S Jayakumar makes his writing-directing debut with Blue Star, presented by Pa Ranjith. The film is about how an underdog team from Arakkonam beats an elite, white-uniformed, English-speaking side – also upper-class, upper-caste – that trains at “MCF” Cricket Club, possibly a stand-in for MRF Pace Academy. But even within Arakkonam, there is a division between the dominant and the oppressed: there is the “oor” and there is the “colony”. In other words, the local enmity – personified by Ranjith (Ashok Selvan) and Rajesh (Shanthnu Bhagyaraj) – has to be set right. The locals have to set aside their differences in order to unite against a common enemy that says that they lack the “thagudhi” – the worthiness – to even enter that well-manicured cricketing ground. The man who keeps that ground well-manicured (Bhagavathy Perumal) is also from Arakkonam. He was once a cricketer. Now, he trims grass.
There’a a wealth of text and subtext in this premise, set in the 1990s, even if the genre itself offers little surprises. The most intriguing character, perhaps, is Anandhi (Keerthi Pandian). She plays Ranjith’s love interest before mysteriously vanishing from the screenplay. He gifts her something, which makes her happy – but then she says that the thing she really wants cannot be bought in any store. And then we see what this thing is, the thing that she desires, and it’s a lovely moment of joy in this predominantly masculine universe. Some of the early Ranjith-Anandhi scenes benefit from the quick cutting that breaks up a scene and uses pieces of it over a breadth of screen time. We get a scene of Anandhi watching Ranjith playing cricket with his team. We get a scene of Anandhi and Ranjith meeting in the overbridge of a railway station. Bits from the earlier scene creep into this one. Combine this with a constantly hand-held camera and you get a sense of observing a relationship unfold in real time. You get a sense of cinema.
But elsewhere, you get the sense of a radio play. There is a ton of exposition – about characters, about the game. After a point, it becomes exhausting in a nearly three-hour film when we are told things non-stop, instead of these things being dramatised in interesting ways. And the frustrating thing is that there is so much potential for human drama. Why does Anandhi suddenly stop meeting Ranjith and start writing letters to him? We know the reason, but it could have added some much-needed emotion into a narrative that relies excessively on the intricacies of cricket. Lagaan, too, was basically an entire game being played out on a big screen, but how beautifully each character and motivation was etched out! These individual characters, these individual (as opposed to collective) motivations fed into the cricket and made the match that much more heart-stopping. Or what about Rajesh? His arc evolves from considering Ranjith a sworn enemy to embracing him as a friend. But this plays out so weakly and generically that we do not get the sense of a man beginning to understand and empathise with the “other”.
I wish Lizzy Anthony’s mother had had more to do than just quote Christian scripture. I wish the Bhagavathy Perumal character had not been such a saint, a cross between the coach and the Buddha. He says that sport can heal hatred, and we see this in a shot involving a stretcher at the end. But we don’t feel this sentiment. The real big match in Blue Star – between Ranjith’s and Rajesh’s teams – gets over in the first half, and it looks as though the writers struggled to subsequently find a balance of cricket and drama to lead us through the rest of the movie. All performers are earnest, but Prithvi Rajan is the standout. He plays Ranjith’s brother Sam, and he gets the film’s quirkiest scenes – love scenes as well as dramatic scenes. If Pa Ranjith decides to make Attakathi – 2, he doesn’t have to look further for his lead. And Sam’s part also gives us some good writing. There’s a letter that leads to a fight with his brother which leads to a revelation about Anandhi which leads to Ranjith’s loss of form in the game… Blue Star could have used more of this nuance.
But the rest of the film is broad. The MCF players are portrayed like evil monsters who sneer at the Arakkonam people and don’t have a single decent bone in their body. And the less said about their coach the better. The man is simply a caricaturish personification of Class/Caste Bias, not an actual human being. For how this movie could have been better, we just have to look at Pa Ranjith’s Sarpatta Parambarai. That was also a story about a sport, about inequality – but it took us deep into its protagonist, and through him, we saw this world he was a part of. Blue Star, on the other hand, has no depth. It equates a Hindi-speaking working-class man to Ranjith’s outsider status. He remarks that that man must have had such huge issues that he had to leave home and find a job in a new place whose language he doesn’t know. It’s a lovely aside. But it would have been lovelier had the central characters been developed with similar asides, with similarly casual observations that revealed them to us. At one point, the members of the opposing team are revealed through animation and voice-over that resembles… a PowerPoint presentation! Blue Star has good intentions, but it needed much better writing and better filmmaking to be what it really wants to be.
