The energy of the dancers seems to spill over to every nook and corner of the slum. Yuvan’s chartbusters are so smoothly blended in, I couldn’t pick out the point where, say, the dialogue ended and the Variya number began. Selvaraghavan shows an impressive feel for his material, and there are as many scenes that exist at a level of poetry as there are that play rousingly to the gallery, especially the song sequences. Somehow, it doesn’t sound right when the lives of these people are underscored by horns and cellos.) (Many of these sequences do not have a background score, though I couldn’t see why because there are other places where Yuvan Shankar Raja goes rather overboard with symphonic swells.
#Pudhupettai movie movie#
(That’s why there’s no beginning-middle-end feel the climax doesn’t wrap the movie up with a neat bow so much as set it adrift on a different course.) Early on, for instance, you see in the background Kumar’s mother being slapped by her husband the screen turns black, then when she’s serving her son dinner, her cheek is swollen.
#Pudhupettai movie series#
The heavily melodramatic story is narrated as a series of flashbacks, and Selvaraghavan doesn’t let his scenes play out so much as let them fade in and fade out, making them seem like random bursts of memory. This is just a tiny visual payoff, but the major innovation of Pudhupettai - other than the fact that it asks us to invest in a protagonist who’s basically a sewer rat with no redeeming qualities - is in its telling. You think the frame, the image, perhaps indicates the split-personality of Kumar (who’s in the cell), but much, much later, when Kumar gets into politics, Selvaraghavan zooms in on a map of Chennai the areas that belong to Kumar are in green, his rival’s are in red. The right half of the screen is lit in a lurid red, the left in an equally lurid, phosphorescent green. Right from the first scene in a jail cell, you can see Selvaraghavan knows exactly what he’s doing. Anyone with an interest in cinema would be part of the audience for Pudhupettai, because it’s been made with brains and a vision. But the thing about this film - as with all of Selvaraghavan’s films - is that it may be about them, but it isn’t necessarily only for them. No wonder, then, that the first song in the movie goes Enga area ulla varaadhey! This could almost be a warning to a certain section of the audience, because Kumar and his cronies say that Pudhupettai, Vyasarpadi, Ennore and Kasimedu are their areas, while Anna Nagar, KK Nagar, T Nagar and Boat Club are ours. As a member of the middle-class, as a member of the balcony audience, you cringe at this moment, but at the same time, you are grateful for the visceral reaction it produces - no, provokes - in you. Yet, you have to admit that this is what someone like “Kokki” Kumar, who grows up in the slums, is likely to do. (Yes, a crass schoolboy.) In one scene, he’s trying to outrun his mother who’s after him with a cane, and yet, when he passes a pubescent girl, he stops momentarily to leer, “ Enna, vayasukku vandhuttiya?” You’ll never find this happening in a Mani Ratnam movie, because his instincts are resolutely middle-class a respect for women is ingrained in him. Pudhupettai charts the rise-through-the-ranks of a hoodlum named “Kokki” Kumar (Dhanush), and the early parts of the film show Kumar as a schoolboy.
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They’ll watch Mani Ratnam’s Aayitha Ezhuthu, where Madhavan’s lowlife is presented in impressively art-directed squalor, but they can’t bring themselves to watch 7G Rainbow Colony because the hero says the heroine regards him as “ therula kadakkara saani.” In other words, crassness in a character is apparently okay, but crassness in the presentation isn’t.īut this crassness is the key to Selvaraghavan’s work it’s why his films get under your skin like a nagging itch. A lot of people mistake Selvaraghavan’s movies for low-class movies - that is, the movies created for the sweepers and the factory workers and the ayahs and the auto drivers. I know I’m treading on thin ice here, but at the heart of this is the whole high-class versus low-class business. I’ll tell them he’s the most excitingly raw filmmaker in Tamil cinema today, that even if his films don’t hold up as a whole there are enough individual moments of brilliance - but they just won’t go to his cinema because of the kind of lowlives his protagonists are. – I KNOW A LOT OF PEOPLE who won’t watch Selvaraghavan movies. Selvaraghavan and Dhanush reunite in a lowdown and dirty tale of a gangster from the slums.
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