Originally published in the November-December 2019 issue of Film Comment
By R. Emmet Sweeney
Vetri Maaran’s sprawling action dramas make for a bloody–and bloody good–panorama of Tamil Nadu’s subcultures and underclasses
The most revelatory moviegoing experience I had last year was seeing Vetri Maaran’s Vada Chennai in a parking garage movie theater in North Bergen, New Jersey. It is an intricately plotted, stabbingly violent gangster saga that is so richly detailed that I could almost feel the texture of the leather hilts on the machetes thrusting this Shakespearean tale of deception into action. Intended to be part one of a trilogy, it is the third collaboration between the Tamil writer-director Vetri Maaran and star Dhanush. Their films together are deeply researched dives into Tamil subcultures, from the aimless unemployed youth of the director’s raucous debut Polladhavan (Ruthless Man, 2007) to the cockfighters in the National Film Award-winning Aadukalam (Arena, 2011). Vetri Maaran’s one film without Dhanush as the leading man is the art-house-aimed Visaranai (Interrogation, 2015), a harrowing story of migrant laborers sucked into the torturous hell of the prison system; premiered in Venice, it was India’s submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Vetri Maaran and Dhanush rolled out their fourth collaboration with Asuran (Tamil for “demon”), a bloody revenge drama that opened worldwide in October. The new film furthers their exploration of modern Indian history as one of unethical land grabs: the hero is a rural farmer seeking vengeance against a capitalist elite. Asuran is the latest in Vetri Maaran and Dhanush’s formidable catalogue of underclass action melodramas that should be much better known outside of India.
In the West, Indian cinema has become synonymous with Hindi-language Bollywood productions, despite the existence of thriving regional film industries outside of Mumbai, whose products are becoming more and more popular at the national level. The top-grossing Indian films of the last two years were the Tamil-language 2.0 (2018, made in Chennai, aka the home of Kollywood) and the Telugu-and Tamil-language Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (2017, shot in Hyderabad, aka the home of Tollywood). In the introduction to the essay collection Beyond Bollywood: The Cinemas of South India, M.K. Raghavendra argues that Bollywood’s publicity advantage is due to the fact that “Hindi mainstream cinema has been a national cinema in a way that regional language cinemas have not.” Speaking directly to their populace, regional cinemas revel in specificity, which explains some of the appeal of a Tamil director like Vetri Maaran, who spends years researching neighborhoods before shooting his films.
Vetri Maaran was born in Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, about 120 miles from state capital Chennai, in 1975. His mother is noted novelist Megala Chitravel and his father is a veterinary scientist. Vetri Maaran’s old friend and assistant Manimaran recalled that the director would skip classes and go to the movies, “each three or four times. Then he would come to the school ground…and would retell the whole story to us.” His films have a tumbling narrative flow, with stories branching into stories, that suggests something similar to these early oral recaps. He went on to pursue a master’s degree in English literature but dropped out after attending a seminar by director Balu Mahendra, who hired him to be his assistant. Mahendra was a adaptable filmmaker who could shift from a blockbuster film (Un Kannil Neer Vazhindal, 1985) to a small-scale drama about a woman’s struggles to build a house (Veedu, 1988). It’s a strategy that Vetri Maaran seems to have emulated early in his career.
One of his first jobs for Mahendra was on the television series Kadhai Neram (1999), which adapt 52 short stories into just as many episodes. Vetri Maaran had to read 50 to 60 short stories each week, highlight a couple, and present condensed versions to Mahendra. This crucible of concision taught him how to edit as well as find the essential kernal of a story. Later, on the set of Mahendra’s drama Adhu Oru Kana Kaalam (2005), he first met and became friends with Dhanush. In Tamil Nadu, movies are a way of life, with fandom so obsessive that its biggest contemporary star, the 68-year-old Rajinikanth (aka Super Star Rajini), is worshipped with fervent intensity (the documentary For the Love of a Man captures this phenomenon) and others have been elected to state office. Accordingly, the way Vetri Maaran has been able to get his films funded and produced is through his collaborations with Dhanush, a younger (36-year-old) multiplatform star who also happens to be Rajinikanth’s son-in-law.
The rail-thin Dhanush emits a distanced cool that he can shape into a variety of packages, including the outrageous gangster of the enormously successful Maari films (2015 and 2018) and the more down-at-heel protagonists of his Vetri Maaran projects, where he hardens that coldness into an icy reserve. Their first film together was Polladhavan (Ruthless Man), in which Dhanush–tousle-haired, wiry, and aloof–plays an aimless lower-middle-class Chennai youth named Prabhu who borrows his father’s savings to buy a prized Pulsar motorbike. When it is stolen, something snaps inside of him, and he tracks its location through a series of chop shops and gang hideouts presided over by Selvam (Kishore, a vulpine Vetri Maaran regular), until Prabhu retrieves it via a kinetic, bloody brawl.
