Aditya Shrikrishna

H Vinoth’s Jana Nayagan, more importantly Vijay’s Jana Nayagan, or even more accurately Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay’s Jana Nayagan, finally sees the light of day. An obvious propaganda vehicle, Vijay’s cinematic swansong was slated to release in January this year. But the film faced release troubles when the censor certificate was withheld without reason, forcing the makers to approach the courts. The court and censor battle stretched long enough that several things came to pass. The film mysteriously leaked online. Tamil Nadu then had its state elections in April, in which Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam emerged as the biggest party, leading to him taking oath as the state’s Chief Minister on 10 May. It was such an eventful, unprecedented couple of months that the film always had an uphill task, a mere underscoring of the occasion.

Raja (Murali), from Kathir’s debut film, Idhayam (1991), may have become iconic over the years, partly due to the grating niceness and tragic innocence of the character (and mostly due to Ilaiyaraaja’s music). But in a contemporary world in which we reevaluate gender, misogyny and the obsessive nature of love, the idea of unrequited romance makes the conversation feel like the colloquial phrase we use to describe it—one-sided. Rathna Kumar’s superior Meyaadha Maan (2017), refracts the idea through a class lens, where the disparity in economic positions chokes the character out of expressing his true love. This year’s Hollywood phenomenon Obsession reimagines extremities of a nice-guy-dream realized to the point of stifling one life for the other’s wishful fantasy.

There is an incredible time jump a little over halfway into Chidambaram’s Balan: The Boy. A police station hide and seek battle between a police constable and a lost little boy (Adiseshan) occurs in parallel with the search for his identity, conducted by the police officer, the one who’s given the constable babysitting duties. We move between the officer’s investigation outside and the game in the station as the nonplussed constable launches a frenetic search only to hit a wall. With a medium size hole in it small enough for the boy to crawl through. A painful realization dawns on her face and a match cut takes us to a bus window with the solitary face of a teenager speaking a language from another part of India. The whole sequence is hardly a few minutes long, but Chidambaram, cinematographer Shyju Khalid and editor Vivek Harshan take us on such a delirious ride that we transcend time.

Abhinav Sunder Nayak gravitates towards obsessive compulsive curmudgeons. He is only two films old but there is a pattern. If his debut film, Mukundan Unni Associates, is about a dogged, unshakeable lawyer who would stop at nothing—even murder—to accomplish his insurance scam, his sophomore film, Mollywood Times, is about another determined obstinate young man, Vineeth Madhavan (Naslen), an aspiring Malayalam filmmaker. There is a subtle but compelling difference in perception. The rigid and unnavigable world of cinema with its uncompromising characters, vicious businessmen and unforgiving mindsets make Nayak’s favorite traits almost desirable. There are more parallels between Mukundan and Vineeth. They both come from middle-class backgrounds with families that offer them nothing beyond education. It’s really their only privilege. A used car gives a young Vineeth a chance to get out on the road to take in Malayalam film posters for the first time. His father begins to trust his talents only after his short film puts his rationalist grandfather in a coma (this has a hilarious payoff in the third act). What is his reward? Not an expensive camera or budget but an offer to get him admission into a visual communications course. It’s the most a father dreaming of a doctor or an engineer son could do. This class position also determines the potency of their obsession—how far they would go or how rigid they can be in their march towards their goals.

The opening sequence of RJ Balaji’s Karuppu is all sparks and embers in a bichrome backdrop of red and black. It’s a nightmare in which a man gets assaulted by unknown assailants and a majestic rageful God descends to save him. The man, played by Indrans, jolts up in a train and looks at his daughter Binu (Anagha Ravi). The Malayali father and daughter are in Chennai for Binu’s surgery and are soon mugged on the road and stripped of their mode of payment for her treatment—jewelry. After this clear establishment of geography, Karuppu eschews all locational specifics to build a world where folk mythology clashes with a land of comical lawlessness. Only we aren’t sure if the exaggeration is intentional or otherwise.

Mahesh Narayanan’s Patriot begins with a curious disclaimer: “This film is not against digitalization of India”. For any piece of popular entertainment in India today, it helps to be as vanilla and nonconfrontational as possible, and at least in southern India few things are more popular than a Malayalam film starring Mammootty and Mohanlal, and directed by Mahesh Narayanan. Add to that roster names like Fahadh Faasil, Nayanthara and Kunchacko Boban, and this is a film that comes preloaded with self-marketing torpedoes. The two Ms are coming together after 16 years, and their fortunes over those years create fluctuating waveforms even as they sit comfortably as Malayalam’s biggest stars. Will such a film take the pains to offend popular sensibilities?

Quite early into Dhurandhar’s sequel Dhurandhar: The Revenge, the turbopop spy thriller from premier propaganda artist Aditya Dhar, R Madhavan’s Ajay Sanyal mentions the word mard. He says to Ranveer Singh’s Jaskirat, a wounded young man whose fate misled him to criminality over serving the nation in its army—before his recruitment as Indian agent Hamza Ali Mazari in Pakistan—”hum mard hain humara kartvaya hai ladna”. We are men, our duty is to fight. No other quote encapsulates the blood-soaked adrenaline driven contemporary cinema of the mainstream in India. Some of the biggest film industries in the country—Hindi, Tamil, Telugu—are all prey to the idea, and in the era of pan Indian cinema that sucks joy and jettisons emotion for violence, the one-man army—the titular mard—is the last remaining hero. The slipshod masculinity is its backbone and Dhar’s Dhurandhar films double down with gusto.

HALLYU is all encompassing — so universal that there isn’t a generation for which it is alien, and not many cultural exports can boast of that. Across millennials, Gen Z, and every Greek alphabet in between, the Korean Wave cuts across age groups and class with equal ease, taking the form of films, K-Dramas, and K-Pop — be it BTS to Blackpink and beyond. It is therefore not surprising that the Korean influence itself becomes a key element in storytelling, for it is such a big part of the lives of anyone who has consumed the internet and media in the last decade. It also lends naturally to Tamil, which shares curious similarities with Korean — enough to have sparked both linguistic scholarship and colourful folklore about their shared origins.