Readers Write In #586: Nanpagal Nostalgia

By Karthik Amarnath

When Sun network launched KTV in 2001, it was a watershed moment for Tamil cinema viewers. The movie channel was first of its kind in Tamil, and turned out to be a carousel of Tamil movies, parading a huge library to screen four shows a day, seven days a week. So many movies that were done and dying in some decrepit warehouse got their moment to shine again. Back then I didn’t care much how good the movies were. It was the pre-YouTube era. To just turn the TV on at any random time and catch a Tamil movie was something. 

And not all the movies were bad. I loved the KTV afternoon shows, which were usually old movies. I think they used to call it the classic matinee.  I’d watched old movies even before but only the really famous ones- the big Bhimsingh weepies, the A P Nagarajan mythologicals, the MGR mega blockbusters and the like. But through KTV I could catch a Sabotage inspired Bommai, an underseen  KB gem like Punnagai, a young M N Nambiar playing Digambara Saamiyar, and so many small movies that I’d heard so little about. It’s the small movies that let you connect to an era in the way that small moments let you connect with life. 

Almost any afternoon I was at home, I’d switch to KTV; the post lunch stupor was perfect for a gentle slide into an older era of cinema. It was a slower era where the films were more like stage plays captured on camera. Many shots were static and scenes unfurled like slow symphonies. The meat was in the writing and acting, and all the drama was in dialogue. Those lazy afternoons were filled with voices of that era, from Sivaji’s booming baritone and Saroja Devi’s cheerful chirps, to SSR’s diction and MR Radha’s two toned theatrics. And adorning the aural tapestry was Kannadasan’s gorgeous poetry set to MSV’s melodies. 

This KTV phase didn’t last very long. Life caught up, then YouTube followed. But I was reminded of those days recently when I watched Lijo Jose Pellissery’s extraordinary Nanpagal Nerathu Mayakkam. Old Tamil movies have such a strong presence in this film, that I wondered if Lijo Jose, who is about the same age as me, had also experienced something like a KTV phase. He even has a character who’s plonked permanently in front of a TV which seems to be only playing old Tamil movies. When I saw this character leaning against a pillar, legs stretched out, silently absorbing one old movie after another, it really took me back to those lazy afternoons. 

But the kicker in the film is that this character, a grandmother, is blind. So she just fills her days with sounds and songs from those old movies. Her TV is never turned off. Just try to imagine her existence, completely devoid of vision, in a dream like state. Its like sitting on a surreal stage where everything must feel like a sound show. Its impossible for her to know when the show stops and when life resumes. There’s a defining stretch of the film when James, the protagonist played by Mammooty, takes off from his bus, walks through a village until he reaches the home of this grandmother. For no apparent reason, James assumes the personality of her son, Sundaram.  And the grandmother instantly accepts him with a gleaming smile. Everyone else is in shock like they’re trapped inside a movie they didn’t sign up for, but the grandmother’s so blissfully unperturbed at all the drama unfolding around her, that it begs the question if the difference between cinema and reality even matter to her? 

Thats a great metaphor to view this movie. Take the soundscape of the film, it’s just like the grandmother’s, and almost entirely composed of dialogues and songs from old Tamil movies. Partly this is because the film spends a lot of time inside her house where her TV is always on. But even outside of that, we hear old Tamil songs played all the time, on the bus radio, off a town loudspeaker, or in other houses in the grandmother’s village. In that pivotal stretch when Mammooty walks off the bus all the way to her house, a different movie might have used composed music there, maybe a haunting piece, to signal the desolate spirit that comes to possess Mammooty’s character. Instead what we hear as background is a near unbroken segment of the audio track of the movie Ratha Kaneer, which channels the duplicitous spirit of its thespian, M R Radha. 

If you’ve seen Ratha Kaneer— I had first caught it on KTV during their M R Radha Vaaaaram— you’d see why it was chosen as a background for Mammooty’s transformation from James to Sundaram. Ratha Kaneer is about another kind of transformation, that of a heartless rich man who ends up discovering his humanity. Like Mammooty’s arrogant and miserly James who arrives in a Tamil village from Kerala, Radha’s Mohanasundaram too arrives from foreign shores with disdain for Tamil people and culture. But Mohan slowly loses everything he owned, to the point of shedding his own skin (he gets stricken by leprosy), that towards the end he is literally unrecognizable to his near and dear. James’s transformation in Nanpagal isn’t so drastic, but the moment he takes off his shirt and puts on Sundaram’s, he too is no longer recognizable as the person he was. 