When asked if Polladhavan was inspired by Bicycle Thieves, Vetri Maaran modestly described the comparison as a “disgrace” to Bicycle Thieves, stating that his film was based on a true story told to him by one of his friends. In any case, it was a surprise hit and became something of a touchstone for rebellious youth at the time (it even caused a spike in Pulsar sales). Polladhavan establishes Vetri Maaran’s street-level view of Chennai, which is present in all of his features. He focuses on a neighborhood and then builds it block-by-block as the story sends Dhanush on a descent into the most dangerous parts of the city. Vetri Maaran dismisses his debut as a “mediocre masala film,” and it certainly feels more simplistic than his later work, with his most linear narrative and clumsy (though catchy) musical sequences that interrupt the narrative flow. But it is already identifiably a Vetri Maaran film, with its attentiveness to outsider communities and sinuous location photography, shot by his regular DP R. Velraj.
In preparation to shoot his next film, Aadukalam (Arena), which reteamed him with Dhanush and music director G.V. Prakash Kumar, Vetri Maaran dedicated two years to research the Tamil city of Madurai, learning its lifestyle and dialect. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the ritualized nature of cockfighting in Madurai. It circles two life-long foes: police Inspector Rathnasamy (Naren) and poverty-stricken Pettaikaran (V.I.S. Jayaplana, a Sri Lankan poet making his film debut). It is a film about masculine pride and its endless spiraling insecurities. Both Rathnasamy and Pettaikaran have devoted their lives to cockfighting. Though Rathnasamy has a prestigious job and Pettaikaran looks the part of saintly self-sacrifice, both have been corrupted by the barbaric intensity of the sport. Rathnasamy is a bribe-taking dirty cop, and Pettaikaran a huckster spiritualist. They have battled each other for a lifetime, and now have to entrust their feud to the next generation. This includes rooster trainers Durai (Kishore) and Karuppu (Dhanush), who are starting to rebel against Pettaikaran’s old-fashioned attitudes. Jealousies and resentments build until Karuppu’s whole world comes crashing down, including his romance with the English-speaking girl next door, whose family bristles at their daughter dating such a low-class specimen.
These are lives built on rigid tradition, and Vetri Maaran details every step of the cockfighting process, from training to battle strategy. He and Velraj utilize low-angle tracking shots to give a sense of scale to the proceedings, making these illegal backyard cockfights feel like the Super Bowl. The birds themselves battle in CGI, and while they won’t earn the film any VFX awards, Vetri Maaran wrings tension out of the reaction shots, which register each talon blow as a personal affront. He also incorporates the musical elements as more organic components of the story instead of cutting to a set. Here the songs naturally emerge from the action.
Vetri Maaran fills the 156-minute running time with an uncountable cast of indelible characters who provide a thumbnail portrait of the Madurai cockfighting underworld, while utilizing a time-shifting structure as a means of controlling the tempo, often toggling back a few days to fill in a random detail. His stories have the ability to flow out in every direction in space and time without getting lost in the flood. Aadukalam and Vada Chennai both reminded me of Mariano Llinas’s 14-hour La Flor at different points, in that I thought they could go on forever and I would not complain.
Aadukalam would become another box office success and garner even more critical praise–winning six times at the National Film Awards (including Best Director). At this point Vetri Maaran founded his production house Grass Root Film Company, which funds films on subjects close to his heart, including M. Manikandan’s Kaaka Muttai (2014), the bittersweet fable of two slum kids trying to earn enough money to buy a slice of pizza for the first time. It’s a story of gentrification, with developers tearing down the kids’ old playground to feed the emerging middle class. Bureaucratic corruption is a theme that emerges again and again in Vetri Maaran’s work, from the films he has produced–like Poriyaalan (2014), a thriller about fraudulent construction paperwork–to his more recent directorial efforts, Visaranai and Vada Chennai.
Visaranai, co-produced by (though not starring) Dhanush, is about three Tamil workers who are forced to leave home and seek employment in the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh. They sleep in a public park and work odd jobs as daily-wage laborers, sending money home when they can spare it. Then one day, they are arrested for a theft they did not commit and beaten and tortured until they confess to the crime. With pressure from above, the cops just want to close the case, and these laborers, who don’t speak the local language, are easy targets for a forced confession.
The film was adapted from the novel Lock Up (2006) by auto rickshaw driver M. Chandrakumar, who based it on his own real-life experiences. It is Vetri Maaran’s most politically outspoken film (although the police are portrayed as thuggish and corrupt in all of his work) in its depiction of a dehumanizing descent into a justice system that seems to run solely on bribery and influence. Lacking the same narrative motility as his other features, the film instead focuses, almost to the point of repetition, on the absurd brutality of the workers’ plight. In other words, it is effective as a polemic but not so much as cinema. Likely due to its thematic import, Visaranai won India’s National Film Award for best feature. Vetri Maaran was now thrust into the forefront of Indian cinema alongside personal heroes like Mani Ratnam , director of the iconic Dil Se (1998), whose praise of Visaranai was used in its promotional videos. Vetri Maaran told Film Companion South that, “Tamil cinema has only had two people we can really call filmmakers. Only they have had the command and control over the film language. One is Balu Mahendra and the other is Mani Ratnam. I don’t even call myself a filmmaker.”
