Category: India

True South: Vetri Maaran

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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.

Rajinikanth: India’s Superstar

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

I am an ordinary man and your friend.

Rajinikanth, King of his Own Forest (1982)

Rajinikanth is a paunchy and balding 69-year-old man who also happens to be one of the biggest movie stars in the world. He has been making blockbusters in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu (aka Kollywood) for nearly five decades now, and he shows no signs of stopping. His latest film Darbar (2020) is a giddily violent revenge drama in which Rajini slices his way through the underworld of Chennai, and it is on its way to becoming one of the biggest Indian hits of the year.

He famously started as a ticket taker for a bus line and worked his way up to stardom, and it is this bootstrapping story and man-of-the-people persona that generated an intense fandom throughout India and Southeast Asia. His working class swagger – exemplified in hair flips, cigarette tricks, and increasingly flamboyant entrances – has become a genre unto itself.

Rajinikanth was born Shivaji Rao Gaekwad on December 12, 1950 in Bangalore. His father Ranoji was a constable in the police force, while his mother Rambai worked raising Shivaji and his three siblings Ashwat Balubai, Nageshwara Rao and Satyanarayana Rao. They grew up in near-poverty, as his father retired in 1956, the family having to live off his meager pension. Rambai died of a respiratory issue when Shivaji was eleven-years-old, upending any sense of a normal childhood. While his older siblings got jobs to support the family, Shivaji was encouraged to get through school, but his main interest was acting in school plays and playing cricket. He had little interest in going to university, so his brother Satyanarayana got him a job as a bus conductor. He was officially licensed by the Bangalore Transport Service in 1970.

Thus begins the official working class hero legend of Rajinikanth, canonized in Baasha (1995) where he stars as an auto rickshaw driver with a violent past who protects the drivers from mob shakedowns.

In reality he was not a driver though, but a conductor (essentially a ticket taker) for a bus line. Shivaji became close friends with his driver Raja Badhar, who would run the line from Srinagar to Bangalore. Badhar recalls their time together, as quoted in Naman Ramachandran’s Rajinikanth: The Definitive Biography:

There was no one faster than him in issuing tickets. He would give out tickets with a flourish, return change in style; it was all about style. Passengers would look on in amazement. He would always flick back his forelock in those days, that’s why he is bald today. 

Raja Badhar (18)

In the evenings both would rehearse plays organized by the Bangalore Transport Service (BTS), and would talk endlessly about the cinema, always seeing the latest films from stars like Sivaji Ganesan, Rajkumar and MGR.

Later on Rajinikanth would say of Ganesan: “I watched him, I imitated him. He is the reason I am in the cinema industry.” Their fates became linked in the 1952 Tamil feature Parasakthi (The Goddess), where Ganesan, then named Viluppuram Chinnaiahpillai Ganesan, took on the role of Maratha warrior Chhatrapat Shivaji. His performance was so convincing that he became known as “Sivaji” Ganesan. Rajinikanth’s birth name was Shivaji, named after the same warrior.

Ganesan would be associated with an intense and brooding style that the Los Angeles Times would compare to Marlon Brando. Rajinikanth experimented with many different styles before he became a superstar, including a Ganesan-esque turn in Mullum Malarum (1978), in which he plays a firebrand winch operator fiercely protective of his sister. The final sequence contains some of his finest acting, in which he has to convey a change of heart in allowing his sister to marry. He executes it in a puckish, self-deprecating, deeply moving fashion, an alpha male discovering the limits of his aggression.

Shivaji entered the Madras Film Institute after the urging of his friends – he had become a local star in the BTS dramas that were mounted locally. Though unclear how he would support himself, and unable to speak more than a smattering of Tamil (Kannada was his native language), he took the plunge. This was all thanks to his brother Satyanarayana and his buddy Raja Badhar, who funded the trip in the belief he could make it big, despite the objections of his father, who wanted him to keep the stability of the BTS bus conductor gig. Luckily Shivaji made the right choice.

