Kirubhakar Purushothaman

Over the years, Tamil cinema has trained the mass audience to always root for the loser. For example, Maan Karate’s protagonist, Peter (Sivakarthikeyan), is the poster boy for this brand of hero. In essence, Peter has no redeeming qualities. He is a lazy and incompetent bloke who lives off a gang that has a premonition that he will win a boxing contest. For a villain, the film features a character who has toiled his entire life to become a professional boxer. Yet, the film encourages the audience to back the hero because he is supposed to be relatable to the masses. Isn’t it easy to imagine a person winning in life without any effort?

What makes Vignesh Shivan an interesting filmmaker is his relentless pursuit of packaging what an irreverent Gen Z would call boomerish as an ultra-modern ‘sheesh’… something even an unaware Gen Beta would lap up as a perfectly in-vogue emotion. Poda Podi is about a modern dancer whose husband eventually convinces her that family rearing matters more than her dream of winning dance competitions. Naanum Rowdy Dhaan was a cool story of a pure-hearted gentleman, now called out for being a stalker. Kaathuvaakula Rendu Kaadhal is about a polyamorous hero whose love for both heroines is so pure he doesn’t consummate the relationship with either. With Love Insurance Kompany, Vignesh Shivan has taken this righteous hero into a future where love has been utterly commodified — and it is up to him to teach his lover, and the world, what true love is.

What if you have no one to die for but are put on a mission to save everyone… and in a sense, everything in the universe? Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) of Project Hail Mary finds himself in such a predicament. Actually, he doesn’t even know he is. When he wakes up from an induced coma, Grace finds himself in a spaceship light years away from home. With his crew dead and his memory inching back to him due to the retrograde amnesia, Grace has to figure out why he is in the middle of space floating in a ship headed to Tau Ceti, a relatively nearby star to the Solar system–just 12 light years away (Didn’t I say relative) from home. Grace slowly remembers himself as a school teacher, a nerd, a loner, and a norm-defying molecular biologist, but what he doesn’t seem to understand or believe is why he would sign up for this one-way trip to save the world when he doesn’t even have one soul to care about.

From Disney’s Snow White to our own Vidaathu Karuppu, the evil grandma stereotype shines, making an old woman the face of terror and crudeness. Indian TV and its serials have furthered this trope of this evil old matriarch harassing the hapless daughter-in-law. On the other hand, there’s another popular archetype of a benevolent old woman, who “melts like a candle” to produce light for those around them. Manormama has been the quintessential choice of Tamil filmmakers for this cardboard cutout. The scene from Shankar’s Gentleman, of her telling her son (Arjun Sarja), “Naan irukaen pa” (“I’m there for you”). She is the all-giving mother, and men are supposed to find her godly love and care in their potential mates.

In many ways, Gandhi Talks feels like a spiritual remake of Kamal Haasan’s Pushpaka Vimana (1987), also released in Tamil as Pesum Padam — a silent film about a struggling, unemployed man who takes a shortcut to wealth and high life before returning to honesty and struggle.

Apart from moral ambivalence, the commonality of all Nalan Kumarasamy’s feature film protagonists is that they are aware of being so. Daas of Soodhu Kavvum can’t resist being a kidnapper. He understands the risks and therefore adopts a ‘middle path’ by finding non-violent ways to go about his business. Ka Ka Po’s Kathiravan is a paper tiger who has served time for crimes he never committed. He strives hard to let go of his past, which is not even his.

James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash picks up things where the second part, Avatar: The Way of Water, left us. Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), the second son of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), is ridden with the guilt of being the reason for the death of his elder brother Neteyam (Jamie Flatters). Even Sully seems to blame him for the loss; he even spells it out, giving the necessary redemption arc to Lo’ak, who continues to defy orders — just like his father from the first part.

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.