Sudhir Srinivasan

What might happen when a woman filmmaker gets the opportunity to make a film about violence and sex? What might happen when she gets access to all the familiar toys of the male-star vehicle: the punch dialogues, the star, the swagger, the slow-motion sequences, the sex, the violence… What might she bring to this cinema that we don’t generally get? As it turns out… quite a lot. First, she refuses to see the protagonist, Raya, as a ‘hero’. Quite the opposite, in fact. The film isn’t interested in hero-villain demarcations, right-wrong judgments. Raya (Yash) himself says as much at one point. When you are in pain, morality stops seeming important. The film, in fact, has a lot to say about the nature of pain, about what happens when you live with it for so long that you begin to fall in love with it, when it begins to feel more like home than any real home ever could, ever did. There’s a fantastic song in the Tamil version, ‘Vittupogaadha Yen Vali’, that speaks of this dichotomy. “Vittupoiduma en vali, poi vidaadhe en vali…”

hings happen in Vishwanath & Sons. Lots of things, in fact, but you never learn about their weight. A young woman subjects her body to pregnancy just so she can fund her education. Later, almost on a whim, she decides to give up this hard-earned education. Meanwhile, a man who seems perfectly content being single is rather quickly persuaded to get himself a child. These are momentous choices with profound ramifications, and yet, we are never truly allowed to understand their emotional significance, the marks they leave on the interior lives of these characters.