Readers Write In #725: My Chiyaan Vikram Story – Part Two: Chapter ‘Thangalaan’

By G Waugh

It has been a while since I stopped expecting anything from Vikram’ s films except may be only one thing for which I hope I may be forgiven. His imposing presence adorned by a very powerful face with distinctive features – half-sunken, yet dynamic eyes nestled comfortably away from the blinding sunshine under a very prominent forehead, a long, unique pipe-like nose that dovetails neatly into sometimes long moustaches all of which team up towards splitting his intense face into four distinct rugged quadrants.

May be after Shankar’s ‘I’, having been disappointed every time I expect a strong comeback from him just like a hapless girl (remember Manikandan’s Lover) in love waiting for her boyfriend to change his frivolous ways and yet ending up getting disillusioned at every such opportunity while finding absolutely no ways to get out of this at the same time, I can say this at least with emphasis – I have finally learnt the hard way on how to temper my expectations on my hero even if the trade talk sometimes pushes me off balance like how it did for Thangalaan.

With no hard feelings as I am writing this, I am still trying to get my head around what made the Studio Green CEO Dhananjayan to remark that Thangalaan will be the film that will not only be a landmark one but the first one to save Tamil Cinema from the lean patch it has been undergoing currently. Initially it was rumoured that the film took more than 100 crores to make and the fact that it was marketed as a pan-India film led me to believe that Thangalaan will be one of a kind not only in Pa Ranjith’s career but also in Tamil Cinema.

I probably haven’t seen confidence (I realised it was hubris after watching the film) on such a scale lately which was bolstered by the same attitude displayed by the producer Gnanavelraja in an interview to Baradwaj Rangan as well.

Though being a Vikram fan and knowing better to expect only a very mediocre film from my hero given his track record post Anniyan, these words of excessive hoopla continued to linger in a corner of my mind. But the trailer showed very clearly that the film wasn’t mounted on any grand scale approaching the levels suggested by the makers of the film, given the fact that most of the scenes appeared to have only twenty people at the max in every frame that too in dry, barren and desolate landscapes with the scorching sun being a constant presence in all of them. I seriously couldn’t understand from the trailer where the much-touted 100 crores could have gone towards and not one frame displayed any kind of supposed and the much-vaunted ‘visual or technical grandeur’. But in promotional events too, one of the greatest actresses in India, Parvathy Thiruvothu had mentioned that “You guys aren’t primed for what you are gonna witness on screen” with regard to the ‘one-of-a-kind’ experience that the film was ready to deliver us. She is an artist I respect so much for her work and intelligence that I couldn’t refrain from trusting her.

When I entered the theatre on Independence Day, I was assured of at least one thing -“even if there wasn’t any visual grandeur, with a film maker of Ranjith’s calibre I could not be disappointed for expecting a work of substantial emotional grandeur at least”. Even if the film fails commercially,I told myself that the art film buff in me could be satiated at least given Ranjith’s extraordinary work in recent times with Sarpatta and Natchatiram Nagargiradhu. But the Vikram fan in me was awake all the time warning the art film buff in me to temper expectations as much as possible as not to end up disappointing myself.

The first half worked for me in the sense that one or other thing kept happening in subsequent frames that I wasn’t bored at least. I am not someone who disses a film for bad CG work and as a result the poorly done black panthers and the snakes that pounced upon the extras in the film during the so-called scenes of ‘grandeur’ didn’t bother me much.

Till interval even if the film wasn’t in the ilk of Bahubali or RRR, I was at least happy that the engagement factor was intact with most of the audience responding reasonably well to the film.

But there was one obvious problem that kept disturbing me throughout despite much to be satisfied about – the very ordinary ‘world-building’ around the main characters that Ranjith usually is a master of.

If you remember Kaala, even if the second half post the death of Rajni’s wife was a disappointment, the first half was a gem in terms of how the people in the slum, their equations with each other, their sense of belonging to the place they had been confined to, their lack of privacy given the lack of adequate space for living, their desperation towards achieving a better standard of living, their relationships with their leader Kaala, everything was so meticulously crafted and almost every character registered within very little screen time allocated to each one. Same happened with respect to Sarpatta too, the idiosyncratic Daddy character played by John Vijay, the Dancing Rose, the women in Kabilan’s life – everyone seemed to exist in a parallel world and the film to use the time-worn cliché, appeared to be just dispensing ‘slices’ of their lives edited to suit the rhythms of the film to the audience. Even if none of Ranjith’s films except Sarpatta were perfect films in my opinion, I have always acknowledged the fact that Ranjith is a master, despite the time constraints that accompany a commercial feature film as opposed to long web-series and OTT productions, of creating milieus that are credible, rooted and extremely nuanced to people like me who don’t share and know much about his very distinct social and historical background.

