THE SILENT REVOLUTION IN TAMIL CINEMA

I’d been wanting to write about this for a long time now. But things sort of galvanized over the weekend. I managed to catch two delightful and out of the box Tamil movies in a short trip to Chennai. Kungumapoovum Konchumpuravum and Pasanga are as different as chalk and cheese. But they have now come to symbolize what’s been going on in Tamil cinema for quite a few years now. They are products of this wonderful silent revolution which is sweeping Kollywood.

In Kungumapoovum, the hero is a debutant, Ramakrishnan. I’ve pasted his pic below. He’s the kind of guy you’d find as a helper in a tea-stall or as a cleaner in a mechanic shop. The kind of guy who’s not worth a second glance, leave alone casting him as a lead protagonist in a 70 mm film.

The look and feel of the average hero has undergone a radical change. The hero has been completely deglamourised. He doesn’t have to be as good-looking and fancy as a Kamal Haasan. He doesn’t even have to bash up the baddies and mouth powerful dialogues like a Rajinikanth. He can be the average, regular guy next door. No six-packs. No dimpled smiles. Just the regular kind of guy who wouldn’t bring the world to a screeching halt, if he went missing for a day.

So you have heroes like Ramakrishnan in Kungumapoovum, or the boys in Chennai 28 or even a Sasi Kumar in Subramaniapuram. None of them fit into your bracket as an average Tamil film hero. Even comedians like Vadivelu and Lawrence have today been cast as heroes. And their movies have done well. It takes some spinal chord to make a movie like Pulikesi and make it work at the box office.

The other defining feature of some of these movies is the caste factor. There’s been a de-Brahminification of cast, plot and setting. Stories like Paruthiveeran which are set in some quaint dusty village in Theni with lower caste lead protagonists have become runaway hits. Kungumapoovum was set in a tiny fishing hamlet in Tuticorin. Pasanga was set in a corporation school in Virachalai.

And the reason for this silent revolution is the phenomenal directorial talent from small towns which is taking Kollywood by storm. A Balaji Sakthivel, an Ameer, a Mysskin or even a Bala for that matter have now come to symbolize this phenomenon. The good thing is that they’re being backed by big banners and established players in the industry, unlike in Malayalam where new talent is seen as a nuisance.

This revolution, which can be called, the post-Rajini Kamal, post Mani Ratnam-Shankar phase in Tamil cinema started with Balaji Sakthivel’s watershed movie Kathal. It marked the beginning of a phase where to make a box-office success, you didn’t need big stars or big banners. All you needed was a solid script. Sine then, the range of stories we’ve seen in Kollywood is just mind-boggling. From the story of two eighties ruffians in Subramaniapuram to the beautiful Mozhi to even a film based on cricket like Chennai 28.

It’s also a tribute to the Tamil cinema audience, the ordinary folk who make or mar these movies. It’s a tribute that the viewer is willing to watch good cinema, shorn of stars, shorn of glamour as long as it tells him a story well. And that’s whole but simple point of any cinema. To tell a good story well. New age Tamil cinema has well and truly arrived.