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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Playful Tamil noir
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Playful Tamil noir

Playful Tamil noir

Dark and racy: Jackie Shroff (in white kurta) ; and (below) Yasmin Ponappa in stills from Aaranya KaandamPremium

Dark and racy: Jackie Shroff (in white kurta) ; and (below) Yasmin Ponappa in stills from Aaranya Kaandam

In the canto of the Ramayan known as the Aaranya Kaandam, things have just hit the fan. Dasharath has died of heartbreak. Ram, Lakshman and Sita have been expelled to the forest, leaving behind two brothers, an assortment of mothers, and a kingdom ruled by a regent. Their exile from Ayodhya is soon compounded by their exile from each other; Ravana kidnaps Sita, and Ram, sinking into grief “like an elephant into mud", Valmiki tells us, withdraws even from his brother. Of all the epic’s cantos, this is the bleakest, the fates tossing around even a god in human form.

Bleakness is also the stock in trade for Aaranya Kaandam, the Tamil film that is the revelatory debut of a young director named Thiagarajan Kumararaja. Even its trailer—titillating us on YouTube ever since the film won the Grand Jury Prize at the South Asian International Film Festival last October—features, beneath chirpy narration, recurrent images of personal anguish. Brows frown, faces crumple, beatings are administered;?at least once, every lead character is shown engulfed by loneliness, exiled unto themselves.

Dark and racy: Jackie Shroff (in white kurta) ; and (below) Yasmin Ponappa in stills from Aaranya Kaandam

Thankfully, film-makers learnt to stick their tongues into their cheeks, to inject irony and wryness into their noir. Vaa Quarter Cutting, a 2010 movie for which Kumararaja wrote one song, applies some of the tropes of noir—its eclectic characters; its mysterious dangers; its chiaroscuro look—to an enjoyably ludicrous plot. On a dry day, two ditherers hurtle through the night to procure a quarter-bottle of Old Monk rum, an alcoholic reprisal of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Roughly halfway through, the directors offer us a broad wink; during one misadventure, our heroes pass a wall plastered with the most iconic pulp image in recent memory: the jasmine-bedecked, lavishly proportioned, gun-wielding amma from the cover of The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction.

Aaranya Kaandam belongs to this strain of playful noir, and it’s a better movie for it. The gloom of moral ambiguity is cut by the banter between the father and his exasperated son (“Are you really an idiot or do you just act like one?" the son hollers in despair; the line sounds so much better in Tamil and in context that it gets the film’s biggest laugh). Hectic chase sequences are set to curious music: an Irish jig melody once, Vivaldi another time, plinking piano notes on yet another occasion. Like Quentin Tarantino, Kumararaja constructs elaborate conversational riffs that go nowhere; in Kill Bill 2, Bill and the Bride discuss Superman, and in Aaranya Kaandam, gangsters swap pick-up lines that work on women. “Ask her if she likes Kamal Haasan or Rajinikanth," one hoodlum says. “That’ll tell you the kind of aunty she is." This sweet advisory is dispensed even as, in an adjacent room, Singaperumal is handing Subbu a ferocious thrashing—levity and cruelty, close neighbours in a crowded world.

Aaranya Kaandam released in select theatres on 10 June.

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Published: 27 Jun 2011, 10:48 AM IST
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