Vishal Menon

Has there ever been another Tamil filmmaker as obsessed with the idea of irony as Karthik Subbaraj? You find this obsession in his earlier works too, including the very concept of making a feminist film by giving us the stories of three flawed men. Or the way in which the government’s indifference towards workers who suffered mercury poisoning was addressed in a silent film. Most recently, he also gave us a schoolteacher named Gandhi who goes on to become the biggest bootlegger in Tamil Nadu. But in his latest Retro, irony isn’t just in the details that make up the subtext; it is very much a part of the text as well. This includes something one of the character calls “beautiful irony,” like how a laughter therapy clinic is set up in the same spot that once housed the gallows. Or the cheeky fun Subbaraj is having when Santosh Narayanan plays a tune that resembles a lullaby, as Suriya’s character Paari schools a bunch of bad guys while they call him Doctor Chaplin. You find the same irony coming to the fore when he decides to write a love story about a violent, relentless fighter like Paari, who falls for Pooja Hegde’s Rukmini, a doctor, a healer, who is against violence in any form.

In what might seem like a silly in-joke, Thudarum begins with Benz (Mohanlal) — a taxi driver who got his nickname because he loves cars — explaining to his passengers the difference between a star and a superstar. He takes the names of legends like Rajinikanth, MGR, Kamal Haasan, Mammootty and Mohanlal, and instead of talking about their hard work, sincerity or unlimited amounts of acting talent, he says it’s because all of them were great at doing action. It might seem like a detail that’s being used as a segue to tell us about how Benz was once a stuntman in Tamil cinema, but you really need to wait until the film’s second half to understand what the real pay-off for that dialogue is going to be. It’s a clever bit of meta writing, infinitely cleverer than the cloyingly lazy ways in which the film uses references from older Mohanlal movies. Some of these were expected given how Mohanlal was to be seen with Shobhana after decades. But the others — like the two Odiyan references or the Malaikottai Valiban dialogue — seem like the work of an overexcited Mohanlal fanboy trying to do what they do best in Tamil cinema.

One is unsure if it’s even ethical to call Good Bad Ugly a feature film. From a safe distance, one can argue that it’s the length of a regular movie and it also features a major movie star in the lead. If you want to push it, one may even argue that it has a something resembling a plot and a screenplay that holds characters and plot points in place. But if you’re willing to wake up and accept reality, you’ll soon realise that Good Bad Ugly is just the Instagram Reels homepage of Ajith’s most obsessive fanboy. Directed by Adhik Ravichandran, the film doesn’t even try to worry about delicately breaking the fourth wall; this Ajith fanboy ends up shooting so many references from the star’s filmography at us, that he nukes the fourth wall and builds a grand tomb over it.

One could be half an hour into the setup of Sashikanth’s Test and still be unsure of the genre of the film. When seen from the point of view of 34-year-old Kumudha (Nayanthara), Test is arguably about the testing phase leading up to her last attempt at being a mother. As for Indian team cricketer Arjun (Siddharth), who struggles with his form in what could be his final test match, the movie could be a sports drama about regaining respect from oneself. Finally, when you lean closer into Sara (Madhavan), the out-of-luck MIT scientist just one step away from changing the world, you could even look at Test as a sci-fi film about hydro-fuels. Not that this mix of genres in Test isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The film spends so much time planting us within the conflicts of each of these characters that you feel like you’re being set up for the ebbs and flows of a juicy mini-series, wherein each character is as important as the last. It’s a film that could have gone anywhere with its complexities; however, instead of going deeper into any of them, Test chooses to settle on one central plot line as it approaches the halfway mark.

Ponman seems like a silly title for the film this turned out to be. The title translates to ‘kingfisher’, but it’s also a play on the phrase ‘pon’ meaning gold and man, because it’s about a man who deals in gold. By the end of the film, though, one might find other reasons to justify this title, but to begin with, you understand that it’s referring to the character played by Basil Joseph, a strange character named PP Ajesh. Going by the term the film uses, he runs what is called a “Madiyil Jewellery”, the kind of mobile jewellery in which the gold, literally, ends up on your lap. I’m not sure if this business is specific to Kollam, where the film is set in, but from my understanding of the trade, Ajesh is a broker who supplies gold to brides right before they get married, expecting to be repaid using the money they earn in the form of gifts during the wedding. It’s a peculiar practice, something many of us will discover as we watch Ponman. It is also ideal as a plot device in a film that talks about dowry, that too within the fascinating Latin Catholic community of the region. So, when we first meet PP Ajesh, he’s supplying 25 sovereigns of gold to a bride named Stefi Graf (Lijimol Jose), a night before she gets married to the “big, mountain-like” Mariyano (Sajin Gopu).

How much does a young boy have to go through to be allowed the freedom to have an emotional breakdown? When we first meet Mithya (Athish Shetty), what we see is his back turned towards us as he travels on a train from somewhere to somewhere else. We later learn that he’s not travelling out of choice. He’s being displaced from his home in Mumbai to Udipi in Southern Karnataka where he will live with his uncle, aunt and their two daughters. Like Mithya, the film about him too has its back turned towards us. It’s not a film that grants you the solace of having empathised with its broken protagonist. Instead, it reveals these broken pieces so sparsely that we feel as lost and helpless as he does.