The broad arc of the story is very generic: a drama of betrayal and revenge. But what makes the film feel fresh is the emphasis on family and how small traumas can shape our actions.
On the surface, Raayan – Dhanush’s second feature as writer-director – could not be more different from his first one, Pa Pandi. That film was set in a more affluent part of Chennai. This one is set in North Madras. That film was written around a sixty-ish man who craved company. This film’s protagonist is probably thirty-something, and he is a loner. That film was filled with good-natured people. This one has bloodthirsty gangsters. But look closer and the two films are cut from the same cloth. Both are essentially family dramas. It’s just that, in Pa. Pandi, the frictions within the household were resolved by peaceful means. Here, the frictions are resolved with a ton of bloodshed. Raayan is a huge leap for Dhanush, the creator. As an actor, he has always proved himself as a major talent, but Pa. Pandi was broad and melodramatic and was happy to be just an undemanding watch. Raayan is quite the opposite.
Due to the milieu, the characters, and the motivations, Raayan (Dhanush’s 50th film) reminds you of Asuran, Pudhupettai, Vada Chennai – but the basic story loosely appears to resemble Ravana’s love for his sister Shoorpanakha, and his thirst for revenge when she is humiliated. That’s perhaps why AR Rahman’s rousing ‘Adangaadha asuran’ is the only number that is picturised as a full-fledged (i.e., uninterrupted) song sequence. The placement of this song is a surprise. You do not usually get a choreographed number this late in a narrative. (Prabhu Deva’s work is brilliant.) But this song is used after a reconciliation and before the climax, so it’s really drama that is playing out in the form of dance. In between the steps, we get looks from the actors that suggest both celebration and caution. Things appear to be okay, but…
Dhanush plays Raayan, who has two younger brothers (Sundeep Kishan, Kalidas Jayaram), and the last-born sibling is Durga (Dushara Vijayan). The broad arc of the story is generic: you could call it a drama of betrayal and revenge, like the Dhanush-starring films I mentioned earlier. But what makes the film feel fresh is the emphasis on family and how little traumas can shape our actions. When your parents disappear overnight, how can you not be affected? When your brother keeps shouting at you and reserves all his tenderness for the sister, how can that not leave a mark on the mind? When the sister’s wedding threatens to bankrupt the family, how can you be without any resentment? When someone wants to sell your sister, as a child, how can you not make it your mission to protect her all your life? It’s fitting that Raayan’s first act of violence is instigated by Durga. (These closest siblings have mythical names. Raayan is short for Kaathavarayan.)
Despite its templated structure, Raayan is not a film that explodes with random mass scenes. It is a film that builds and builds incrementally until the interval explosion and then the explosion at the climax. One example of this is when a woman slaps a man and others laugh and a fight begins… This is such a beautiful, tangential, and yes, incremental approach to an action stretch that could have just as easily happened without this woman. The beauty of Dhanush’s writing is that he gives us little scenes and little visuals that are then expanded/extrapolated. For instance, Raayan’s grown-up brothers are introduced in two separate fights that are intercut, and later, we realise they are closer to each other than to Raayan. So it makes sense that they are introduced “together”, in the same stretch, and their tendency for violence will find deeper resonance as the film goes along. There’s always something “extra” happening, like in the sequence where Raayan’s sister’s marriage is being fixed. The extra bit is that the conversation is drowned out by an MGR song from loudspeakers outside – and someone has to step out to take care of this. This is a film with a lot of flavour.
Raayan is not a vanity project. The first time we see Dhanush, he is just a character. He has not yet become a “hero”. Therefore, there is no hero-introduction shot. We just get a wide shot that moves in close and we see Raayan, as one among many. He even gives away an entire action sequence to others, showing that women don’t always need men to save them – that they are perfectly capable of saving themselves. Raayan is not just about the protagonist. Aparna Balamurali plays Sundeep Kishan’s love interest, and she has a question about Raayan. She could have asked her boyfriend, but instead, the scene plays out between her and Kalidas Jayaram. Due to these writing decisions, even though many of the actors have small-ish parts, there is a strong sense of an interconnected community. Even structurally, the film feels different. There is one big inciting incident that happens in a bar, but there are many smaller inciting incidents (those traumas) that happen within the family.
As a director, Dhanush extracts amazing work from his collaborators. GK Prasanna’s editing is sharply attuned to the fragmented nature of the screenplay: there is a lot of intercutting. Cinematographer Om Prakash gives us a range of rich, deeply saturated compositions – from deep-focus shots to handheld shots to many frames shot through and around doorways, and when a time transition happens, we get a smooth move into a bar from the street. It’s like entering a new world. Rahman’s score is perfect. The first time the grown-up Raayan utters a threat (to a man in a hospital), we hear the hum of ‘Adangaadha asuran dhan’ in the background, and we sense the violence rumbling inside this outwardly peaceful man. The next time we hear this background score, it is when Raayan is issuing a quieter threat – an order, really – to one of his brothers. As for the music during a bar fight, it has an almost religious intensity and it makes us guess (rightly) that this is where the fuse has been lit. Peter Hein’s action choreography is brilliant, especially in cramped spaces. In one such fight sequence, we keep switching between real-time and slow-motion, and the effect is that of a bloody ballet. Another action stretch unfolds in a clinic, and the use of space is superb.
The casting is superb, too – but more importantly, Raayan proves that casting the right actors can elevate even the most generic parts because the actor’s personality fills out more than what’s on paper (or rather, what’s not on paper). Take the gangster played by SJ Suryah. He has a magnificent scene sitting across the table from Raayan, and his modulation of one word (“kenjaren”) elevates the entire stretch. That single word is uttered in a higher pitch, and the effect is part-comic, part-dramatic, all SJ Suryah. Saravanan plays another gangster. He has a scene where he is sitting on a chair, frozen, while violence is erupting outside his house. The focus on his face is everything – because it is exactly the right kind of face. And who better to play Raayan’s father figure than Selvaraghavan, Dhanush’s father figure in cinema! Does he get anything ground-breakingly new to do? No! Is he effective? Amazingly so. Prakash Raj plays an underwritten cop and writes the rest of the character just by virtue of being a veteran actor. The boy who plays the young Raayan is a great choice, too. He has the cold dignity and animal-like stillness that we will later see in Dhanush’s beautiful performance. Again, it is not a stretch for Dhanush – but when you see him tear up seeing the lifeless body of someone close to him, it is truly moving. There are many, many acting moments in this movie.
And there is not a bad performance in the bunch. Sundeep Kishan comes with just the right amount of attitude, Dushara Vijayan handles both the calm and the storm of her character nicely, and Kalidas Jayaram is perfect as the “college boy” of the group. The film flows smoothly, but if there is one issue, it’s that we don’t feel as emotional as we ought to. There are several emotional scenes, but as a whole, they don’t build into one shatteringly emotional movie. But Raayan gets so much right that I didn’t mind. And perhaps it’s also the newness of watching a film that breaks away from so much of what we “expect” from such a movie, especially one with a big star. Raayan is a very good example of how to reimagine a typical story and typical characters with short bursts of writing. If there’s one scene I’ll take away, it’s when a child is born, but there is no joy on the mother’s and father’s faces. It is a tiny scene, but it says so much about what has happened and what is about to happen. An early scene begins with Raayan and his family on a truck, with no clear destination in mind. A scene towards the end is an echo, and there is the suggestion of a sequel. If yes, that is going to be something worth waiting for.
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