But here in Thangalaan, everything was so perfunctorily constructed and every relationship was ‘literal’ in the sense that nothing apart from explicit dialogue established the characters, their equations among themselves and with their oppressors of the present and the past. The maximum number of people in the village didn’t exceed more than twenty or something and I didn’t for one moment, feel like I was looking at a close-knit village headed by Thangalaan as opposed to a hastily assembled refugee colony which was desperately trying to prove to me through rehearsed dialogue that they all belonged to one single place and soil. The way the young couple one of whom was played by Harikrishnan was shown, the large family of Thangalaan, the ‘social movement’ led by Pasupathy’s character – everything was depicted with so little conviction that I felt like I was watching a school play or an old outdated film like Kappalotiya Tamizhan which existed solely for the purpose of imbibing patriotism in the audience as opposed to narrating a story. The history of the people living there and their connections with yesteryear kings and their problems with the caste hierarchy imposed by ‘Brahmins’ upon them are all spelt out so loudly and broadly that a street drama performed by Kamal Haasan’s Nallasivam character could have given us more nuance and credibility.

In the second half, if a newly married person has to be shown to be missing his wife at the ‘gold-mine’ commissioned by the Englishman, he is condemned to weep loudly explicitly announcing how much he is suffering on account of that. And when the women are ‘gifted’ with blouses to wear and if the scene is supposed to establish their happiness that reflects a relief from their pent-up agony for not having been allowed to wear one for so long, Ranjith chooses to give them a ‘broad’ song and a dance sequence. Couldn’t have scenes that elaborate on their centuries-old ‘sartorial’ longings and frustrations been placed in the first half so as to prime us for the warm and happy pay-off in the second? Similarly, couldn’t the scene where Thangalaan enters the village on a horse fully dressed up with a firearm in one hand like a smug Englishman surveying the spoils of a successful raid upon enemy territory, worked much better had scenes depicting the exploitation of the natives at the hands of local feudal landlords been written with much more finesse and conviction? As a half-baked film critic is it my responsibility to give suggestions to a master craftsman like Ranjith on how to write better scenes as to give a much more satisfying final product that befits the actor of Vikram’s stature?

After almost the entire village moves to the ‘gold-mine’, there is nothing in the film that we haven’t seen before or predicted already. I didn’t like Bala’s Paradesi much but seeing Thangalaan I was forced to acknowledge that that was a much better film in terms of depicting treachery, exploitation and oppression. As the film meandered towards the climax, having felt absolutely nothing at the travails endured by Thangalaan’s men so far for none of my fault, I was bracing for a juicy conclusion at least like money-lender Gounder’s foolish optimism in Senthil’s howling in the illustrious Vadakappatti Ramasamy comedy. Even if the climax of Kaala didn’t fit in well with the tone of the overall movie, I still love how well it was shot with a daring decision to use a stirring song and dance sequence to narrate how the whole slum rises as one whole body to chase and pulverise the foreign invader to dust, even in the physical absence of their leader.

Sadly in Thangalaan, the reveal in the climax about Vikram’s past was extremely underwhelming at least for me and if the ending where the natives get their hands finally on ‘real gold’ was supposed to be poetic and beyond the reach of my layman’s ability to comprehend, I don’t understand how such an ‘incomprehensible’ film could be expected to emulate the box-office history of Bahubali and other pan-India releases, resuscitating a dying Tamil cinema market in the process.

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In 2015, when Vikram released 10 Endradhukulla, he unwittingly chose to take on a struggling Vijay Sethupathi at the box-office who was betting on his Naanum Rowdy Thaan. 10 Endradhukulla was allocated the highest number of shows and the latter the smallest screens in any multiplex in Chennai. Within a couple of days, the dynamic completely reversed and a largely unknown Vignesh Shivan shot to fame with Naanum Rowdy Thaan turning out to be a blockbuster slaying the in-form ‘Goli Soda’ director Vijay Milton.

This time, an in-form Pa Ranjith took on an out-of-form Ajay Gnanamuthu (after collaborating with my hero in Cobra) and the ‘10 Endradhukulla vs Naanum Rowdy Thaan’ fairytale has repeated itself. Thangalaan is now getting moved to smaller screens allocated lesser number of shows and a largely oblivious De Monte Colony 2 has turned out to be a blockbuster. And we have a critically acclaimed series of films in Vaazhai and Kottukaali releasing this week.

