Aditya Shrikrishna

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.

There is an evolutionary completeness in Vijay Ranganathan’s debut feature Oh Butterfly. We see larvae, chrysalis and the whole butterfly lifecycle. We also see other insects and ants and as if to attract them, and us, there are breadcrumbs. They take the form of a book, a golf ball, a club, a glass and other objects. Ranganathan lays them out in the beginning like multiple Chekhov’s guns, objects that will eventually come into play. Not all of them wait till the third act to fulfil their destiny, some aid in dialing up the stakes midway amidst casual as well as torrid conversation, and some in fatalistic action. There is considerable therapising and some psychobabble, not all of it interesting but the drama remains compelling, not necessarily due to the writing (by Ranganathan and Harish Rajagopal) but mostly down to the direction.

A new dissenting voice emerges in Tamil cinema. R Gowtham’s debut Tamil feature, Members of the Problematic Family, premiered at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival last week in the Forum section. Everything about this film is distinct yet unfamiliar, beginning with its title. The Tamil title, Sikkalana Kudumbathin Uruppinargal, a literal translation, rolls off the tongue. For decades we’ve had the word kudumbam (family) in Tamil film titles that have often alluded to the spotless, divine status accorded to the unit. But here is a film that makes no such promise. It invites you not to witness a few days in the life of irascible characters but just human beings who, as fate would have it, need to function as a society sanctioned order.

IN Madhan’s directorial debut, With Love, Monisha (Anaswara Rajan) and Sathya (Abishan Jeevinth) meet on the arranged marriage circuit. Sathya is a designer, and Monisha is an influencer with over a million Instagram followers. If there is anything particularly modern about this film, it is that Monisha asks about his “boring” design job. While her job is indeed one with the times — monetising social media — design apparently is already boring. It is a harmless word, but, wonder what choicest descriptors she would have used for the more common arranged marriage qualifications in the Tamil family circuit: engineering. Not pretty, one imagines. Having said that, we don’t get films that skirt the arranged marriage route often in Tamil cinema, at least in recent times. While the practice would have been a more common fixture on screen four decades ago or so (think 1986’s Mouna Ragam), the more famous contemporary (using the word loosely) examples include Dum Dum Dum (2001), Parthiban Kanavu (2003) and a few more. All those films begin with conflict, either the couple actively hating each other or the idea itself abhorrent to one of them (usually the hero, the man).

If you possess above average knowledge of contemporary Tamil cinema, Semmalar Annam might be familiar. Maybe you cannot place the name, but you will recall the face, a face unfortunately stereotyped by Tamil filmmakers. She is an actor with such ferocious presence that if you give her half a decent role, she will single-handedly lift a film. Films like Leena Manimekalai’s Maadathy and Jaikumar Sedhuraman’s Sennai are a testament to this talent, but my favourite Semmalar performance came in a short film, Arikarasudhan’s Ullangai Nellikkani, an adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Woman Who Came at Six o’clock. She has also directed short films, and now her debut directorial feature, Mayilaa, premieres at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this week in the Bright Future section. The 97-minute feature, produced by Newton Cinema and presented by Pa. Ranjith, is quite indicative of the promises in this section full of debutantes.