He received a decisive break from director Kailasam Balachander, who gave a lecture at the film institute, but was also preparing production on Apoorva Raagangal (Rare Melodies, 1975). Shivaji was soon to complete the two-year course and was seeking a way into the industry, and managed to get a brief meeting with the director. Balachander recalled: “I was thrilled by the fellow’s fragile health and powerful eyes and his chiseled face. These were the good things. And of course, his skin colour, you know. The dark skin I thought was an advantage, because again it is different from others. All the people who are very fair and all that, they have an easy entry into films. Why shouldn’t I take this boy, give him a good role, and see what can be drawn out of him?” (Ramachandran, 27).

Shivaji’s “fragile health” appealed to Balachander because the character he had in mind was dying of cancer. He was to play the small but pivotal role of an estranged husband returning to see his wife before he passes.

He receives an appropriately dramatic entrance, in a low angle shot pushing open a gate. He is disheveled, his face unshaven, his shirt untucked, as if on a staggered stroll right to the gutter. But before he fully dissipates he is seeking forgiveness, and his performance is one of pained hope. There is a beseechingness in his eyes that is surprisingly moving for such a bit part. It was an encouraging debut for one so enamored with Sivaji Ganesan. And since his real name was so close to “Sivaji”, Balachander decided he needed a new name for his acting debut.

So Balachander chose a character name from his film Major Chandrakanth (1966) – Rajinikanth. It literally means “color of night”, and was a reference to the darker hue of his skin. For an industry that preferred lighter-skinned performers, it was already a difficult task for Rajinikanth to get work, and now he was given a name that emphasized that perceived flaw. Balachander was aware of this prejudice and thought it was time to push back aggressively. “Even for a small role”, he said, “they’d not take a dark chap. I am quite dark, you know. My father was even darker than me. So, I thought, why not introduce a dark-complexioned fellow as a new character? Especially as the main villain? And it worked out. It worked out wonderfully.” For years after Rajinikanth would call Balachander on the anniversary of his name change, to thank him for that gift.

So now all of the elements of Rajinikanth’s stardom are converging. There is the hustler vaudevillian from his Bangalore Transport Service days, entertaining customers with hair flips. Then there is the serious film actor who trained in Madras and idolized Ganesan, who finally gets his big break into the Tamil film world. Finally there is the name itself, “Rajinikanth”, which is subversive in foregrounding his dark skin – his name on the screen immediately indicates his otherness, which gave him outsider appeal to an audience that rarely saw someone of that look on-screen. All of these elements converge over time to create “Superstar” Rajinikanth. But this would still take some time as he worked his way through the different Indian film industries, from Kannada to Telugu and back to Tamil.

One pivotal feature was Anthuleni Katha (Story Without an End, 1976), where he plays a deadbeat gambler. Though he has a slightly redemptive arc in this Balachander melodrama, the key aspect of the film is the depiction of a cigarette trick, wherein he flips the cig into his mouth with a flip of his wrist. These kinds of stylish moments have become a Rajinikanth signature, and his fans tally up how much “swag” he displays in each film. His modern features are basically structured around these displays of swag, though the cigarettes have been replaced by sunglasses as his prop of choice.

Between 1977 and 1979 he appeared in an astonishing 44 films, working at an exhausting clip. He was making money for the first time in his life and accepted jobs as if he would never receive another. Bairavi (1978) is the historically important title here, as it established him as a hero in Tamil cinema, after a run of villain roles, and the publicists promoted him as “Superstar” Rajinikanth, a nickname which would stick – and would eventually become part of the opening credits of all of his features. One of the joys of Tamil cinema is seeing tiny blue lights spell out “Super” and “Star” across the screen as a celebratory “hey!” chant pumps through the speakers.

The most influential film from this period however, is Mullum Malarum (1978), which establishes many of the character elements that Rajini would elaborate upon throughout his career. “Kaali” is deeply protective of his sister and brazenly rude to the owner of the power plant that he works for – which rallies his fellow employees around him. He is a labor organizer in spite of himself. This character will reappear as “Kaala”, Pa Rajinth’s ambitious 2018 effort that depicts Kaali/Kaala as a community organizer trying to keep his town from being swallowed by redevelopment.

