ESSAY: Cinematic Realism & the New Tamil Bloodfest

By Joyojeet Pal

The decline of Sunny Deol into near B-moviedom is an important indicator of the market reorientation towards upper class sensibilities in Hindi cinema. The fight scene is not gone entirely, but between the gloss of romances set in Switzerland and multi-starrer screwball comedies set in Goa, the regular visual ethic for the multiplex audiences of Hindi film watchers is increasingly less crusty. The one-man army bashing up a line of extras is more or less disappearing from the Hindi film narrative. As the prices of theatre tickets slide past the affordable ranges for the urban poor, Mithunda’s retirement from lead star makes timely space for a the rise of Bhojpuri cinema. Here, as in most vernacular cinema, the ceremonial bashing remains a necessary reinforcement of the protagonist’s masculinity and a guaranteed quencher of the audience’s blood-thirst at the end of a ticket price worth of air conditioning.

Since the early 2000s, Tamil cinema has seen a considerable expansion in visual and narrative experimentation. Unlike Hindi cinema, the gloss in Tamil has grown alongside a new strain of carnage. In 2003, director Bala made the Tamil film Pithamagan about an illiterate orphan who grows up inside a graveyard with no human contact other than the gravedigger. The film had high production values, great music, and boasted good performances. But what made it stand out more than any other hit film was its visualization of visceral ferocity that triggered a new wave of ‘realist’ violent dramas in the popular cinema genre. These differed in their depiction of violence in three important ways – in the circumstances of the violence, typically a more stark depiction of poverty or desperation, in the persona of the perpetrators, typically grimy and desperate, and in the description of the acts, typically graphic.

Among director Bala’s protégés was Ameer Sultan, who followed Pithamagan with the remarkably brutal Paruthiveeran in 2007, a Madurai-based stab-fest. Ameer’s assistant was Sasikumar, who in turn went on to make Subramaniapuram in 2008, a grisly romance set in an 80s Madurai slum. Perhaps most disturbing in this series of films was Bala’s recent Naan Kadavul in 2009, an intense, voyeuristic, and exceptionally violent film about disabled beggars. What was unusual about this wave of realist films, including Veyyil and Mirugam was that they were centered around a violent rural underbelly, usually in Southern Tamil Nadu. The use of dry sunburned landscapes was rediscovered and offered as a gritty visual companion to the crusty narrative. The films’ clever use of rural metaphor and folk art further strengthen the authenticity of portrayal – Pithamagan used long-distance train peddlers, Paruthiveeran used village fairs, Veyyil used body-painted performers and rural cinema halls, Naan Kadavul actually cast real-life performing beggars.

These films on one hand revived the rural film, but emphasized a society deeply oppressive on caste, gender, and class. This setting was much different than the idyllic hinterland than was typified by Bharatiraja films, where rural purity upheld Tamil social and cultural values. The realist flare of these films also created a new wave of urban shoot-em-ups, which were equally tenacious in their claim of realism, actors playing cops for instance, agreed to get haircuts and trim bellies. The main thread of class authenticity in these films is not in how close the character is to reality, but how far the character is from being someone the class elite would relate to.

In each of these, the male lead was a rugged, brutish character, a far cry from the typical boy-next-door star. The female lead, equally importantly, moved away from the western-dressed, fair-skinned north Indian girls towards a form factor of cultural and racial authenticity. The protagonists of 2006 hitman drama Pattiyal are unfashionable slum kids, the thuggish protagonist of Mafia drama Chitram Pesudhadi from the same year is a pudgy unkempt brute, who reprises an almost identical role, with cleaner cut hair as the temperamental police officer in Anjaathey. The female leads in most of these films are not only deglamourized in looks but are vulnerable to physical and social violence, and importantly – the hero is fallible and frequently unable to ‘protect’ them. The actresses in Pithamagan are a runaway schoolgirl and a prostitute. In Paruthiveeran, she is a sullen sickle-wielding village girl, in Subramaniyapuram, the pigtailed plain-Jane lead plays a class card by reviving the traditional half-saree, in Pattiyal the lead actress is a slum-dwelling salesgirl, and in Mirugam she is a casual farm labourer  – all far cries from the stereotypical decked-up heroine.

The face of the antagonist has changed likewise in these films. Replacing the fanciful, stylish arch-villain with uniformed cronies, many of these films was disconcerting by coming closer to home, by relating to the  middle-class audience. The nasty drug lord of Pithamagan has a doting wife and lives in a typical small-town home, the wicked politico of Subramaniapuram is a barely middle-class wannabe politico, the hitman of Anjaathey looks like an accountant with a Rexene man-purse, the Mafia don of Chithram Pesudhadi owns a banana wholesaling business.

This new wave of realist violent dramas has thrived in part due to its understatement of star appeal. The curious catch-22 of Tamil (and most south Indian) cinema is that once the male star becomes bigger than the film, his films have to follow a fairly standard formula. This is why the physical or emotional violation of the female leads in many of these realist films listed above is a critical exception from the male protagonist’s designated role in a typical Tamil film. With the exception of Pithamagan, which starred two established, but not superstar-class lead actors, each film listed here features either complete newcomers or lesser stars.

