Tamizharasan Pachamuthu makes a sixer of a debut with ‘Lubber Pandhu’, a beautiful drama with heart and craft

This wonderfully written story is not just about cricket, but also about caste and ego. And this is not just about the two men at the centre, but also the people around them. A few bits of over-emphasis apart, the film is a real charmer. The rest of this review may contain spoilers…

In the first big scene of Lubber Pandhu, set at a cricket match, we are introduced to a great bowler and a great batsman. The story will soon shift to 11 years later, and we will see these two characters as Anbu (Harish Kalyan) and Gethu (‘Attakathi’ Dinesh) – but this early scene gives us the sense of a history being established. Anbu and Gethu will soon become enemies, and the fantastic first half essentially becomes a demonstration of Alfred Hitchcock’s bomb theory. According to Hitchcock, if you show the audience that there’s a bomb ticking away, then they will wait in suspense about when and how the explosion will happen. Similarly, here, the audience is told who Anbu is, who Gethu is, and what the bomb-like plot point is. And we wait for these two characters to realise how they are connected. We wait for the when and the how of the explosion. The experience is bliss.

Given the milieu and the title and the number of matches we see, it would be easy to slot Lubber Pandhu as a “cricket movie”. But at heart, this is a movie about caste pride and male pride: equality and ego. That first big scene with the batsman and the bowler – it also establishes this caste conflict, this potential ego conflict. Loosely speaking, you could call the story a cross between Blue Star and Parking: two headstrong men have to conquer their differences and fight a common enemy. But those films – though not bad – were broad and one-dimensional, and did not have much nuance. Lubber Pandhu is different. At a time our cinema is becoming increasingly generic, this film – set in Thozhuthur – paints its characters in very specific ways. The way the screenplay keeps intercutting between (or interweaving) caste issues and ego issues is a thing of beauty. Except during a wordy “message” part at the end, which I felt need not have been so obviously spelt out, we don’t feel we are watching an “issue-based film”. The interaction between the many characters flows so beautifully that the first impression is that of watching a very interesting drama about very interesting people. That is writer-director Tamizharasan Pachchamuthu’s biggest success.

The beauty of Lubber Pandhu is that it is not just the story of Anbu and Gethu. Anbu’s love interest Durga (Sanjana Krishnamoorthi) gets to do cute romantic stuff, but she also gets to assert herself when needed. When upset, her tone with Anbu is harder, more direct – but later, with her father, she is softer, because there is the sense that the man has let her down. There’s also Gethu’s wife, Yasodha (Swasika). This older couple, amazingly, gets more romantic moments than Anbu and Durga. Watching Dinesh in these scenes is like watching a grownup version of the character he played in Attakathi. This is a man who just can’t stop doing stupid things, but at the end of the day, all he wants is the comfort of love. The scenes with Yasodha’s sari could have easily turned into melodrama, but except for a few scenes in the second half, the director has a solid hold on the film’s low-key emotional pitch.

Another wonderful writing touch is that Anbu and Gethu may be a generation apart, but are very similar men. Anbu gets all ego-heavy when Gethu says or does things, but when Durga slaps him, there is zero ego. A superb scene in a bus, later, contains one of the most realistic progressions of a relationship. The  characters acknowledge the pain of the situation, and there is no attempt to sweeten or cute-ify the scene with an “ippo siri paakalaam” making-up moment at the end. Similarly, Gethu’s gethu disappears in front of his wife, who shoulders the family’s burdens. He is scared of her but he also loves her deeply. Lubber Pandhu could have been just a movie about these two relationships and it would still be a joy to watch. When what we call “side characters” add so much to a story, it only strengthens the core plot – whether it is the caste angle in the Gethu-Yasodha marriage, or the things going on with other people, too.

Take the scene involving a xerox-shop owner named Kaathadi, a generally cheerful man from an oppressed community, played by Balasaravanan. Almost every character is given an interesting profession: we see a nurse, a tailor, a painter, the above-mentioned xerox-shop owner. In other words, we see what people do when they are not involved in caste wars or ego wars or cricket wars. Everyone has a life that does not depend solely on driving the story forward, and this life gives extra dimensions to the drama. In the tailor shop, for instance, we get a scene where a player asks for his caste name to be displayed with more pride on his jersey. The scene, though, is small and treated like a throwaway. A big point is made with minimum fuss and then we move on to the next scene. 

