Readers Write In #840: Coolie and the Art of Collective Catharsis

By Venky Ramachandran

For the religious Indian, satsang is the divine communal space where collective catharsis unfolds. For the cineligious Indian, cinema theater is the divine communal space (filled with dark matter) where collective catharsis unfolds. Both serve the same purpose. They bring those who know a certain truth (sat) together (sang).

Isn’t that why it is pointless to argue with those who have drunk the hemlock of untruth? Isn’t that why fan wars continue to exist despite its utter pointlessness? Why do we Indians love cinema with every fiber of our being? Isn’t cinema (and cricket) supposed to be the first love in our collective rites of passage as we grow up from our halcyon days to discover what we are meant to do in our lives?

In the case of the religious Indian, the truth is hyperlocal. For our gods shift shape and form every 150 kilometers across the country. For the cineligious Indian, we don’t have that mind boggling diversity. Thank Goodness. We have the last few living Gods around us and if the predictions they say are true, we are quickly forgetting the art of making Gods.

To hell with the smartphone revolution which broke every matinee idol inside our heads we had painstakingly built during the pre-smart phone days!.

Rajni is one of those last Gods whose fifty year divine run deserves a celebration. It doesn’t matter even if he has almost fallen from the crevices of our dreams and myths. It doesn’t matter that we’ve glimpsed his fragile humanness that employs spirituality as deftly as a magician employs card tricks. We celebrate him because we love the nostalgia he evokes in us.

I remember dancing in my living room, wearing my dad’s sun glasses with a mix tape of all Rajini introduction songs. Who can forget those introduction songs? For a country that gives almost equal rights to God’s poets (say Nammazhvar) to stand besides the Lord himself, How can we forget the divine caroller SPB who sung the glory of Rajini? As I drove back from the FDFS screening of Coolie last night, I kept wondering what did I miss from the Rajini of the yesteryears?

I missed SPB for sure. Although I found myself enjoying the thathithom trance music that Anirudh masterfully plays out when Rajni joins hands with Upendra in the mansion fight sequence. Oh Gosh! It was pure goose-flesh inducing magic.

Coolie worked beautifully for me. It was refreshing to see Rajini treated, as BR beautifully pointed out, with dignity. It was refreshing to see Rajini without the crutches of moral massaging, without being used as a placard in which any ideology can be projected at scale towards the masses. It was refreshing to see Rajini drink alcohol to retro tunes (was it kaali?) and let himself loose. Much like the powerful Kaithi scene where Karthi narrates a tale from the past, it was quite powerful to hear Deva recount the story of his past to Simon.

What didn’t work for me? Aamir made a caricature of himself. He just couldn’t bring any ounce of delicious wickedness within him for a scene that required scene-chewing levels of intensity. I also couldn’t believe Sathyaraj as an inventor. There could have been a subtle throw back to his inventor level curiosity in the past. But these are minor irritants in a movie that left me smiling all throughout. I didn’t expect anything earth-shattering. My expectations were minimal. I wanted something sweet that made me briefly leave my mind palace and indulge in something that evoked childhood nostalgia. Lokesh delivered that beautifully!