate out of a film institute. Bharathiraja was a malaria insprector ina village. When the average lay viewer sees this, he automatically assumes that if these guys do make this, why cant i comment or assume expertise on this? It doesnt require a 4-year degree like medicine or engineering after all.
But as an aside, I am not sure if you got a sense of where Mani learned his craft while you did your book with him, but thats something I always wanted to know. Same with Vishal Bharadwaj in Hindi. Where and how did they find the time to pick up the technical aspects of filmmaking as early as Pallavi Anupallavi or Maqbool. Watching films or being an avid film fan is one thing, but being able to execute ideas at the shoot is a different ballgame. When IR was at his peak he took formal lessons in carnatic music and I read recently he attended workshops in Singapore along with his son on use of computers and synth in 1985, just before Punnagai Mannan’s music came up. He somehow found time amidst his busy schedule to hone his craft and upskill.
Mani did’nt even apprentice under any other director, so the question remains..was it all just ‘kelvi gnaanam’ as they say or was he attending some workshops too that we did’nt know about. Or was all learning on the job? They did’nt have’ naalaiya iyakkunar’ or any reality contest like that back then
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Madan
January 26, 2022
“Mani did’nt even apprentice under any other director, so the question remains..was it all just ‘kelvi gnaanam’ as they say or was he attending some workshops too that we did’nt know about. ” – But he was from film family so if not workshops, he may have got lot of technical support early on that doesn’t get mentioned anywhere, support that Raja wouldn’t have got because he had to build up his expertise brick by brick on his own. Bharatiraja OTOH did follow the traditional route of assisting other directors before striking out on his own (as did Ilayaraja too).
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MANK
January 26, 2022
I mean, we are talking about a Baahubali type of project..somewhere Mani is putting his MBA skills to good use I think
I LOLed on that one. A film costing 500 cr should gross 1000 crores just o break even. In a world which is struggling to come out of Covid, i cant see any film grossing that kind of money in the immediate future. Maybe Mani has a backup plan and has already negotiated with an OTT platform like Amazon or Netflix.
I think Mani is like Quentin Tarantino, whose knowledge of filmmaking is strictly from movie watching. And then they find great collaborators to put their vision to screen. P.C. Sriram, Thotta tharani, etc. They themselves may not know how to achieve the effects they want, but the talented technical team execute their vision. All they needs to do is talk to them. And little by little they become proficient in all aspects of cinema. You could see this perfectly reflected in Mani’s career. His pre-mouna ragam films finds him struggling to find his voice. With Mouna ragam, he became a good director. With Nayakan, he became a great director, and by Thalapathi he had become an all-time great director.
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brangan
January 26, 2022
vijay: It’s not very different from how some singers / painters / novelists turn out “technically” good from the get-go. I really do think talent (any talent, be it cooking or cricketing) is INSIDE people, almost at a DNA level. It can be honed but it cannot be got by someone who does not have that innate predisposition.
Mani Ratnam already had the eye. He was already identifying and discussing the “baby zooms” in MULLUM MALARUM with his friends (which is one of the reasons he went to Balu Mahendra to be his first cinematographer). And then he honed his craft with every great collaborator he took on.
When I talk about his “eye” already being there, you only have to see how he identified Santosh Sivan from a work like RAAKH. Two or three frames is all he needed to say “this is a guy who can give me on screen what I am seeing in my mind’s eye”.
A director only needs that eye — the eye for putting actors in a certain position and then saying “now you move left and you turn in profile”, the eye to say “I want to see the sun and then I want to move down to Rajini’s house”, the eye to say “I want to see Vikram’s boat ram into Aishwarya’s boat” but seen from underwater”, the ear to say “at this point I want no BGM because Kamal is going to be doing something,”….
In short, he himself does not need to know how to operate a camera or edit or design a dress or anything. It’s that CUMULATIVE vision he needs. And like MANK said, Tarantino and Mani and many others were born with that. They just honed it and honed it by watching a lot of films and pushing themselves and their collaborators.
