Veeran is the kind of guy you’d club under the category of sandiyar. (It’s basically a spin on the Romeo-Juliet template, where warring families oppose the young lovers getting together.) This is a movie in no hurry to get anywhere real soon, and that’s because it centres on someone in no hurry to get anywhere real soon. After all these years of the cinema, I doubt if anyone actually goes to see a “story” unfold anymore, and Ameer probably knows that his story is his weakest element.
And that’s why so much of Paruthi Veeran works so well. The infrequent bits of exposition are almost apologetic, as if Ameer is telling us that he’d rather show a bored Karthi entertaining himself by bullying a group of folk types into dancing than establish the framework of the narrative. This flavour - really - is the reason for the film’s existence, for entire stretches of screen time are devoted to nothing else. (He’s named Paruthi Veeran, after all.) It’s when this song came on that I realised how completely the director (Ameer) had succeeded in immersing me in his (fictional?) Paruthiyoor. Yuvan may have chosen this number - one of his father’s loveliest creations - to underline the mood of the moment, but it’s too urban, too silken a song for Karthi’s coarse-cotton hero.
There’s a staggering amount of detail here - dancers in exotic costumes, loudspeaker announcements, cattle with balloons tied to their horns, card players oblivious to the ear-shattering noise around them, eunuchs singing the praises of a local big shot to the tune of Gangai karai thottam… These opening frames so completely transfer us to a different world - thanks also to the burnt yellows of the cinematography and Yuvan Shankar Raja’s magnificently earthy score - that much later, when the hero discovers love and when Kaadhalin deepam ondru plays on the soundtrack, it comes as a shock. People who’ve actually grown up (or lived) in villages may or may not find these depictions accurate, but for those of us from the cities, it’s a whirlwind tour of the rites and the rituals and the traditions that make up rural Tamil Nadu. It begins with scenes from a thiruvizha - I would have said “folk fair”, but given the rustic context here, that just doesn’t sound right - and this is possibly the most bravura stretch of atmospheric filmmaking since the manjal neeraatu vizha in Kaadhal. – IF FLAVOUR WERE TO DETERMINE THE WORTHINESS OF A MOVIE Paruthi Veeran is a classic, one for the ages. Sivakumar’s younger boy debuts in a showcase for how good filmmaking can (almost) overcome mediocre material.
0 kommentar(er)
