Pasanga

Director: Pandiraj
Music: James Vasanthan
Cast: Kishore, Sri Ram, Pandian, Tharani

Why don’t movies like Pasanga get grand opening or pre-release hype that movies like Aadhavan or Kandasamy get? Why do we rush to the theatre or the DVD shop the moment these 'blockbusters' are released even though we are inherently doubtful about how good these would be? On the other hand, even though we see movies like Pasanga stacked at DVD shelves for quite a while, we hesitate to pick it up until one of our friends strongly recommends it?

We will never know the answers to these questions. We wouldn't need to either because movies like Pasanga will never get such pre-release hype. This is not just Tamil Nadu but is an international phenomenon. Movies like Gran Tornio will never get the openings commanded by Harry Potter or Spider Man. We will often rush to reserve the first day tickets for Harry Potter and end up renting out DVDs of Gran Torino. These are inevitable. What should be heart-warming is that movies like Gran Torino get made and reviewed favourably.

Watching Pasanga – other than the filmic experience it provides – was a similar heart-warming experience because the Tamil Industry – despite rotten manure like Kandasamy raking in crores – allows such movies to be made. The Tamil audience should be thankful to Balu Mahendra not just for the kinds of films he made but for spawning an institution from which directors after directors who are out to transform Tamil Cinema are emerging. Bala, Vetrimaaran, Ameer, Ram, Sasikumar, etc. And these directors are carrying the torch further and seems to be really in a hurry to topple trends. Encouraged perhaps by Sasikumar, Pandiraj, Cheran’s disciple has dared to venture into something unheard of in the Tamil industry: A children’s film.

Pasanga attempts brave storytelling and uses parodied humour as the form of entertainment, a typical Bala instrument. The story revolves around a bunch of kids and their joy, struggle, ordeal and triumphs. There are of course characters who are adults and their life obviously is affected by what is happening to the children in the movie. The characters are real, grounded and well realised. But many situations are melodramatic. This combination of pitting real characters against the melodrama, a technique invented by Barathiraja, is actively employed here to create some entertaining moments. A tad clichéd climax brings on the necessary conclusion to complete the experience. The charged music with constant reference to 'mass-entertainer' elements add to the required entertainment. The result is a powerful parody, high comedy and, well, in a nutshell the Bala cinema.

Another delightful aspect was that Pasanga knowingly or not, satirises all the so-called 'mass masala' entertainers. Especially in the first twenty minutes, the film seriously parodies the mass hero phenomenon that is at once hilarious and another level humiliating.

Pasanga works as a children's film at one level, filling in the long overdue gap in Indian cinema. Children’s films in India often end up being either tacky or preachy. Pasanga effectively overcomes that barrier. It is a clean, fun-filled, entertaining children's film on the lines of Children of Heaven or even the Apu Trilogy. Many ardent Satyajit Ray fans are going to be terribly angry at this comparison but damn them. They don't know the harsh realities of the Tamil film industry.

And finally, a very interesting feature in the film is the progress of the story through the four seasons. The story starts during April, summer, and also the start of the academic year and progresses through monsoon, autumn, and winter and till the end of the academic year. Mise-en-scene is a cinematic technique that refers to using non-actor elements such as lighting, environment, settings, and objects to aid storytelling. Mise-en-scene, pronounced as 'miss-en-sen' is the feature almost completely missing in our mainstream mass entertainers. In Pasanga, the seasons are used effectively to aid storytelling just like how the eighties Madurai was used in Subramaniapuram.

Pasanga is interesting, hilarious, and one of the important films of the year. Director Pandiraj, just like every member of Balu Mahendra institution, is the one to watch out for. They won't need a Diwali opening. Regardless of how much we are going to hesitate picking their movies up from DVD shelves, they are going to continue to make films like Pasanga and Subramaniapuram. And there are going to be friends nudging you in Facebook to watch those movies.

That’s good enough.

Aadhavan

Director: K S Ravikumar
Music: Harris Jeyaraj
Cast: Suriya, Nayanthara, Murali, Vadivelu, Sayaji Shinde

It would be apt to start on the thread left in the previous review: Comedy Tracks. What would we do without them? And what our so called Mass Masala Entertainers would do if there was legislation restricting these tracks?

There are films with comedy tracks running as separate strands unlinked to the main story. Often times the main protagonists won’t even know that there’s a comedian interrupting their story. This does not take much effort from the director or screenwriter’s point of view. They can simply write a main script without any other consideration and later insert the comedy relief wherever necessary. There were times when a separate writer is commissioned to pen the comedy tracks. Perhaps this is still being practiced.