Post-IRUVAR, for instance, you will see Mani moving the camera a lot to stage a scene (even if we don’t notice this movement all that much). I think that could be a result of working with Rajiv Menon in BOMBAY, which had very “free” frames when compared to the very formal/spot-light compositions of PC Sreeram (not comparing or rating, just stating). Rajiv worked in ads a lot, used the steadicam a lot — and so now, Mani has one more trick in his bag, and many more ways to stage a scene.
But it always comes down to the eye, the vision. Without that, no amount of great collaborators can help you. And it works vice versa. Look at Ravi Varman’s fantastic work in BARFI or RAM LEELA vs his very ordinary work in SANJU.
PS: He got no technical or any other kind of support from his family. He just decided to do it with some friends.
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vijay
January 26, 2022
“I think Mani is like Quentin Tarantino, whose knowledge of filmmaking is strictly from movie watching. And then they find great collaborators to put their vision to screen. P.C. Sriram, Thotta tharani, etc.”
that is what I also suspected but am not sure if you can get the kind of precise output you want just by leaning on technicians..to even get the best work out of them you need to have a clear vision and clarity about what you want..and Mani is often said to be having a serious clarity of thought which is envious..but if that’s true this could be inspiring for a lot of avid movie fans, home-film makers who have’nt had formal training. And it is posisble to do that being a director because you get other technicians to execute your vision. But if you were a technican yourself like an editor or music drector you need to get your craft really honed, formally or otherwise. Even there, we have had stories of how how a Bhagyaraj could do music for his films after he briefly broke away from IR in the mis-80s.He, in turn, leaned on his arrangers to fill up the music for his skeletal tunes.
But with Quentin, he atleast had a serious flair for dialogue-writing, something that I did’nt see in Mani.
“His pre-mouna ragam films finds him struggling to find his voice.”
But even his pallavi anupallavi was so different from other kannada/tamil mainstream films being made at that time. His tamil films like idhayakovil were a willing compromise just to get a foothold, by his own admission. For all we know, he could have had mouna raagam’s script and vision ready in 1983 itself and found his opportunity to make it only in 1986.
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vijay
January 26, 2022
“For all we know, he could have had mouna raagam’s script and vision ready in 1983 itself and found his opportunity to make it only in 1986.”
like as in Ponniyin selvan,which was first readied about 20 years back I think, with the late Sujatha having a look at its script. Sujatha proposed that Kamal-Rajni be a part of this film and IR-ARR be joint MDs. and we were like..yeah right 🙂
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vijay
January 26, 2022
BR, I understand Mani did have some family connections in cinema, his father or uncle was a distributor..so he may have had exposure to cinema quite early and may have had it in his DNA as well. You mentioned BGM..its no mean feat to consistently extract the best out of two MDs belonging to 2 different generatiions with their different styles and approaches. and he often brushes it off modestly saying that he didnt have much to do with the songs/BGM. But he did need to have the right ear to pick the right tune everytime and to gently nudge the MD towards what he wanted, which he did for the most part. And thats a skill that’s quite different from filmmaking. And which is missing in most contemporary directors, even the celebrated ones
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Enigma
January 26, 2022
@BR, thank you for your response. I get your point that filmmaking skills are largely irrelevant to most audiences. But as there are more Hindi speakers and as therefore Hindi cinema has a larger audience, there is a possibility of finding that many more people who would be able to appreciate some of the finer aspects of filmmaking. In fact Mani Ratnam should dream bigger, if Shekar Kapur can direct Elizabeth why can’t he(MR) aim for something like that.
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anon
January 26, 2022
Wait, that budget CANNOT be real! 500c?? No MR movie can make half as much, even pan India and no one is gonna be checking for Jayam Ravi and Karthi. I myself will not watch because I’m fed up of the terrible casting in Mani films in the few decades. The casting is so bad, right out of the gate, I cannot buy a single character. Add to that the weird dialogues – nothing feels authentic anymore. How he could’ve persisted with Karthi in KV, I cannot imagine – I could not buy the character even a little bit. Dude can sign any actor he fricking wants and he persists with casting every star kid he can find. I rem he said in an interview that sometimes casting against the grain works. Well Mani, most times it spectacularly misfires. Cut your losses.
