Kirubhakar Purushothaman

Abel Donovan (Suresh Gopi) asks the victim of a brutal sexual assault, Janaki V (Anupama Parameswaran), “Do you watch porn?" Almost everyone in the court and in the theatre is supposed to be shocked by that question, which seems to be the point of it. The idea here is to invoke a similar dramatic intrigue as in a scene from Pink, where Deepak Sehgal (Amitabh Bachchan) asks Minal Arora, “Are you a virgin?" The question in Pink is justified, as Deepak intends to bring about the irrelevance of it in the context of consent. However, here the scene is exactly for all the wrong reasons. Debutant director Pravin Narayanath, who has also written the film, has intended to create an enigmatic protagonist and a sense of shock value by having a protagonist saving the wrong person in Janaki V Vs State Of Kerala. To put it more precisely, David Abel Donovan is the Devil’s advocate, literally! While it sounds like a brilliant idea, the film fails to bring it to fruition.

Any film that begins with a narrator introducing the hero immediately raises a suspicion. If cliches are alphabets, it is A. Oh Enthan Baby kicked off with Vishnu Vishal’s (who has played an extended cameo) narration introducing his brother Rudra as Ashwin, and the dutiful brother also preps us that the film is about three of his romances in different stages in life. As you get ready for further such datedness, director Krishnakumar Ramakumar manages to surprise you. The first surprise came in the form of scenes parodising Vijay and Ajith Kumar. It was bold and funny, and I was piqued. While there were no such risks again as the film followed many of the rom-com tropes, it managed to be enjoyable, thanks to the director’s nonchalant and self-aware treatment of a rather tested story.

Director Ezhil captured a particular sense of humour with his films Desinguraja and Velainu Vandhutta Vellaikaaran, where the villain and the conflict have no serious bearing on the film. The plot or the semblance of such is just a device to hold together a series of gags with eccentric characters that had a decent hit rate. Ravi Maria’s Bhootham and Robo Shankar’s MLA Jacket Janakiraman climactic scene in Velainu Vandhutta Vellaikaaran is the pinnacle of the success of such humour. Ezhil, naturally, has attempted to emulate the same with his new outing Desinguraja 2, which has backfired. The reason could be that the latest doesn’t seem to have even the wafer thin plots his previous ventures had. Also, the humour here is tasteless and desperate leaving you with a bad aftertaste.

This is the kind of movie that is made with the certainty that it would strike a chord with the middle class and their struggles. “Nalla relate aagum" (It would be very relatable) would have been the feedback about the film at every stage of its making. The bet is all on creating the feeling in the viewer that one is seen, heard or represented. By doing so, filmmaker Sri Ganesh portrays the life of the class as nothing but struggle, stripped of any joy, and the viewer feels the same. 3BHK is the story of a father named Vasudevan (Sarathkumar), struggling to buy his own house. However, every time he gets closer to his dream, the finish line moves further. The entire family is on a mission to buy a 3BHK and move out of their rented house in a cramped complex. A chart is stuck on the living room wall with the goal amount for their dream. Vasudevan’s son Prabhu (Siddharth) faces financial pressure, making him fail in his academic pursuits. Despite his relentless efforts, he manages to clear his board exams only with ‘just pass’ marks. A management seat in a reputed engineering college for Prabhu costs the family more years to reach their goal. Then it’s a heart attack, then the wedding of Vasudevan’s daughter Aarthy (Chaithra), and then something else. By then, we understand the film’s intent and where it is heading.

Vasan (Nagarajan Kannan), an egotistical writer with a god complex, makes a living by writing stories for a small magazine. He avoids mainstream magazines, citing the lack of freedom. Even his magazine’s editor (Delhi Ganesan) calls magazine stories a dying art. But Vasan is adamant and relentless. His resolve is also seen in his writing and his choice of creating tragic stories where the oppressed and people on the fringes of society get tortured. Parallel to Vasan’s narrative, we get three other narratives, and it takes a while to understand that the three stories are by Vasan. One is about a gangster, Dhanapal (Sai Dheena), on the precipice of finishing his 50th murder assignment. The second one has Selvi (Aishwarya Raghupathi), a domestic worker struggling to make money for her son’s school fees, and the third is another tragic tale of an aspiring doctor, the daughter of a poor farmer, who doesn’t have the means to attempt the NEET exam. All three stories teem with archetypal tropes of poverty and oppression that cater to a particular gaze of society. Vasan has an air of superiority while weaving their stories of torture, but his characters start tormenting him, demanding he write more responsibly. He claims his characters are after his life, and thus begins a maze of a story where the lines of reality blur.

Kolai, Raththam, Mazhai Pidikathavum Manidhanum, Hitler… after such a barrage of misses, a sense of prejudice is expected to set in when Vijay Antony comes up with another crime thriller. But a few minutes into the film, Maargan assures you that the streak will be broken. It exhibits good craftsmanship despite ticking all the boxes of genre films and treads carefully without breaching the territory of clichés. To top it all, it sets up an engrossing supernatural premise involving Siddhars and astral projections that effortlessly win you over. Tamil cinema tends to get overly didactic and self-congratulatory when it ventures into such themes of ancient knowledge. However, Leo John Paul’s success lies in the way he effortlessly sells you his ruse. The trick, after all, is not to convince you to believe but to entertain enough that you don’t mind. To give the context, Maargan is an investigation thriller where an archetypical resigned police officer, Dhruv (Vijay Antony), takes up a case that looks similar to the murder of his daughter. A Chennai girl, on her birthday, is murdered by an unknown killer using a chemical cocktail which, when injected, burns the body from the inside, turning it black. Dhruv takes over the case unofficially and arrests a suspect named Tamilarivu (Ajay Dishan), a brilliantly written role. As Tamil is subjected to police interrogation, it is realised that he is innocent but has supernatural abilities that would aid the investigation. With his astral projection abilities, he puts himself at risk of finding the killer, which also turns out to be an effective surprise.

Good Day starts with a line from Tamil writer G. Nagarajan’s existential novel Naalai Matrum Oru Naalae, which is about a labourer and the things that pan out in his life on a single day. The novel gives an eagle-eye perspective of the non-person as he goes about his day getting some work done and indulging in vices. Good Day is also about one such person from the fringes of society. Shanthakumar (Prithiviraj Ramalingam), a supervisor at a textile factory, begins his birthday with distress as his monthly salary is yet to hit his account. He asks his housemate to lend him a thousand rupees, but when the friend asks him to run an errand, Shanthakumar refuses. His ego is hurt. Hours later at his office, he gets slapped by his manager in front of a co-worker. We aren’t told why, but we understand that Shanthakumar is facing the fire for backing the co-worker, who was facing sexual harassment at the hands of the manager. The manager, being the son-in-law of the factory’s owner, leaves Shanthakumar to swallow his ego and endure the humiliation. And his salary is still yet to reach his account.

It is natural to expect a moral tale about greed or an existential fable about wealth with a film titled Kuberaa (the Hindu God of wealth) and with a beggar for a protagonist. But what one would fear is the film turning overly sentimental about poverty. Kuberaa is both. As expected, it is a story of a naive beggar taking a cunning multi-millionaire for a ride, throwing a familiar light on the rich, exposing them to be self-serving murderers. It is a social commentary on the top one percent, failing to help the rest. On the other hand, the film also has a familiar gaze of the poor as a naive and oppressed lot – a perspective that has been popularised by our mainstream commercial films. However, Kuberaa treads this path carefully.