The other, perhaps much harder, technique is to try to blend comedy within the main narration. In here, the protagonist knows the comedian or the protagonist themselves work with the designated comedian to evoke laughter in the movie halls. This is considered harder work because the main narration is usually the serious one and blending jokes within would be risky. It requires experienced directors to employ this.

K S Ravikumar certainly is one of the highly experienced and it is a known fact that comedy comes naturally to him. It is quite evident in Aadhavan that has probably one of the best utilised roles for Vadivelu. Thanks to his presence, you almost fail to notice that there is something serious going on in the main story. Even if you did notice, you sincerely hope it turns out comical to enable Vadivelu or other assigned comedians in the film to poke fun at it. Surely enough there are plenty of such opportunities.

Funnily, there are even some unintended moments of laughter in the narration. When the ambitious but botched up job of Suriya as a child is realised, when Saroja Devi in her squeaky voice delivers some melodramatic lines in feigned sincerity, or when the father cries out to his son from within a car suspended in the air by a crane. The serious attempts turn into funny moments.

Neither the director or the producer of the film would be really bothered about how the audience respond to these scenes as long as some form of entertainment is realised in the halls. The audience though won’t be complaining about Suriya or K S Ravikumar. They are, however, going to praise Vadivelu on his ability to evoke laughter by merely standing in the frame. Why do we bother that we don’t care much about the characters and the consequences? In an ironic sense, the rules of Mass Masala Entertainer dictates that the audience shouldn’t be ‘disturbed’ much emotionally and only ‘entertained’. This requirement is achieved in ample quantities in Aadhavan. So why bother?

And finally, with a huge sigh of relief, may god bless the person who invented comedy tracks!

Kandasamy

Director: Susi Ganesan
Music: Devi Sri Prasad
Cast: Vikram, Shriya, Prabhu, Vadivel, Ashish Vidyarthi

Whatever happened to characterisation? Whatever happened to the love of cinema and plain simple storytelling? More than anything else, whatever happened to the eyesight of the Tamil audience? Just when we thought that the disorienting, music video editing trend is not, well, a trend but just a fad, here comes another film that has more than three hours of material edited with fast, interlaced frames, and within those frames, colours change, images blur, get washed out as a method of storytelling. Kandasamy follows the latest Tamil film making practice of conveying very little through characterisation, acting, or mis-en-scene. When a character is shocked, the frame is washed off colour for a couple of seconds. A character duped would have the frame shaken. Almost every department of storytelling is limited not by the creative capabilities of the director but by the features available in the latest version of Final Cut Pro, the de facto editing software.

The result is a severe headache, temporary loss of vision, and the terrible loss of story thread, if such a thing was available. So we wondered how the land acquisition problem was sorted out so quickly by a mere CBI audit, how the biggest businessman was nailed down before the last reel in such a tearing hurry and whatever happened to the other businessman with a paralytic attack? Please remember that this reaction is the result of a DVD view where the movie was amply paused, multiple breaks taken, songs forwarded, a few snippets rewound and watched again for clarity. Heart shudders at the thought of the effect one would have by watching it on the big screen; without the remote control.

Also, various other details also found missing or lost in the myriad of Final Cut Pro project files. Details such as where does the protagonist live? Where is his family? What are the businesses of the two main antagonists and how do they know each other? The director probably felt that these were absolutely unnecessary to the main story. He was probably right. Perhaps these details were unnecessary. Perhaps the movie itself was unnecessary. And so was this review.

This review does not even intend to go into the analysis of the story, the banality of its social concern, the poverty pornography it sets out to cash in, the hangover of Shankar, the hangover that was associated with a splitting, debilitating headache, and the message it seems to espouse, which we missed because again, it apparently got lost in the hard drive among the millions of edited frames.

And finally, whoever invented the feature called comedy track, thank god for that person. What a relief they were in this film.

P.S:
Here’s a sincere request to Chief Minister Karunanidhi. ‘Sir, ever since you have taken charge, you have been actively involved in the affairs of the film industry, more so than of any other industry in the state. You have passed various bills in the interest of the perceived welfare of the public, such as taxing the films with non-Tamil names. Here's another bill you can pass, this time in the real interest: Ban the usage of editing software from Tamil films, and with immediate effect, and order all the filmmakers to return to linear, manual editing. Thank you in advance. Yours faithfully, The Reviewer.’