MR is smart enough to know what kind of money he can make in the best case scenario, surely? Who is producing this?
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Enigma
January 26, 2022
Yes 500 crores sounds unreal. I am hoping for MR’s sake this is not true.
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RK
January 26, 2022
As a telugu person, I feel insulted that RGV doesn’t come into discussion when Mani is compared with other directors 😀. I know that RGV’s significant movie career lasted for only 20-25 years but the kind of impact he had on telugu and Hindi industries, not sure if anyone else has had it. May be since RGV doesn’t take himself seriously and acts like a joker these days, he doesn’t feature in these kind of discussions.
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anon
January 26, 2022
@RK, you have Rajamouli now, not to mention mediocre pot boilers from Telugu taking over N.India by storm. I see Bollywood making v south indian mass movies for the next decade.
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Filistine
January 26, 2022
Talking about language, i am surprised that we still don’t have a full-fledged English films made out of India. We have a large enough English speaking population. Indian writing in English has become fully established. Most film-makers in Bollywood at least do seem to think in English. How long before we get an English movie made here?
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RK
January 26, 2022
@Anon,
I brought up RGV name for two reasons. One, he and Mani came into prominence few years apart and were close acquaintances. Two, unlike Rajamouli, they are not strictly commercial directors, yet successful. Though RGV and Mani are close at personal level and have respect for each other, seems like they don’t really like each other movies (atleast that’s what RGV claims) . RGV openly said that Mani’s movies are too beautiful to like and he wants his movies to be more realistic.
Regarding South movies capturing North market, it is bound to happen as hindi movies from Mumbai film industry stopped to catering to huge chunk of North population. With almost zero promotions, Pushpa has become a blockbuster abd i think trend will go up only now
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therag
January 26, 2022
I find it very funny that portraying a “Bombay couple, one a video-game designer, another an architect” is considered “elitist”.
The real problem Mani (and Kamal before him) faces is their real target audience (white-collar professionals in cities?) refusing to turn out for their films. When “Anbe Sivam” flopped, the producer and Kamal both said piracy was to blame. Kamal said and I quote: “a lot of people watched the film but they didn’t pay”. Might have been sour grapes but I think there is an element of truth here.
Part of the blame lies with the Tamil film Industry’s ultra-conservativeness. For a long time there was no way to watch a film legally if you missed the theatre run. OTOH I feel the notion of supporting talent and good art is mostly absent among the English speaking classes. So I don’t blame the moneybags for not throwing good money after bad, when there hasn’t been a reliable signal to indicate a decent sized market here.
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Madan
January 26, 2022
“OTOH I feel the notion of supporting talent and good art is mostly absent among the English speaking classes” – You’re right on the money. A friend of mine who plays a little bit of guitar cannot – or at least could not – stop mentioning the underrated British jazz guitarist Allan Holdsworth. We used to joke that he would bore whichever girl he dated by talking about Holdsworth to her. But…he has never bought a single album of Holdsworth. OK, there’s streaming now so nobody HAS to buy but even back when there wasn’t and the only other way was to download. By the way, Holdsworth died penniless and a few friends and wellwishers crowdfunded his funeral. You have hit upon a very fundamental problem of Indian society, that the English speaking classes are super-materialistic. And also super-miserly about art, meanwhile spending tons of money on gaudy home refurbishments of jarring if not dubious taste, on the latest Samsung or Apple and stuff. There’s NEVER any shortage of money for those things but tell them to buy a CD and they will say hundred rupees is too much yaar.
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therag
January 26, 2022
@Madan, +1. BTW listening to music on Spotify does not really make musicians much money from what I’ve heard. The real money-maker is concert and merchandise but I’m sure you know this. Kanye West was apparently bankrupt in the late noughties, early 10s before KimK taught him the tricks of the business. Kanye makes most of his money from his shoes and fashion line.