Nanpagal isn’t very clear on what caused James to assume Sundaram’s persona. Was it an act of divine intervention? The film after all opens at the drama troupe’s pilgrimage to Velankanni. And when the troupe’s bus leaves Velankanni, the first thing we hear is Sirgazhi’s Irukkum Idathai Vittu, a song from A P Nagarajan’s Thiruvarutchelvar where God descends on earth and beckons his devotee. Even if you didn’t know the song or the film, the temple bell timbre of Sirgazhi’s voice leaves little doubt on the song’s call to faith. But James is a self professed atheist, much like M R Radha’s Mohan in Ratha Kaneer— or like Radha himself, if you want to get even more meta. That begs the question if the role of the pious Sundaram was a means to draw out the faith in James? 

There’s a beautiful line in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s beautiful film Drive my Car where a director tells his actor, “When you say Chekov’s lines, it brings out the real you.” It’s an odd thing to say to an actor who’s talent lies in portraying someone other than himself. But that line gets to the heart of Hamaguchi’s film which is about the power of art to blend identities and languages and cultures. In fact, both Drive my car and Nanpagal are films where reality and the stage intermingle, where the lines between an actor and character are blurred, where art and life seep into each other. In Nanpagal, James is an actor while Sundaram is not. But when James assumes Sundaram’s persona, we see him put on one performance after another. At first, he’s entertaining his friends with stories from their past. Later, he’s at a bar enacting lines from Sivaji’s famous double role in Gauravam. The latter is a beautifully framed scene, lit with twin lamps and Mammooty keeps switching sides for the two roles, while the actual movie plays in the background.

This act though is only a prelude to James-as-Sundaram’s biggest performance, which happens in front of Sundaram’s house. Like an artist in an amphitheater, he’s framed in the midst of two pillars, and he delivers a heart wrenching monologue beseeching his audience to believe him. All through this scene, a faint audio track of Gauravam continues to play through the grandmother’s TV, where a different kind of performance has concluded. Sivaji as a lawyer had put on his typically theatrical show to to get a judge to believe his story. But at the end of these acts, what the characters get is not the warm embrace of an audience but the cold irony of being a performer. When someone is so good at putting on an act, why would an audience ever believe that they’re speaking the truth?

Listening to the audio track of Gauravam took me back many years, to a time when we had a stack full of bootlegged cassette tapes, with complete audio tracks of Tamil films. Our collection stretched back to the era of Karnan and Kandan Karunai, and Gauravam was a perennial favorite. When you listen to the audio track of films like Gauravam or Ratha Kaneer, even the small segments you get to hear in Nanpagal, you instantly recognize what great voice acting we had then. Just listen to the derision dripping in M R Radha’s tone when he says “Mister Pillai” or listen to how starkly different and yet full bodied the two Sivaji characters sound in Gauravam. History might not be too kind to the “A” for Acting that went along with these voices, but taken as “A” for audio alone, their legacy leaves much to cherish.

And cherish is what Lijo Jose has done in Nanpagal. Unlike his previous films that were defined by kinetic filmmaking with bursts of movement and bedazzling single takes, Nanpagal is entirely shot with static cameras. The scenes are allowed to gently unfold like the titular midday reverie, and there’s time to soak in the songs and dialogues from those old films. But none of that takes away from Lijo Jose’s visual artistry which shines through in the way he frames his characters. We always see the actors shot between pillars or walls, or through doorways or windows, making it look like like they’re inside a screen, in a “scene.” My favorite of these comes towards the end where we get a moment where Sundaram’s wife is seen through a window, and James’s wife is out sitting on a verandah. One is a character inside the James-Sundaram drama while the other is a spectator outside. In a beautiful expression of art and life mirroring each other, we see Sundaram’s daughter and James’s son walk up to their mothers at the same time. All of them just want the show to end.

And how does the show end? With an old Tamil film song, of course, a beautiful ballad from a forgotten 60s film. It’s a song I’ve heard countless times just for the sublime simplicity of Kannadasan’s lyrics. In another film, this song could have sounded cheesy or absurd, but here we’ve been so primed to the soundscape of this film, that the acting, the mood, the music and the words, whose meaning hits you both literally and metaphorically, all come together to produce a cinematic moment for the ages. 

There I think is the bigger metaphor of this film. Where even old art when resurrected in a new context can be as powerful, if not more than what the original makers intended. Just like the stage artist James from Kerala breathes fresh life into a Tamil man Sundaram who’s passed on, we have a filmmaker Lijo Jose from Kerala who’s film breathes fresh life into an era of Tamil cinema that we’ve gone past. 

Now would Nanpagal Nerathu Mayakkam have worked for me had I not known those old films and songs? Had it not been for my lazy KTV afternoons? I don’t have an answer. But I’m glad that this film let me revisit those Nanpagal Nerathu Memories.