Kuruvi - Responsible cinema

There are many heart-wrenching human issues in today's world which Cinema can, should and does focus on. Issues such as poverty, illiteracy, racial and sexual abuse, human trafficking and, state sponsored violation of marginalized people and suspension of even basic human rights by arrogant administrations. And all these tentacles are but parts of one ugly miasma - the medusa called exploitation.

We watch the plight of those human beings caught in this chakravyuham in network documentaries and the so called award films and cringe, maybe even shed a few tears. But rarely do we get to go to the movie theatre for a weekend bonanza with the family, have a wonderful time watching the hero kick the living daylights out of the bad guys, romance the dusky beauty, indulge in rib tickling escapades with the comical sidekick, and yet come back home with a spring in one's stride and with a social message implanted deeply in one's heart. To this latter category of core-value-deep impact cinema belongs Kuruvi. Let's look at the tentacles of exploitation this movie illuminates.

The plight of bonded labourers is probably the worst consequence of exploitation. From the time of his birth, the labourer is subjected to a life of very little haves and even smaller wants. He is forced into a viscious cycle to pay off his father's debts, which he can never accomplish in his lifetime. Married to hunger and hard toil day after day, exploited to the bone by unethical middle men controlled by politicians, he is living the life of a Gulag prisoner, only with a lower life expectancy and sub-zero hope. Kadappa is Kuruvi's Liberia, Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The resounding message the movie conveys is that you and me, the end consumer seldom realize the blood we have helped spill for our little comforts in life. Be it rock salt or blood diamonds, the slavemasters and middlemen whose pockets we line are like parasitic weeds that block the sunshine out of the bonded labourer's existence. That Vijay does not know of his father's plight is just a metaphorical spin on this "see no evil, ask not of it," bubble we live in.

I used to wonder why Tamil moviemakers usually choose Singapore, the Middle East and Malaysia as their foreign locales of choice. This movie, maybe unintentionally, has opened my eyes to the glaring fact: the Tamil diaspora outside of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka lives there. In Malaysia alone, Tamilians form 8% of the nation's populace. Yet, their existence is not very different from that of the bonded labourers of Kadappa. A majority of this pupulace is poor and fulfills the critical yet unattractive professions shunned by society. They are subjected to racial abuse and communal discrimination based on their belief system. Their human rights are routinely violated and there is no semblance of secularism afforded to them. For such people, more movies should be made in such places, so that they may provide a window into their lives for the more fortunate world citizens. While this movie does not do this explicitly (but there is a token message in the title and dermal premise - the role of the "kuruvi"), it atleast provides a setting which influential people should sit up and take notice of. For that I salute Udayanidhi Stalin and Dharani.


I am a big fan of the Dharani-Vijay-Trisha combo. The on screen chemsitry between Vijay and Trisha is realistic because of two reasons: their common generational bracket, and their sense of comic timing. Vijay provides most of the aerobic moves, and has a face that is as malleable as martensite when it comes to comic reactions. Trisha is his perfect foil with her gullible belligerence that sets up the duo's next escapade. Dharani leaves us panting in avid expectation about what these two will be up to next. Ofcourse, most of Ghilli's success was based on this exhilerating exchange, so what could Dharani do that would not be old? Fuzz-brain: call in the king of comedy, Vivek. So, he adds a pinch of salt to Vijay's spicy chillies and Trisha's wholesome lentils, and what you have is a mouth watering vatha kuzhambu ready to eat.

Mannivannan's cameo is brilliant in that he is as usual very emotive and plays the role of a distraut father to perfection. At the same time, we should salute the story for being bold in giving Mannivannan more minutes in retroanalysis than onscreen. Vijay is not the lynchpin of the story. Mannivannan is. At every stage of the story, it is he, who in the background, drives it forward. For if he had not been in debt, Vijay would not have needed to race that deathtrap of a car. So, no dynamic entry. If he had not been in bonded labour, Malaysia would have just been another patch on the map for Vijay. So, no hero, no villians, no Kuruvi.

The roles of Ashish Vidyarthi, Suman and the other dadas are typecast, so there's not much scope for experimentation here. I'd have liked atleast one of them to be a suave Company style Ajay Devgan, or a brooding Sarkar style Big B, but I guess that would have sapped some of the on screen energy. For this kind of movie, this formula works, so well... bite the bullet.