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Ravi K
January 27, 2022
Madan wrote: “There’s NEVER any shortage of money for those things but tell them to buy a CD and they will say hundred rupees is too much yaar.”
It’s the same with movies. The home video market in India is practically nothing these days. There was a golden period when Indian companies released a lot of DVDs and, for a brief few years, Blu-Rays. But now hardly anything gets released on DVD, and Blu-Ray releases stopped completely. We’re at the mercy of streaming services for most films. The only disc releases these days are bootlegs and the occasional release from non-Indian distribution companies.
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Madan
January 27, 2022
therag: Yup, and as concert prices keep going up, the biggest draws get priced out of the pockets of all but the upper crust of society. So in a way, the industry has puḻled a fast one over the people who think they’re very smart by not spending any money on buying music. Well, what do you do when your pampered kid wants to see Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift? You pay so much money that you could easily buy a 100 CDs for what the ticket price costs!
Streaming translates to a few units of physical music sold against hundreds of thousands of views. Billie Ellish’s Happier Than Ever album sold 154000 copies in the first week of release and was viewed 113.87 mn on streaming which translated to just 84000 units. Aka not even Gold, far from it. The biggest hitmakers today cannot generate enough streams to achieve a Gold certification equivalent sales. But they still sell enough, all taken, and rake in the moolah in concerts to enjoy a good lifestyle if not as extravagant as the peak of pop like MJ. But for the rest, it’s a constant and fruitless struggle to make enough money just to get by.
RaviK: Yup. Because you could only make people buy if they think it has some value over the pirate rip. You cannot reason with an audience wide perception that the pirate rip is good enough. As you say, now we’re at the mercy of streaming. Some of the distributors like Eros or Shemaroo have uploaded a few movies on their Youtube channels. If neither those nor any of the OTT platforms have a movie you want to see, good luck finding ANY way at all to get to see it.
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Kay
January 27, 2022
Voldemort – Book writing, in fiction at least, if not non-fiction, would sadly not make the cut anymore.
You are forgetting writers like EL James who gave us the masterpiece, Fifty shades, of which 100s of millions of copies were sold. 🙂
Jokes apart, I agree with Madan. Even if reading physical copies reduce, simultaneously there has been an increase in e-books. I don’t have the numbers for this, but this has been my observation including my reading habits.
Apologies for the digression from Iruvar.
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Aman Basha
January 27, 2022
“masterpiece, Fifty shades,”-A book that began as a Twilight fan fic on the author’s BlackBerry. But also, I think the sequels were nowhere as successful as the original?
I quite Billie Eilish’s Six Feet Under and No Time To Die. Her voice is a melancholic whisper.
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shaviswa
January 27, 2022
@Madan
Well, what do you do when your pampered kid wants to see Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift?
I will ask the kid to go take a hike. 🙂
I do not go to live shows by film musicians. Why do I need to when I can listen to the same songs with better quality at home?
For the record, I do not go to the cinema halls to watch movies. I watch them on OTT only. I have a large screen TV and a home theater set up. I do not miss the big screen at all (except for some movies like Bahubali or the recent Spiderman film).
All my music is on youtube, Amazon Music and Spotify. I do not buy CDs. In the 1980s, I used to buy empty cassettes and get songs that I choose copied on to them. The reason why I preferred this was because the cassette albums those days used to have 2 or 3 good songs and the rest very average or awful ones. Why should I pay my parents’ hard earned money to get those? When CDs came, they were extremely expensive and out of my range (as a kid). By the time I started earning online streaming was available (though not great quality).
About your question on why I would prefer to buy a smart phone but not a Rs. 100 DVD for a movie. The smart phone is what I would use for at least a couple of years if not more. The 100 Rs. DVD becomes a dud after I watch the film a couple of times. Spending money for a one time use product will always take a back seat.
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Madan
January 27, 2022
shaviswa : I did not talk about just any smartphone. I talked about latest Apple /Samsung. You can’t tell me you NEED the latest high end smartphone, it’s just a want to keep up with the Joneses. Mine, a good old Vivo, dates back to 2018 and it’s just fine, none of the charging issues of Samsung and Apple.
