Vishal Menon

Lokesh Kanagaraj is no longer a “young” filmmaker. He’s been around for eight years and six films, and it’s become easy to predict the exact manner in which he works on his screenplays. Back when he introduced the Gatling gun towards the end of the much-loved Kaithi, we didn’t just get one of Tamil cinema’s most exhilarating climaxes, we also got a textbook example of what one can do with a great Chekhov’s Gun. Five films and an artillery later, you’re able to make out the beats of what he’s trying to achieve, hours before his films get there. So when we saw a happy picture of Parthiban/Leo and family feeding their newly domesticated hyena, you could sense that the wild animal would make a return later on in the film. And by the time we hit Coolie, our minds are working overtime when a pointless character walks past a closed door with another pointless character revealing how lethal the inmate of that room is. It may have been a gun in Kaithi, a canon in Vikram, a box and arrow in Master and the Hyena in Leo, but with Coolie, Lokesh has possibly realised that he’s making a film so big that he can now afford to cast a full-time superstar from another industry as his Chekhov’s Gun.

Hidden within the surface of Meesha (moustache) is an intense drama about lost friendships and betrayal. This friendship may be described simply as one between Anandhu (Hakim Shah) and Mithun (Kathir), but there are larger factors at play to keep them separate. From the outside, it looks like caste is what divides them most. Although they both appear to belong to the same financial class, Anandhu hails from privilege. He appears to stay in an agraharam, and when he struggles to find a job, we hear him complain about reservations and the surname that has kept him poor. On the other end is Mithun, a childhood buddy of Anandhu’s. But as they grow up together, they face societal hurdles that keep them apart. Mithun belongs to a community of fishermen, and he lives in a colony that becomes the hot topic of Meesha. A corporate textile factory is said to come up in this colony, promising jobs, homes, and money to each resident. It will likely lead to development in the future, but for now, it requires this group of 2000 to be relocated.

Five minutes into Pravin Narayanan’s controversial Janaki V Vs State Of Kerala and there’s no escaping the strong feeling of déjà vu the film wants you to experience. It begins with the shot of a bishop entering the office of a hot-shot lawyer named David Abel Donovan (Suresh Gopi) and you’re thinking of a character from Lelam. A scene later, we’re drawn into a protest sequence and the sight of an old man getting crushed by the mob and immediately, Kuthiravattom Pappu from The King comes to mind. The sequence and the phone call that sets off the mob is something we’ve seen in several films before, but The Commissioner comes close, and strangely, the film’s ending gets you to recall The Truth. All of these films belong in the ’90s and so does most of Janaki V Vs State Of Kerala. But it’s not just the dated making and clunky dialogues that give you the feeling of watching a 30-year-old movie. It’s almost by design that the film wants to take you back to a time when Suresh Gopi was a legit superstar (the movie begins with a title card stating the same). Just like how the makers of Gopi’s Kaaval tried to milk the ’90s nostalgia by even setting the film in that particular period, Janaki V Vs State Of Kerala too wants you to dig deep and go back to a phase when a bombastic dialogue delivered in affected English was enough to deliver the big goosebumps moment.

Can watching a film ever make you nauseous? Director Raghav Mirdath’s Bun Butter Jam seems to be a philosophical exploration of this one question. Why else would the director of a light rom-com want to zoom in so closely on the shot of a man clipping his nails? Or the reason why so many scenes are set in the toilet, including one that has the hero talk to a friend while holding a used toilet brush? Or the strange ways in which the film keeps trying to crack the same double-meaning joke by using unending shots of a tissue box and what the hero needs it for at night? or a film titled Bun Butter Jam, it’s impossible to explain just how unappetising all of this can be. It’s a seemingly simple plot about two old friends who decide to live next to each other with the hope of getting both their kids to fall for each other. Hence the caption, “An arranged love marriage” in the film’s title. Yet the performances, the jokes and the plot points are so stale and predictable that you can write down exactly what’s going to happen on a piece of tissue, i.e if the film’s hero decides to spare one.

After making films that were all about loving your family (Kadaikutty Singham, 2018) and loving your siblings (Namma Veetu Pillai, 2019), Pandiraj returns to home territory with a film that’s all about one family loving another family. It’s interestingly structured, with an inventive narrative tool that adds freshness to the same Visu-movie template. And when we meet Arasi (Nithya Menen) and Akasaveeran (Vijay Sethupathi) for the first time, they’re already married, and they also have a daughter. This gives it the feeling of reading a novel by starting somewhere in the middle, and as we run through the pages, flipping back and forth. We meet new people; we understand their interpersonal dynamics and the love-hate relationship that brought Arasi and Akasam to a point in their story where divorce is one signature away.

The opening shot of AR Raghavendra’s head-scratcher Maayakoothu frames two creators and one creation as they discuss the philosophies of their respective artforms. Our protagonist Vasan (AR Raghavendra) is the writer of pulply serialised novels, and we see him deep in conversation with a sculptor he refers to as his mentor. As they discuss the powers they wield as creators, we see the mentor slowly sculpting away at the bust of a man, explaining how a single stroke of his chisel is enough to both bring life and death to his creation.

Among the many factors that make director Sri Ganesh’s 3BHK consistently engaging is the film’s inherent relentlessness. It’s a film that spans a 20 year timeline, with it beginning in 2006 and going all the way up to 2027. Yet its temperament is closer in spirit to a thriller in which the clock is always ticking. 3BHK is about the average middle-class family’s struggles to buy an apartment during a period in history in which Madras slowly transformed into Chennai. With each passing episode, the family’s biggest battle is with time itself as they wonder if their city has room left in its heart for them. As they’re tossed around from one rented apartment to another, the film redefines the phrase “out of place”. Like time, we constantly see the four members of this family struggling to find a corner they can call their own. Yet ironically, it’s their dream of buying their own home that continues to push each of them into places where they do not belong. For the patriarch Vasudevan (Sarathkumar), it’s his office desk that’s slowly edging him out. As a computer lands up in his cubicle, he grapples with modernity and the task of staying with the times.