Dinesh and Kalaiyarasan play siblings from a marginalised community. The crux of the film is from real life, an incident involving Naxals. But the screenplay bites off more than it can chew. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
Athiyan Athirai’s Thandakaaranyam is the story of two brothers from a tribal community in the Tamil Nadu-Karnataka border. The older brother is Sadayan (Dinesh). He questions the people who oppress him, like the forest officers who arrest his people on flimsy grounds. He questions the powerful men who rig the auctions of forest produce. They are all corrupt, and Sadayan gets a powerful Ilaiyaraaja song (‘Manidha manidha’) as his theme to lead a potential uprising. The other brother is Murugan (Kalaiyarasan). He is a forest officer, who – again – is a victim of the powerful men who oppress his community. His only relief is the woman he loves (Vinsu Sam), and this gives him his Ilaiyaraaja song (‘O Priya Priya’), which has her name. When push comes to shove, a decision is made. Murugan will join a paramilitary force in Jharkhand, and return as an officer. Their father wishes to see his son in the very uniform that used to terrify him, when worn by his oppressors.
At first, we seem to be in a genre that Hollywood specialises in, with the training boot camp, the sadistic supervising officer, and so forth. But about midway, we get to the crux of the story, which is based on a true-life scandal where people from marginalised communities were recruited with the promise of jobs in the army. They were asked to pose as Naxals and act as though they were surrendering. In return, they would be given employment and the government would get miles of media coverage. This is a powerful premise, and it’s exactly what you expect from Pa. Ranjith, who co-produced this movie. There are many stories about the oppressed, and here we have one that steps away from Tamil Nadu’s villages and addresses the country as a whole, from the South to the North. The corrruption and the oppression extends from Sadayan’s forests in the South to the Central Indian jungles that Murugan finds himself in, to the corridors of power in the North.
The performances are fine, but the screenplay suffers due to a lack of focus. As a character, Sadayan is as marginalised from the story as his community is from their oppressors. His “mass” moments feel very contrived. So Murugan comes to bear the bulk of the narrative – and even around him, things aren’t very convincing. Shabeer Kallarakkal plays a man who torments Murugan and later becomes his best buddy. This arc is very randomly sketched out. Bala Saravanan is present for some comedy that is at odds with the dead-serious narrative, and so are the detours into sentimentality. I kept thinking about the noose-tight focus of Visaaranai, which made many of the same points but with more clarity and detailing, and more attention to the individual arcs of the characters. As a political tract, Thandakaaranyam is an important reminder of a history that should not repeat itself. But as a film, it tries to do too much, and in the end, ends up doing too little.