Also if you only ever watch a film or hear an album twice in your lifetime, I have no problem if you find no utility in buying the CD/DVD. I am talking about those who boast about not being able to live without being able to listen to XYZ album and still somehow finding hundred rupees too much to spare for something supposedly so precious.
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Rahini David
January 27, 2022
Madan: In general, in a usual conversation about original CD versus pirated CD, it was clear where an honest person who wanted to support art and valued quality was supposed to stand. But that is not the case anymore. Why would I even have a CD player? And listening to music through Spotify or YouTube Music is not the same as Piracy, no?
So I hear you that talented artists should be able to make money out of their talent. But it is unavoidable that the average listener who listens to music, say, only on weekend drives avoid purchasing clunky CDs that they should maintain without cracks and store without dust.
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Madan
January 27, 2022
Rahini : I mentioned that in my earlier comment. That it doesn’t matter but these are people who would prefer to illegally download and then complain that the CD is not free or nearly free. No shit sherlock, downloads were ‘free’ because they were illegal. Streaming was born out of a need to find a way to monetize some of this large audience that now refused to pay for CDs or even paid digital downloads. It may be pennies to the dollar for the artist but it beats record labels spending money on printing CDs that won’t be bought.
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Madan
January 27, 2022
*that it doesn’t matter NOW
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Anu Warrier
January 27, 2022
Madan, an American friend of mine ‘downloads’ tonnes of Hindi films to watch – at last count, she had around 2000 DVDs. She knows it’s piracy but she makes a valid point – ‘legal’ Indian film DVDs, especially of older films, are of horrible quality. Scenes are randomly cut (since most films are made into DVDs from their VCD avatars instead of the original VHS) and even put out of order, the print quality is bad, the audio is scratchy and so on.
For instance, you will never find a complete version of Teesri Manzil – every single DVD you find in the market will have half an hour cut out of it, a part that includes Premnath’s entry in the film. Shemaroo is responsible for butchering Raj Kapoor’s films, and they hold copyright. Moser Baer, Eros, Goldmine, are all DVD companies that forget quality in their race to make a quick buck.
I used to buy DVDs – legal DVDs – by the dozen. I have since stopped. For one, I too am sick of the aforementioned issues. Two, if I want to see a well-cleaned-up old Hindi film, both audio and video, I would much rather visit Tom Daniels YouTube channel. He does yeoman service preserving our cinematic heritage, and the guy gets hit with fake copyright claims from the above companies – on films that have run out of copyright! What’s worse, some of these companies take the fruits of his labour, put their watermark on the print and upload it on YouTube as their print. That’s how shameless they are.
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Madan
January 27, 2022
“legal’ Indian film DVDs, especially of older films, are of horrible quality.” – On the one hand, I cannot disagree there. On the other, I also know that many give or gave the same excuse to not buy audio CDs for Indian film songs where I know that that is not the case.
Also, we are getting somewhat side tracked. The question isn’tjust about legal v/s pirated DVDs. A home video market would be or would have been nice but it’s a bonus. The first level issue, which therag pointed out, is the English speaking class does not even come to watch the movies they claim they want to see more of in theater. Whether you like Vijay or Ajith films or not, there is no denying that at least the fans do come to watch them in theater. The people for whom Mani made movies like Mouna Ragam once upon a time will not come to watch them in theater today. You can always invent a pretext to argue against the need, saying it will come on TV or OTT anyway. But not watching it in theater reduces the incentive for filmmakers to make those kind of films which don’t get the same reception in their theatrical run, as simple as that. The audience cannot have it both ways. If you won’t spend, don’t complain about the kind of movies that get made because the makers will make the movies that they think will find an audience for the big screen. If they wanted to go straight to OTT, they would make a web series instead.
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Aman Basha
January 27, 2022
@Madan: Disagree. Didn’t the audience come out for all the Ayushmann movies or Badla or Gully Boy. A Mouna Ragam would have been a huge hit in today’s times too. I don’t understand what makes you say this otherwise.
