Readers Write In #808: Thug Life – An experience

By Jay S

Like Kamal Haasan, in his own words, I am selfish. I need movies to change me, not to entertain. My experience with Thug Life is not meant to negate others’ but I hope to just add a voice to the noise. I have a cloying distaste of gangster and action movies and my question has always been ‘Have I ever seen or interacted with gangsters? Then why do I have to suffer so many movies about them?’ similar to Balu Mahendra asking –‘ In real life have you ever had people dancing behind you as love unfolds?’ – My point being – ‘ Why do thugs take up so much screen space when they hardly occupy any space in my life or in my brain?’ The movies that have worked for me in that genre always had something more to give, than a peek into the criminal world. They needed to sneak back into my world.

I wish I could say .. Then Thug Life happened and it blew me away and landed in my brain. No, it did not, but it engaged me. It kept me centered  both ways – I saw MR telling me – ‘You know the mafia story –in many forms, from epic  to comic, (We, as well, made a movie called Nayakan), you know the philosophy – the futility of violence and the cycle of its perpetuation and yet … I will treat you to something new – feeling a philosophy in the language of cinema.

In a beautifully choreographed fast paced action shootout scene in the beginning, I saw a lingering shot of Sakthivel with a kid in his arms staring at the face of the dead innocent bystander casualty – the father of the kid. MR/KH held me right there, in the pain that goes beyond that of a child losing a father – it is the pain of the casualness of this casualty. What the movie Eye in the Sky managed after a whole movie, is conveyed in that single shot. MR and KH demand that you come to this movie with all that accumulated experience from other movies. MR goes a step beyond and asks that you leave your brain behind – for this movie, it gets in the way. Whether that works for you or not is what the fate of this movie depended on. MR isn’t interested in the symbolism of what you can interpret from a scene. He is interested in helping you feel in your gut a philosophy that you know in your brain.  He isn’t dishing out a narrative (partly because of the weak writing) but is crafting a conceptual experience. When all the other movies are pulling in another direction and trying to hit you hard using every writing and movie making craft, this movie just sits back and invites us into the director’s canvas.

I felt a jolt when KH tells a new orphan that the kid won’t die only because he is a shield to KH and later, I sensed a dissonance in the first shot of Kamal and Simbu together – They are close to each other but their eyes hardly meet. They even face slightly off each other. I felt it first and took 3 days to find the words for it. That’s a new experience for the ‘thinking’ me. I sensed that KH lives in a transactional world – one in which in a blink of a butterfly, a handshake becomes a stab. That’s how I experienced what others are calling emotional disconnect. There is no mourning of a dead daughter, there is no bromance or romance, no familial sentiments binding brothers – I felt the lack of all this in the scenes as part of the experience of living in his world – I leave it to the movie pundits to exposition how this was accomplished using cinematography and the other crafts. I don’t know. I only know what my gut knows.  The trigger event happens – equilibrium is disturbed – well known predictable dialogs float in the air with seeds of jealousy, with the lust of power, with the poison of doubt, with the demands made of the gangster’s wife. When extrapolated with all previous movie going or Shakesperean knowledge and the BGM mood, there is drama in the air. 

There is a beautiful shot in the Himalayas where the aerial camera does a U turn on a snow covered mountain road. It totally worked for me to do a reset in my head – I was hardly fazed by the (absence of) realism aspect of SakthiVel arising after a mythical fall. I had settled in for the experience. All the revenge killings that followed was more of an appreciation of the surreal action for me than adding any meta value to the movie.

Nasser-Kamal face off really worked for me with both living in their own reality of enmity and familial feelings but what rounded it all up was KH’s reaction to Nasser’s wallpaper image in his phone. I found Ashok Selvan a presence that matched the zone the movie was – again I am just trying to verbalize a feeling here. After the unevenness of Simbu Trisha faceoff and the half baked bomb blast where the movie gets into symbolic territory (of the vices being left behind), I enjoyed the scene where Kamal reunites with his daughter. While his evolution with the monks made him realize that his wife and daughter are his only true connections in this world, it still precluded him from connecting with the grandson. He doesn’t even know how to react to the baby or its cries. It connects with his clumsiness in Abirami’s kitchen. I also enjoyed the symmetry of Abirami’s questions before and now – ‘ yaaru neenga’ – that was her reality regardless of the brain damage. His and her lives and legacies are their own with each making a guest appearance in the other’s.

Then with the beautiful stretch with Simbu’s death, Aishwarya Lekshmi again brings to my gut cells the continuing pathos of the cycle of violence. Tamil cinema then takes over with the hopeful hark back to ‘poi pullai kuttiya padikka vainga da’ in the grandson’s kanakku parikshai bit. But I enjoyed that Abirami’s ‘Dei Sakthivel’ was the grandson while the older Sathivel settled down finally to the things that really mattered – food, family and a legacy of finally turning state witness. The intercaste wedding and the protection provided by the other caste in law family are a symbolic positive glimpse into the future. The grandkid is still her legacy and the turning away from crime is his.

Movies like Kaidaisi Vivasayi provide a meditative experience from a slice of real life. This movie ponders on the reels of movie lives we have all lived collectively in the mafia world. It invites you in with your old theater tickets, and mafia memory box and lets you make a painting with MR. Story, scene, dialog- everything is cliched but the emotion conveyed is expansive , and larger than the titillation of love, sadness of death, the adrenaline of hatred, the trigger of jealousy. For the first time (for me), a director is trying to embed a philosophy in a cinematic experience within a scene.

This movie is a ballroom dance between the director and the actors. If I got so much from the movie it is as much due to KH acting as it is due to MR direction. His acting found a new purpose – there is not a performance, there is not a character -there only are scenes and he is definitely hauling them high up to the sky. In general, the movie is a ponderance through form. (It is not elevated enough to call it meditative). That’s why it relies heavily on (non-)performances. (You have to make an impact without character build up, story and other instruments). A performance does not work – the actor has to Be – for me this was KH, Aishwarya Lakshmi, Ashok Selvan and possibly Bugs, Abirami. There are no big or small actors in the movie. Because many scenes (the ones that worked) in the movie are like their own kural.

All the time in the movie hall, I was wondering if I would ever get to see Thalaivan Irukkindraan as it was intended to be, which I guess would have been narrative rich as well. The movie definitely is not without flaws and MR may not have reached us all the way with this movie but the director in him (not the writer) is still relevant and operating in the cutting edge of movie making. The generally overdone mafia story in here is just a shorthand framing for the film and its philosophy and an invitation to a dialogue in the language of  cinema (which I did not know I could converse in).  It is an ode to and an opera about the futility of bloodshed, hatred, violence and not one word is being said beyond what is needed for the scene. I saw a poem and some of the verses spoke to me.