A director closer to his generation, and one who was a heavy influence on Vada Chennai, is Hindi-language filmmaker Anurag Kashyap. Also in his forties, Kashyap overcame battles with censorship early in his career and went on to create the epic, two-part crime saga Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), one of the models for Vada Chennai. Kashyap reportedly was the one who urged Vetri Maaran to expand the film beyond one feature. Heaving had three critical and box-office successes by then, Vetri Maaran followed suit and undertook his most ambitious project yet, one he started writing in 2003 and that endured endless production delays.
Vada Chennai depicts the origin and influence of one self-interested gang on a North Chennai slum over two decades. Vetri Maaran’s initial cut was five and a half hours, which he cut down to 164 minutes before release. It is the densest film he’s every made, with the story threading outward form each scene, as it takes in the cultural and political earthquakes that shook Chennai between 1987 and 2003, from the death of M.G. Ramachandran and the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to the screening of a Rajinikanth film in prison. It has as intricate a flashback structure as any film I’ve seen, jumping through the intervening years to fill in backstories and delay pivotal revelations. The editing by G.B. Venkatesh is whiplash-tight and the plot is beautifully complicated and full of shocking betrayals (led most memorably by its Lady Macbeth, a cunning widow named Chandra, played by Andrea Jeremiah).
Dhanush produced the film and stars as Anbu, a promising carrom player (a tabletop game, like billiards with checkers) who gets drawn into a gang war between Guna (Samuthirakani, the only good cop in Visaranai) and Senthil (Kishore, calmly malevolent). Criminality had been a way of life in the slum since its inception, when Rajan (Ameer Sultan) brought in pirated goods to sell in the city. But Guna is the new man in charge, and he has joined up with local developers in a plan to build a road through the slum, whose people would be relocated to public housing further inland. Seeing this as a siege on his ancestral home, Anbu starts to organize a resistance. There are no full-blown song-and-dance sequences, though the brilliantly propulsive theme by Santhosh Narayanan, which uses a cappella voices as choral instruments like Ennio Morricone did, conveys enough foreboding without the need for words.
Vada Chennai balances a growing multiplicity of storylines, and there is a thrill in their telling, especially in Vetri Maaran’s most elaborate setpieces: an assassination underneath a slowly collapsing awning and a nighttime brawl in the slum where Anbu uses his knowledge of the geography to his violent advantage. And I haven’t even mentioned Anbu’s tempestuous courting of Padma (Aishwarya Rajesh), whom he meets when she steals his (stolen) sewing machine during a riot. Much of Tamil cinema, including Vetri Maaran’s, has a woman problem: they are always shunted into girlfriend or wife roles and rarely have more to do than be romanced (there is also a dearth of female filmmakers). It is a problem in Vada Chennai as well, though the character of Chandra, with her white-hot coal of hatred that burns through the last third of the film, is a fine first step toward more dynamic female characters in Vetri Maaran’s work.
Vetri Maaran has only made five movies in 12 years due to his exhasutive research process, so the shooting and release of Asuran in under a year was surprising. In interviews he has admitted to the immense stress caused by the time frame (the release date was announced with 15 days left to shoot, and only 40 days to complete post-production). He was unable to supervise the dubbing and color timing as on previous projects, having to focus entirely on the edit. Though it’s not as complexly sturctured as Vada Chennai, it’s remarkable that Asuran is as cohesive as it turned out to be.Adapted from Poomani’s novel Vekkai, translated into English this year, it depicts the violent family feud between alcoholic farmer Sivasamy (Dhanush) and yet another evil land developer, Narasimhan (Aadukalam Naren, nicknamed after the film, which gave him his star-making turn). While the book takes place over seven days, Asuran expands it to span generations. Vetri Maaran again uses a flashback structure, which fills in Sivasamy’s brutal youth as a lower-caste liquor brewer: the wounds he suffered back then turning him against violence–until personal tragedy pulls him back to wielding a blade. It is Dhanush’s most moving performance to date, as he adds gravel to his voice and a hitch in his step to embody a broken old man, barely keeping his family together as Narasimhan schemes to acquire their small farm. But, like a Tamil Rambo, Sivasamy can only be pushed so far; his last act is one of limb-severing vengeance.
This time, I watched Vetri Maaran’s latest in Times Square among the Jokers and the Abominables, though the director’s older features remain hard to come by with English subtitling on U.S. streaming services. But with each film, Vetri Maaran and his collaborators have refined and condensed their style to the point where they can pack in limitless narrative possibilities, creating local hits that deserve worldwide recognition. There are a million stories in Tamil Nadu, and Vetri Maaran and company will try to tell them all before they disappear via a developer’s wrecking ball.
R. Emmet Sweeney 