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Madan
January 27, 2022
“Didn’t the audience come out for all the Ayushmann movies or Badla or Gully Boy.” – In Hindi, where the market is large and they can release it on several screens in urban centers and get enough to watch in the first two-three weeks to do decent business. A Tamil film’s primary market is just one state and there the absence of a strong A-center audience gets exposed. Remember, Mouna Ragam ran in single screen times and still did wonderfully well. Would Gully Boy still notch 200 cr without carpet bombing 3500 screens? Doubtful.
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therag
January 27, 2022
@shaviswa, returns from watching a film or reading a book are highly non-linear. The marginal utility of the average film you watch is going to be moderate (and this depends on how well you choose which films to watch) but every once in a while you chance upon a gem that makes it worth your while.
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Madan
January 27, 2022
therag: I can still understand the argument that, say, expecting the viewer to pay for ten DVDs in the hope that he will LOVE one is not necessarily a fair equation. This is the flip side – that before streaming/piracy, the art lover had to pay a high price to consume what he liked.
Fine. In that case, we need to devise a sort of pay per use model. You don’t feel like paying a lumpsum for a movie that you don’t know if you will watch again, great, but then, there should be a fee for each time you watch afresh. That is not happening in streaming. As of now, Netflix is profitable and still forking out money to acquire properties but a recent look at their India offerings would make clear that they are struggling to keep up with Hotstar and Amazon Prime which have deeper pockets. It’s not clear to me that long term, they can still provide high quality offerings without substantially hiking the price. You can see the evidence clearly in music where the nominal subscription for Spotify or Youtube music is simply not enough to pay a decent value to musicians. There should be a rate for every new viewing/listening. And a decent chunk of that rate should be passed on to the artist. That is a model that would be fair to artist, distributor and user.
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Jayram
January 27, 2022
“But not watching it in theater reduces the incentive for filmmakers to make those kind of films which don’t get the same reception in their theatrical run, as simple as that.” – At least I watched the Telugu movie Skylab in theaters because I wanted to see and encourage something new in Telugu and also because it was Nithya Menen’s production debut. And there was nobody else in the theater! Has anyone faced this situation before?
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Madan
January 27, 2022
Jayram: Never been completely alone but there were two films that I saw with a very, very small audience, barely touching ten people, if that – Bridget Jones Diary (don’t ask why!) and Borg-McEnrose.
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therag
January 27, 2022
@Madan, I think you countered your own counter-argument there. Before streaming, the art lover paid a “fair price” to get the art he wanted. Now the equation is rigged in favor of the consumer and the platform.
All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t expect to like every film you watch, or consider films that disappointed you to be a waste of money. If you want to try something new, a certain proportion of films (that you chose to watch) will be disappointing. That is just the cost of experimentation. “Wanting to like every film you watch” is exactly how Disney-Marvel has come to rule Hollywood today.
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Madan
January 27, 2022
“Before streaming, the art lover paid a “fair price” to get the art he wanted. Now the equation is rigged in favor of the consumer and the platform.” – No, what I am arguing for is a midway between both models where the customer doesn’t just pay a cheap subscription for unlimited use through the month but a pay per use. Each time you watch a film, you should have to pay something. Each time you listen to an album on Spotify, you should pay. This accounts for shaviswa’s argument of “what happens if the film I bought a DVD of turned out to be not to my liking” but also puts a price tag on repeat watches.
That said:
“All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t expect to like every film you watch, or consider films that disappointed you to be a waste of money.” – I can’t not agree and yes, this is exactly what has led to the Marvelisation of Hollywood. The notion that a mediocre film is like having a crime committed against you is what leads to risk averse behaviour on the part of both maker and audience.
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KP
January 27, 2022
Mani always hypes his movie budget but in his movies all are under paid. I will not be surprised if ARR stills takes his first movie payment from him. Two parts together will not be more than 120-150 cr.
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Voldemort
February 10, 2022
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/what-went-wrong-at-westland-books-11644074427112.html
A very insightful read.
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