The 1980s found Rajinikanth trying to relax – his impossible pace of the previous decade put him in the hospital for exhaustion. But now that he was established as a superstar he drastically reduced the number of projects he agreed to work on. This included his ill-advised attempt at a Hollywood crossover – Bloodstone (1988) – which was a low-budget Romancing the Stone (1984) knockoff. He played a cab driver (of course) who gets entangled in the chase for a precious gem. It was an independent production with no Western stars, and it went straight-to-video in the U.S. He would focus on the domestic market from then on. My pick for Rajinikanth’s greatest film is Thalapathi (1991), his first and only film with revered director Mani Ratnam (Dil Se.., 1998). He plays an orphaned child rejected by society but accepted by local mobster Devaraj (Mammootty). They form an intensely personal bond, a familial love that is tested from without and within. A deeply empathetic portrait of two love-starved men, it shows Rajinikanth at his most vulnerable, his performance an open fount of need. It is one of the few Rajini films that fails to follow his usual heroic template, instead focusing on the intensity of a platonic love. The story was based on the friendship between Karna and Duryodhana in the Mahabharata, and Mani Ratnam keeps the tone pitched at a religious intensity.

Rajinikanth has never matched that depth-of-feeling since, but instead has gone after more plastic pleasures. The aforementioned Baasha (1995) is what the set the template for his late-career blockbusters. He plays a heroic worker with rebellious tendencies who, it is revealed in an epic-length flashback, is a legendary gangster whose whole career in crime was a long-haul act of revenge. This setup lets him have it both ways – to be a slang-slinging man of the people as well as a super-rich mobster in top dollar suits. It’s the contradiction he’s been incorporating into his films ever since – most of his films has the same working class present tense and gangster/revenge flashback (with a reveal of hidden wealth). This plot structure mirrors Rajinikanth’s relationship with his fans, who revere him for his humble beginnings and flamboyant screen style, and who consider his wealth deserved. But Rajinikanth has a supremely self-effacing personality and a total disinterest in maintaining his image off-screen. When he appears in public his wild mane of hair from the movies is gone, as he proudly displays his bald pate and protuberant belly, making him even more beloved to his worshipful fan base (there is a whole documentary about their fandom, entitled For the Love of a Man ).

Petta (2019) and Darbar (2020) pull from the Baasha playbook, with him playing a dorm room RA and a disgraced cop, respectively, both full of swag. But the two films that have moved away from that pattern have been his most successful – the sci-fi spectaculars Enthiran (Robot, 2010) and 2.0 (2018), both directed by S. Shankar. In those films he plays a rich scientist who invents an android (also played by Rajini) who goes mad and wreaks havoc on the city in the first, and saves it in the sequel. They were attempts at making a Kollywood blockbuster with Hollywood-level money and effects, though with more visual invention than recent Hollywood fare (such as a group of androids self-replicating into different shapes in Enthiran, and a monster built out of cell phones in 2.0). These films don’t run on Rajini’s aura, but on baroque CGI constructions.

So it was refreshing to see him return to form in Petta and Darbar, which are nothing more than fan-service machines, setting up sequences for Rajinikanth to swat away bad guys, fluff his hair, flick open his sunglasses, and bellow out a beguilingly arrogant laugh. This basic formula has worked for decades and will continue to until Rajinikanth decides to retire. But for now he seems indomitable. Anurag Kashyap (Gangs of Wasseypur, 2012), one of the most exciting directors on Tamil’s independent film scene, is another fan of Rajinikanth’s, and summarizes his appeal better than I ever could: “He’s a man of the people. He came from us. And he gave us that feeling that we can fight against the system. Amitabh Bachchan became synthetic…but Rajinikanth never became synthetic. He stayed what he was.” (Ramachandran, 254)

Originally Published in NeoText on November 19, 2020