The way Vasanth builds these emotions on the one hand and the wedding preparations on the other hand is terrific. The setting is a Tambrahm wedding in 1965 and the narrative is driven by the feelings felt by the character played by Delhi Ganesh, who is solid as always. In Payasam, Vasanth tells a simple story with brilliant contributions from his team, editor Sangathamizhan E, cinematographer Sathyan Sooriyan and music director Justin Prabhakaran who is one of the few composers in the anthology who goes with the flow of the film rather than trying to put his signature on the music (which could make it random).
That film too was based on stories by three major writers Ashokamitran, Jeyamohan and Aadhavan but the final product was so much more.
But ever since he shifted to what we might call parallel cinema, with films like Sivaranjiniyum Innum Sila Pengalum, he has become a superb craftsman. You wouldn’t exactly call his work “pure cinema”.
His mainstream films were more about the writing and the performances. But the early Vasanth was a maker of pleasant, middlebrow dramas about the middle class. Usually, directors start out strong and then lose their craft and sense of storytelling as they go along. Vasanth’s trajectory has been one of the most unusual in Tamil cinema. Vasanth Sai makes one of the best films of the anthology. They say people become better actors as they grow older, have more life experience. His pauses, his gestures - you believe every moment he’s in. And yet, there’s no ‘wow’ by the end which feels like a cheap twist. We feel as mindfucked as the Prasanna character. The writing is solid and builds its sci-fi universe really well, with well-timed explanations that never feel like spoon feeding. And he does something that is very difficult to do in our films: he gets the right mix of Tamil and English in the dialogues. He also does a hat tip to Indian myths by naming a couple Vishnu and Lakshmi. He name-drops both Christopher Nolan and Stanley Kubrick. It’s overtly derivative of Hollywood and the director himself makes no bones about it. The film is Karthik Naren’s Project Agni, and it’s a very curious creature. This is the hasya rasa ( comedy) but the one time I laughed out loud was in the next film, when the character played by Prasanna is thoroughly mindfucked and tells Arvind Swamy’s character, “Now, I’ll have the whisky.” Again at the end, we are left with a sense of generic-ness. Yogi Babu plays a Yogi Babu-like character: someone from a modest background becomes a big comedy star and returns to his old school to give a speech recalling incidents from the past. Do we really need to emphasise the sadness on someone’s face with two lines of a sad song? Isn’t the acting enough? Priyadarshan’s Summer of ‘92 is especially guilty of this, where the score is as non-stop like in a cartoon. It has some qualities that we see in quite a few of the films in this anthology: some great craft, some terrific performances, but also, an overall sense of generic-ness.Īlso, many of the films make you wonder if we should begin to rethink the purpose of songs and background scores. But the film is very wordy and doesn’t have the power that the premise suggests.
NAVARASA NAYAGAN KARTHIK VIDEO SONG SERIES
And I loved Revathi’s big speech at the end, which is about a series of what-ifs. It’s certainly interesting as a concept, something like an interior monologue from a Dostoevsky novel.