The points that Vetri Maaran makes are sickle-sharp. But these points do not come together coherently in a cinematic form, because the film is extraordinarily dialogue-heavy.
Taken together, Vetri Maaran’s two Viduthalai films are certainly some kind of achievement. Until now, the two-parter films we have had in India (or maybe even the world) have all been in the fantasy / history zone. This may be the first time a socio-political movie is being served in two installments. Part 1 was set in 1987, in southern Tamil Nadu, and it was about a newbie cop named Kumaresan, played by Soori. Like us, he was the outsider to police life, and through his eyes, we saw police life like we had rarely seen, from bathrooms to kitchens, from ego wars and punishments to hierarchies and the willingness to go to any extreme to get the job done. Viduthalai – Part 1 operated at a fairly simplistic good-versus-bad level. The “bad guys” are the cops, the special task force set up to capture the leaders of a rebel group named Makkal Padai.
These are the “good guys”, led by the Vijay Sethupathi character, who’s named Perumal. They resort to violent means to push back against the government’s development initiatives, because of the cost to the local people and the local ecosystem. Depending on who’s doing the talking, the members of Makkal Padai are Naxalites or revolutionaries or terrorists. And through Makkal Padai, we got a character arc of Kumaresan. We got to know how an outsider becomes an insider. We got to know how someone learnt to separate State-disseminated propaganda from the truth. We got to know how a man who fears a gun at the beginning ends up holding one. That is: how does a “coward” become a “hero”? These were the questions driving Viduthalai – Part 1 – and the way they shape Kumaresan is the overall arc of the coming-of-age narrative.
In theory, Part 2 is more interesting, more ambitious. This installment is about Perumal, and we learn about how a simple school teacher became the leader of a revolutionary movement. And here’s what’s interesting and ambitious. While Part 1 was the coming-of-age story of a man, Part 2 is the coming-of-age story of a movement. Perumal may be the head of Makkal Padai, but it becomes increasingly obvious that he is no “hero”. The real heroism comes from the resistance to an unjust, oppressive System – and it isn’t just a one-man job. The film’s first image is the forging of a sickle. It isn’t just a weapon. It is a symbol of what’s to come. At the opening, Vetri Maaran says that this is a “karpanai kadhai”, i.e., all events are imagined and not real. But followers of Tamil Nadu politics will be able to spot many references in the lines and the scenarios. But even if you don’t catch these, the story is easy to follow.
And the points that Vetri Maaran makes are sickle-sharp. There are the generic issues of class and caste and religion. But more specifically, we see that even a man from an oppressed community can become an oppressor because he wants power, because that is the only way he can climb up the ranks. We hear a woman’s anguish that the freedoms we take for granted today are thanks to the sacrifices by people like Perumal, many of whose names are now lost in time. We see a woman who has cut off her hair because her braid was once used by a man as a weapon to yank her around. We see Perumal’s connection with Nature through a leaf that falls on him and through the rain that wakes him up from an unconscious state and by his knowledge of forests. No wonder he resents (in Part 1) the land being plundered by mining companies.
But these points do not come together coherently in a cinematic form. We are told that the characters played by Ken Karunas and Kishore are crucial in Perumal’s evolution. But the parts they play, the things they say are generic and obvious to anyone who knows the basics of workers’ rights and capitalistic exploitation. Maybe they had more scenes and these were chopped off – which is the sense you get with Mahalakshmi, too, played by Manju Warrier. It would have made for terrific drama to see how this daughter of a sugar mill owner turned into a Communist. It would have helped to see this hard woman slowly becoming more emotional because of her love for her husband. (On the other hand, Kumaresan’s love interest, played by Bhavani Sre, is completely absent in this movie. So the man does not get a single personal moment.)
The music doesn’t help. When Kumaresan signs his suspension order, Ilaiyaraaja lets loose some sad-sounding strings – as though the event weren’t sad enough, and had to be made sadder. This sentimental score works against the grit of what Vetri Maaran is trying to say. But the bigger issue is that the film is extraordinarily dialogue-heavy. We get voiceovers and lines and bigger lines that are meant to be philosophies. The scenes are cut in a way that shows us how much research has been done. For instance, a character talks about how the French Revolution gave us the political leanings that, today, we call the Left and the Right – but this thought is not completed, and the next scene cuts in. This is a great way to say something, give us something to think about, and yet not have it sound like a standalone lecture.
But sadly, many of the lines do sound like standalone lectures. We don’t feel the simple human emotions we felt in something like Asuran, where it was about a small family unit and we rooted for them. Here, family is secondary to ideology – I get that. But shouldn’t some emotional aspect be there to draw us in? We don’t feel the Vijay Sethupathi-Manju Warrier romance. We are told about it! We don’t feel Perumal’s transformation to ideologue. We are told about it. Everything is dialogue-heavy, and everything is conveyed through voiceovers and dialogues. And given the time period, I don’t know if Vetri Maaran was going for old-style melodrama, like the cliched words from a weeping widow or Nambiar-style whipping of workers – but somehow, all of this is jarring in this “realistic” world, with a great metaphor about how Perumal becomes a literal and metaphorical “guide” (“vazhikaatti”) in the forest.
I wished the film had just been about a bunch of cops escorting a dangerous prisoner through a forest, and him turning into their guide. That would have allowed for a compact framework and also given Vetri Maaran the chance to say what he wanted to say. The other characters, like Mahalakshmi, add flavour, sure – but at the expense of a coherent narrative. Vetri Maaran is unable to contain the chaos, the sprawl. He shows people trekking through the jungle, and he also wants to cut away to an instructor lecturing about jungle warfare, like a talking head in a documentary. The latter parts of Part 2 perk up with some action and with some old-style villainy from Chethan (in a very good performance that makes you want to kill him). Vijay Sethupathi, Manju Warrier, Kishore give “veteran” performances, in the sense that they come across strongly even when not supported by the script or the hyper-edited structure. The film didn’t come together for me, but I did have fun thinking of Vetri Maaran as the real “vaathiyar” (teacher), who’s made his own version of the Communist Manifesto.