Anyway, back to the scene with Kaathadi. It involves a visit from Karuppiah (Kali Venkat), who has generally been inclusive about bringing in new players into his team for the local cricket tournaments. So far, we have seen Karuppiah as a nice guy, someone who treats everyone from every community equally – but suddenly, Kaathadi brings out the difference between calling someone “thambi” versus calling them “thambi maadhiri”. The voices are not raised. The background score does not rise. And the point gets through beautifully: through the casualness of the acting, the casualness of the dialogue, through the casualness of the staging. The point about caste is made so lightly that you may not even register how major this point is. It is not something that has come up now, at this point in the story. It has always been a part of these lives. The shame on Karuppiah’s face is the shame of a society that tries to “do the right thing”, but only as long as it’s convenient.

But this same Kaathadi is also responsible for so much humour during the matches (very well edited by Madhan). He competes with the other team’s fans to provide a sarcasm-filled running commentary. Every character is written with some amount of depth and dimension, so we don’t just see one side of them. And it helps that this is a well-chosen cast. Balasaravanan, Kali Venkat, Geetha Kailasam as a grumbling mother, Devadarshini as another kind of mother, Sanjana Krishnamoorthy as the love interest who is both fun and serious – all of them shine brightly, along with, of course, Dinesh and Harish Kalyan. Even a tiffin box gets something of a character arc, with its own distinctively angled position in the kitchen area, its function in the Gethu-Yasotha relationship, and the way it becomes part of a heated argument. Only Swasika sticks out, because she plays her scenes in a less naturalistic and more theatrical metre that doesn’t gel with the others.

Sean Roldan keeps the background score minimal, and the excellent cinematographer Dinesh Purusothaman covers the film as though the camera is a character, watching the events unfold. There is not a single “look-at-me” shot, and yet, we keep looking at, say, the wide shot that has a mother-in-law walk into her daughter-in-law’s home. The older woman is probably taking in these surroundings for the first time, and so are we. There are so many standout scenes and moments that it’s not possible to list all, but here are a few: the low-angle hero-like shot of Gethu hitting a six, the way Anbu and Durga meet at a wedding and very casually continue their romance, the way Durga’s line “I won’t force you to do anything” plays a part in both love and cricket, and especially the way the phrase “chinna paiyan” irritates Anbu and Gethu at different points. This is highly concentrated writing.

The second half is a bit – only a bit – of a letdown compared to the first half because it follows a more conventional path, with some sentimental scenes that seem more “designed” than organic. The phrase “aambala thimiru” stings like a whiplash, but I wished the woman player in the team had been given more to do. She is just a symbolic presence. And the film tends to stuff a lot of information into dialogues. Take the scene where Yasodha yells at her mother for insulting her husband. It is obvious, right there, that Yasodha will never let anyone else say anything bad about Gethu, so there is no need for the tail-piece scene that has Yasodha saying this to Durga as a separate line. But this is a small issue in a film that does so much so well.

The screenplay is a series of small scenes and character traits, and they keep building and building. Usually, the heaviest moments will carry the hugest dramatic weight – but the way Anbu and Gethu make up or the way Anbu decides to form his own team is marvellously casual. That is the word that kept coming back to mind over and over: “casual”. Tamizharasan has managed something unusual in this mix of cricket and caste and ego. He has kept it all so casual, which is why the story flows so well. The films that Pa. Ranjith or Mari Selvaraj make are more serious and filled with more angst, and rightly so. But this lighter approach is welcome, too. In one of the small scenes in the screenplay, a man is asked why he likes cricket. He says, “I just like it. That’s all.” He could have made a major point about a relevant issue (like how the game unites diverse players, et cetera), but this innocence, this casualness is so charming. This moment is like the movie, light on the surface, and also deceptively deep. Lubber Pandhu is a real charmer.