The minor comic bits are okay. But the major part of the narrative struggles to maintain a tone that can make the characters seem convincing even as the things they do get wilder and more farcical.
In Raghu Thatha, Keerthy Suresh plays Kayalvizhi, a bank employee who is an activist about two things. One, she does not like the imposition of Hindi. She has no problem with the language itself – and indeed, there is a man from the North East who says that learning various Indian languages has helped him find jobs in various cities. What Kalayalvizhi hates is that Hindi is being forced down the throats of the people of Valluvanpettai. (Note the name of this town, proudly wearing its Tamil credentials.) The other thing that provokes Kayalvizhi is patriarchy, which comes in many forms. At home, she chooses to wear shirts, and when asked why, she counter-asks if only men can wear shirts. This is a broad film, and the messaging is obvious. Every now and then, we get very direct scenes like the one about a girl who wanted to be a Collector but was married off at 15.
Writer-director Suman Kumar’s premise is interesting, and the “one-line” of the plot kicks off when Kayalvizhi is asked to get married in order to make the family happy. She does not want to. But the twist is that she feels she has to. She could have simply said “no”, and gone on to do whatever she wanted. But the times are such that the family’s emotional manipulation forces Kayalvizhi to think like a “woman” and not as an “activist”. (After all, we all carry multiple selves within ourselves.) She picks Tamilselvan, played by Ravindra Vijay, who reveals himself as a progressive thinker and a man who is working on the electrification of villages. In a beautiful scene, they go back and forth about a promotion to Calcutta that will give Kayalvizhi a higher salary than Tamilselvan. He states that it might not be the best thing because his work is important, too, as is his mother. Kayalvizhi does not argue. She does not become an activist. She is swayed by what seems to be a “logical” argument. Like she is reminded constantly, she decides to “adjust”, like a good woman should.
Despite the language imposition, despite the internalised and external patriarchy, Raghu Thatha does not aim to be a story rooted in hard realism. We meet a young man named Kamal Haa… he looks like the dude who played the lead in Balu Mahendra’s Kokila, and he is trying to direct a movie. The title of Raghu Thatha itself comes from a K Bhagyaraj joke in a movie that may have come after this film’s timeline. And Kayalvizhi is forced to hide her female identity while writing her fiery stories for magazines, never mind that writers like Lakshmi had been serving Tamil readers since the 1940s. With Sean Roldan’s bouncy score and Yamini Yagnamurthy’s palette of warm colours, Raghu Thatha sticks to an upbeat mood. There are odd, interesting bits like someone who writes anonymous letters. I laughed at a line that starts sounding like philosophy but ends with a reference to diarrhoea.
Suman Kumar sets up various hurdles that lead to a climax that’s a comedy of confusion – and the last half-hour does deliver on this count. Hurdle 1 has to do with Kayalvizhi’s grandfather. Hurdle 2 has to do with a discovery about Tamilselvan. Hurdle 3 has to do with Hindi imposition. Hurdle 4 is the fact that Kayalvizhi has chosen to align herself with the patriarchy, and she has to snap out of it and become her old self again. And this is where the film becomes a bit messy. If you are in for just an easy watch, with a heroine in top form and a host of likeable supporting characters, Raghu Thatha may be just what the doctor prescribed. MS Baaskar and Devadarshini get a few decent lines – though much of the dialogue-writing sounds like filler. There could have been more flavour. Ismath Banu is a scream as Kayalvizhi’s sister-in-law, and her delivery of a line about a lorry driver is to die for.
But though the scenes are cleanly written, the pacing is off and the various hurdles are not crossed as satisfyingly as you’d like. There are too many conveniences and easy resolutions. We meet a man who is an MCP of the highest order – yet he wants an educated bride, and he writes out all his misogynistic thoughts in a diary kept conveniently where anyone can pick it up and read it. Later, a convenient dig about him makes him confess all his dirty secrets. At one point, I began to wonder why Kayalvizhi could not simply talk to her family about the major problems she faces, especially with marriage. Is her grandfather really that unreasonable a man? There are two ways this could have been addressed. One, the comedy should have been so breathless and frantic that we are given no time to think. And when that didn’t happen, I began to wonder if this material would have been better as a drama.
Kayalvizhi is forced to use tricks and ruses in order to get what she really wants. And because the treatment is breezy and easy, it becomes hard to stick with or care about anything or anyone. The minor comic bits are okay. But the major part of the narrative struggles to maintain a tone that can make the characters seem convincing even as the things they do get wilder and more farcical. Raghu Thatha plays out at a quiet pace and it’s a relief to see a film that lets its scenes and actors breathe, but even at 2 hours and 15 minutes, the strain shows: the material seems stretched. There is a sequence where Kayalvizhi writes an exam, and it is a little summary of the film itself: parts of it are wonderfully nuts, but parts of it are not pushed enough. The stakes should have been higher. Keerthy Suresh is earnest and watchable, and you could say the same about Raghu Thatha. But it had the potential to be so much more.
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