If you think I am blaming everything on Vikram’s bad luck and exculpating him, I would like to clarify. Vikram himself has mentioned that he wants to make only one film at a time implying with confidence that that is the only way to deliver memorable films to the audience that stand the test of time. If you think he is sounding like Hollywood’s Daniel Day Lewis, you cannot be blamed. I know Daniel Day Lewis is someone like Fountainhead’s Howard Roark who doesn’t care for others’ estimation of his work and that destinies of his films at the box office probably doesn’t affect him much. But has Vikram reached that level of maturity or ‘Zen-ness’ with respect to how he is being received? If yes, why was he ‘provoked’ to retort with hostility, when one of the reporters at Thangalaan’s promotional event referred to his much smaller fan-base despite being enormously talented, comparing the same with that of his peers?

As a Vikram fan, to conclude, I have the following to say. ‘Boss, I cannot blame you for the directors you have chosen to work. In fact, you have always worked with the most enviable directors in the industry and apart from Karthik Subbaraj and Mani Ratnam, all of them have only succeeded in bringing your stardom down a few notches reserving their laziest works for you, despite your extra-ordinary performances in these films. I understand that there is only so much as an actor you can do. You cannot completely dictate how a story needs to be told and determine the box-office prospects of the film at the scripting stage or on the sets. Granted. But there is one thing you can do to realize certain things. You are not in Hollywood to do a Daniel Day Lewis. And you are not a Prithviraj who finished hundred films before he turned 35. We don’t have such a vast pool of film-making talent waiting to make films and resources in parallel in search of them. And needless to say, age is not on your side, how much ever you succeed in deflating or inflating your physique. If an actor throws away his career on drinking or lack of self-discipline like Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, I can understand. If an actor loses his stardom, on account of bad films, I can understand. If an actor loses his market because of lack of talent or inability to adapt to changing expectations of audiences, I can understand. But what you have been doing is beyond the comprehension of anyone who has been observing you for decades. If you think you will do only one film at a time, are you so deluded an individual not to understand and appreciate that a very commercial script like Bheemaa doesn’t deserve two years of your valuable career, especially when you were very much around your peak? Ask Lingusamy himself. He will tell you what a terrible decision that was! I am not going into the mess that was ‘I’. Two more years wasted on a work that anyone barely remembers it today. Again, I am not going into how bad those scripts were. They might have sounded good during narration and a lot could have been lost on translation to screen. Granted. But these two films should have taught you something by this time. I remember you had completed filming Thangalaan in July 2023 and it is August 2024 already. How much have you completed Veera Dheera Sooran? For more than one year, what were you doing? Preparing for that character? Aren’t you doing this for every film of yours and don’t you see very clearly that none of these films deserve such Siberian prison stint-like efforts? Will you prepare for years together referring to the best libraries in town for the finest reference books, ransacking Google for answers, burning the midnight oil only to write a class test that will be evaluated by your classmate? Or aren’t you getting enough offers lately as to getting condemned to do only one film at a time? If yes, don’t you see very clearly that your decision to waste months together for every unworthy film of yours is the biggest reason for that? For a film like Irumugan, for first fifteen minutes where you were supposed to sport long hair and a thicker beard, didn’t you waste months together at home doing absolutely nothing but waiting for the hair to grow? Don’t you repeat these acts of absolute stupidity for every film of yours post Anniyan? Or do you have a sure and a vast fan-base like that of Aamir Khan or Rajnikanth who might unwaveringly support your films at the box-office no matter how long they take to gestate? I still remember pretty well that you had completed your portions for Shankar’s ‘I’ almost a year before you started your next disaster that was 10 Endradhukulla. Between all those months, I am sure you were preparing for that illustrious nameless character, sculpting your malleable physique, tinkering with your sub-conscious and trying to enter the perfect psychological zone to transform into the physical manifestation of that much celebrated Dostevyskian character. Ok let me stop with this. I know you want to make history by creating memorable characters on screen and I love you for that. You were outstanding in Thangalaan, no second thoughts on that. You are the greatest actor I have seen and your calibre is already among the all-time greats of Sivaji Ganesan, Marlon Brando, Mammootty and Kamal Haasan. But in twenty years from now, you will be gone at least off-screen. You think you will be remembered for posterity among the aforementioned greats for your thesping abilities. Wrong. You will not. But if you don’t change course, you will be definitely remembered for something else altogether. The first most talented actor-star in the history of World Cinema who squandered his career away by over-preparing and working too hard and wasting precious years of life, despite having choices. Just like thousands of Dalits in history who toiled all their lives like that Thangalaan character of yours and getting absolutely nothing in return, fading into oblivion, dying of over-work, you will be gone, wasted, forever from everyone’s minds and of course, from history too. Time is gold, my dear deluded Thangalaan. Wake up and simply do more films!’.