Bison Kaalamaadan

Since his directorial debut with Pariyerum Perumal (2018), it’s been well-established that Mari Selvaraj’s primary weapons as a storyteller have been his singular point-of-view and guttural intensity. Whether it’s the symbolisation of Karuppi (a dog painted in blue) in his debut, or that interval-block from Karnan (2021), when the protagonist (Dhanush) destroys a public bus. Careful to not end up advocating for mob violence through the scene, Selvaraj uses Santosh Narayanan’s score to build up to the violence as an act of desperate assertion, rather than an accomplishment. In his latest, Bison Kaalamaadan, I kept waiting for a similarly sublime flourish, which arrived in the film’s final moments. Based on the struggles of a Kabaddi player, it’s in the final moments that Selvaraj zooms into what makes Kittan (Dhruv Vikram) such a potent athlete. For the first time in the 160-minute film, we see Kittan’s guile as a kabaddi player, deceiving his opponent by moving sideways and forward faster than his opponents can think. When he’s grabbed by an opponent – instead of trying to free himself, he grabs the opponent back, and spins both bodies around. A couple of twirls later, he’s back on his side of the pitch.

Several aspects of Bison will urge you to keep rewatching the film, but if there’s one that kept surprising me, it was its editing. More than a smooth linear edit, Sakthi Thiru builds up scenes like he’s stacking Jenga blocks. Just when you feel too overwhelmed to absorb the layers playing out in one scene fully, he chooses to insert that with a tiny reaction shot or a cutaway that will immediately take you through the entire magnitude of Kittan’s (played by Dhruv Vikram) journey and how much he’s had to go through to get where he has.

I can’t remember the last time leaders of two opposing factions in a film spoke about the futility of their struggle and its relevance with more muddled honesty than in Mari Selvaraj’s Bison Kaalamadan. It helps that the leaders are played by Ameer (Pandiaraja) and Lal (Kandasamy), artists whose faces and voices convey honest anger and built-up fury, but also wander into areas filled with doubt. This makes them very non-leader-like and utterly human. This ability of Mari’s to question his own character is one of his defining traits.

Underdog stories tend to traverse a predictable arc - from incipient dream to dogged pursuit, from frequent stumbling blocks to rousing, triumphal finale. On the face of it, Bison Kaalamaadan, writer-director Mari Selvaraj’s fifth film, is cast in pretty much the same mould. But that isn’t all there is to it. While the Tamil film largely swings to a familiar beat, it isn’t just another sports drama. Selvaraj puts on it a significant spin that liberates the film from the confines of genre. The urgent social commentary at the core of the film is draped in popular storytelling trappings. The audience gets the best of both worlds.