Musing on Raavanan

If you keep thinking about the movie a week after you are out of the movie hall, it is worth writing about it. Lets just call this the extended process of enjoying the movie. Yes, I did say I enjoyed the movie. It is an enjoyable movie ... not your normal 'enjoyable' movies but a rare work of art in Indian cinema.

Lets start with the well known story... or is it really that well-known? Is the story really Ramayanam or is it just a facade or an allegory? The story has much more parallels to Veerapan vs Devaram, LTTE vs IPKF, Kashmiris vs Indian army or Al-Queda vs US. It is almost the fourth edition of the Roja, Bombay, Dil Se sequence, only that this time the director gets more into the head of the villain and asks the question is he really the villain or more aptly, is he the real villain?

This movie is all about exploring the thin gray line between virtues and vices and how in YOUR eyes, a virtue in one person is a vice in another... again in YOUR eyes - the characters themselves do not seem to have any moral qualms.

Is Rahini falling for Veera a vice or a virtue? Is it a virtue because we know Veera is a "good person"? Can a hero lust another person's wife? Is it ok to gamble away your wife to kill a terrorist? If that is not wrong, why is abducting the half-sister wrong? Is it ok to denude a person and humiliate him? what if it is the adorable half-sister?? If a man hunt and a shoot-out at your home is wrong why does ransacking the tent in the forest feel right?

It is not just the big three characters that have these contradictions built in. A lot of characters Step outside the good vs evil stereotype. Kattapanchayathu brother, police deputy with below the belt tactics, An aanjaneyar with the worst record in the department. Speaking of characters and characterization a special kudos for having a transvestite character with not a single reference to his/her sexuality.

In the Tamil version I saw, the casting is perfect. Aishwarya is the perfect mettu kudi girl and the story actually pivots around her. She has handled it really well - with equal proportions of pride and rage. Vikram seems to be a natural and Prithviraj sufficiently underplays to let only the dark side of his character come to the forefront.

Going back to Ramayanam as the facade - it is not as blatant a reproduction of Ramayanam nor or there mindless parallels in the movie. If you really think about it, you can count the no. of paralles in your hand. (14 days, 10 heads, Soorpanakai, Anjaneyar, Anumaar meeting Seetha, and a cleverly concealed Jadayu) - but they are so strategically placed that the creator fools you into thinking it is Ramayanam and that gives him the liberty to tell his story without compromising for karunanidhis (Iruvar) or Bal Thakreys (Bombay).

" Un pondattikkaghavae unna kollalaaam... aana athae pondatikkaghavae unna uyirodavum vidalaam' , "kadavulae, enakku kovatha kudu, ivanghala en kitta anbha irukkka vaikkathae", "Aval kannula bayamae illainnae, aprom eppadinnae avalai kolrathu" - I bet if I said these were by Vairamuthu, you would have said those are the greatest words written. The one place where the dialogs are plastic is in the train sequence. But, if your intention is to make your wife leave you, that's exactly how you would talk.. and yes you will talk about polygraph too.

The director challenges you to sit up and pay attention to every frame of the movie. A single reference to Dev being an encounter specialist or Veera being the menace of the society, Indirect references to Veera being well-read, The subtle difference btwn love at first sight and love by sight.

By the way, Veera's falling in love with Aishwarya is one of the most beautiful sequences pictured in Indian cinema. Veera does not fall for her when Aishwarya jumps off the cliff or when he jumps after her trying to rescue her. But he falls for her the instance he sees Aishwarya falling from the branch of the tree and surface from the water choked up. The vulnerability of the character in that moment affects him in a deep way. His desperation to protect her manifests itself as love and he does not like that. This immediate moral struggle is captured well by Vairamuthu in "Aghini Pazhamendru therinthirinthum, adikkadi naaku thudikkarathae".


This is not a screen play strong movie and the strongest manifestation of this is that the final duel seems to erupt out of nowhere. Many Manirathnam movies off late have this issue (Iruvar, Guru) where the gravity of the climax feel out of proportion to the scenes that build up to it. It may be because all these movies are more character-centric that the director eats up too much time in establishing the characters and there is no more room for a solid screen play string. Also, unlike a lot of other international movies, the director does not get the benefit of the flow of a good story handed to him. Indian creators mostly operate in a silo, ignoring the good works from the literary field and end up carrying the extra burden of creating the story too. May be that is something our production houses should consider - Get the stories from literary field and just build a screen version of that story.


Another aspect that is distracting to me is the movie is trying hard to dazzle you - with cinematography, locations or art direction. In a more authentic work, the bridge or the huge stone idol would have been introduced earlier and you will be familiar with the props when they eventually take the center stage, allowing you to focus on the proceedings. By trying hard to impress, the director has distracted us enough to locus focus on the script.

In the end, it is not often that you get to think about an Indian movie in these aspects and I think that is the proof that this is great piece of work. It is completely ok if you do not like Raavanan, But please do not claim you are a connoisseur of quality cinema or pretend you understand cinema and tear up the movie in your 'reviews'.