In an industry where directors pitch their ideas to stars, who in turn bring producers on board, making a film where the star is seconded to the concept is a risky proposition. By establishing the realist violent drama as a genre of its own, these films have created a saleable genre of their own, but in doing so, ironically, the stars these films created can no longer play the imperfect characters – Karthi has bounced off his Paruthiveeran launchpad into conventional blockbusters, Arya now a top-billed boy-next-door since his Pattiyal days, Jai moved on from his scraggly Subramaniapuram success to romantic star, Vikram’s roles since Pithamagan have generally conformed to a superstar image (Ravanan does not count, since working with Mani Ratnam squeezes image politics somewhat, as it famously did for Rajnikanth in Dalapathy).

The idea of screen violence in Tamil cinema has gone through an interest shift of trends since the early days of Kodambakkan. Before the secularization of narrative, most Tamil cinema was mythological or in what was known as the fantasy, and where the swashbuckling fight sequences tended to be oriented around Silambam – a local martial art which local superstar MG Ramachandran was himself an exponent. MGR’s famous stick-fighting sequences, notably his one-handed stick swirling as he rode a cycle-rickshaw through a gang of armed attackers in Rickshawkaran (which he incidentally won the national award for) was not only emblematic of the ‘novelty’ action sequence of the time, but landmark in its establishment of the invincible one-against-many fight sequence.

Outside of the occasional melodramatic ‘social’ film, fight scenes in the 70s were offered in roughly the same intervals as songs, with one climatic master fight. The deathlessness of heroes, primary MGR, meant that the climatic sequence were mainly kitschy. This changed with the entry of Rajnikanth, whose move from villain to hero meant he was not new to being thrashed on screen and therefore able to transcend the image trap and offer a far more interesting fight scene. Like Rajnikanth, actors like Thyagarajan and an early Vijaykanth looked adequately blue collar in angry young man avatars that allowed them to be involved in a fairly messy hand-to-hand match ups. This changed by the late 1980s. Despite the then legendary savagery of the fistfight scene in a Mumbai gutter between Velu Naicker and Ratan Singh in Mani Ratnam’s Nayakan, the decade was known for its circus-like rather than any serious ferocity. For much of the 1990s, the trend continued, only now aided increasingly by the Crouching Tiger-esque special effects that allowed punches to send the recipients flying.

Fast forward to the 2000s, while the brutality of the Pithamagan successors is certainly more explicit by its realism, the ‘circus’ nature of the fight scenes in the typical ‘mass film’ is by no means easy watching, nor particularly uniform. Older superstars like Rajnikanth and Vijaykanth will typically spend little energy and achieve significant results as if air-blowing their attackers away, whereas a Vijay, Ajith, or Vishal film may have a far more graphic means to the same end. Very slightly closer on the spectrum of acceptable realism, the typical cop film with a Surya or Vikram film would likewise maintain the invincibility of the star, but unlike Vijay, Surya can actually end up with a bandage at the end of the fight without the fear of the theatre being burnt to the ground.

The appetite for violence in recent Tamil cinema is rooted in the overwhelmingly male audience for general consumption. On one hand is the salivating savagery of the mass stars who burdened by their images must follow a very set pattern of what they can do, maximize the screen time and innovation in violence for their typically young fan base. The same applies to films of other actors who while not burdened by images must nonetheless pander to some formulaic elements. In this environment, the exaggerated realism of a Subramaniyapuram, Paruthiveeran, Nadodigal, Pattiyal, or Naan Kadavul is particularly concerning because all of these films have one other element in common. They share a nihilistic view of the social exclusion, in which young men, typically unemployed or in some shape of desperation, have but other male companions to rely on. Women are either baggage, unreliable or simply irrelevant to the protagonist’s self realization in society.

In many ways, the fact that most of the filmmakers at the helm of these movies are themselves transplants into Kodambakkam – Bala, Ameer, and Sasikumar are all from Madurai, and bring the small town cultural and class discourse into the narrative centerpiece, in much the same way as Balachander introduced the urbane ethic to 70s Tamil cinema. That there is a wealth of new cinema in Tamil Nadu is extremely refreshing and indicative of the opportunities for experimentation, but the gendered nature of these changes is deeply disturbing.

This testosterone realism is clearly designed for a male audience, and by derivation thus, the authentic rural film or a film about class struggle or despair in present-day Tamil Nadu holds little in store for the female filmgoer. Worse, the story of rural Tamil Nadu, or of the urban underbelly, is increasingly defined by the glorification of the Aruvaal (the sickle shaped machete) and a corresponding mythology of a society based on tribal honour. Rather ironically, the key symbolic representation of Madurai has traditionally been Kannagi, the Tamil folklore heroine who was used symbolically by the DMK. In these films, the recasting of Madurai as a land of moustache-laden violence lionizes an Azhagiri myth of medieval lawlessness tamed by a fearless man. The woman plays no real role.

Perhaps the most unsettling trend in these films is the comfort with violence towards women. This is problematic not just in its casual nature, but also in the concerted frequency with which this is both portrayed and allowed to rest, as though the world moves along. The purpose thus of the narrative becomes to show a gritty realism of rural life, a necessary visual tool of which, perhaps as important as the moustache or the Aruvaal is the abused woman. The new wave of realism, sadly, is about men and other men, shot from the perspective of men. For our respected female viewers, there is always the soap opera.

Comments

[Sivakumar]

Paruthi Veeran and Subramaniapuram owe quite a bit to early films of Bharathiraja's like 16 Vayathinile in terms of brutal portrayal of violence in rural settings. Kamal Haasan's Thevar Magan and Virumandi also had a fair bit of blood and gore in pretty realistic surroundings. The big difference in Bala's films, though, is that he seems to get a kick out of violence the way Tarantino does with a generous amount of black humor mixed with conventional gore and that has added an extra dimension to his school of film making.