The action sequences are as usual choreographed brilliantly, but what sets the stage ablaze is the background score by Vidyasagar. Anyone who buys a ticket for a Vijay flick is automatically a mover and shaker. So the apt medley of bass and dappankuthu adds flavor to the fold. The songs are, as in Ghilli, once again equal to Vijay's vibrations. There is one thing I have to say about Vijay's dance: after a point you begin to wonder if he's a Pinnochio boy transformed from a GI Joe toy with hinges for ball-and-sockets.

Most times in Tamil cinema these days, clever directors attempt to weave the song and fight sequences into the story, but face the pitfall of arresting or accelerating the tempo of the storyline. Dharani has shown in Dhool, Ghilli and Kuruvi that he is the past master of this tempo tuning. These interludes take you from the pantry car to your berth at the speed of the passenger, and basically leave you with the feeling that the signal was green and the scenery didn't blurr past.


The movie is not without its faults too, but these are more devils in the detail than ghosts in the machinery. Campy summersaults and non-physical flying baddies take nothing away from the movie's appeal, so I accept the sop to commercialism and move on.

Please don't come out of the theatre thinking that Kuruvi was just another Vijay flick - a dhoom dhamaka entertainer. It is also a sensible effort to educate the masses on an existing problem - that of blatant exploitation in our country. Whether it is the human trafficking in Kadappa, the salt mine agarias of Gujurat, the opium cultivators of Rajasthan, the bar girls of Mumbai, or cotton farmers of Maharashtra, the sad stories are the same. And even though directors form Satyajit Ray to Bharatiraja have dealt with these subescts before, Dharani scores because the manner in which he's gift wrapped this bitter pill ensures that this is not one more film that gets watched by forty self-acclaimed refined critics and recieves a national award, but one that reaches the millions of Tamilians around the world, be they the upwardly mobile urban middle class, or the B and C mofussuls. And ofcourse, Dharani has ensured that Udayanidhi Stalin's investment is rewarded well. It would be wishful thinking that U. Stalin would talk the message of the movie up to Tamil Nadu's first family, but I like to be an optimist.

Dasavatharam - Divine layers

When I go to the theatre to watch a movie, there are a few things on my checklist I would like to be ticked off: a star cast with a reputed hero, a good story narrated in an entertaining fashion, not a tear jerker (because those are easy to create and captivate and don't really provide the escape from reality I look for in a cinema hall), and a well delivered message if the movie claims to do so. Other ones that do not fit the bill, I usually make do with live streaming and DVDs. I ticked off points one and three before I entered the theatre, and crossed out two and four after leaving it. Two days and a lot of thinking and interacting with people around me saw the crosses becoming ticks. Dasavatharam was a great movie.

Kamal Hassan plays ten roles in this movie and each one showcases a different getup, mode of dialogue delivery, poise, attitude, and in a more subtle sense, a different type of acting. A few of the roles required the use of method acting - notably those of the protagonists, and the CBI officer, because I am not sure there were templates for these characters that Kamal could have worked off. The Dalit leader, the Asian martial arts expert and the middle aged pop singer characters all have real life templates, but representing their psyches would have probably required Kamal to probe the depths of his own ideals in life. So, I would categorize their portrayal under Stanislavsky's method. The role of George Bush is a case study in impersonation. The Villain's role is one which he pulls of with the so called indicated acting technique, as are the roles of the giant sized midget and the old woman. An actor who masters one of these techniques usually wins atleast one Oscar in his lifetime and becomes critically acclaimed. An actor who seamlessly flits from one to another in a span of three hours should win not one but ten Oscars.

Oh, by the way, I was trying to show off a bit there, but truth be told, I know zilch about these deep matters, and that last paragraph was borne out of Wikipedia and four other windows, one each for Stanislavski, Strasberg, Meisner and Adler. So, if I'm totally off the ball, go ahead and slam me, but politely.

There is no point in reviewing the movie here, because you are going to see it yourself. If you are clever - to be able to grasp his message in all its layered complexity, then you don't need this. But if you are as asinine as I am, then you need someone to help you cancel the bias that is bound to creep in as the movie progresses. Hope this helps...

First of all, doing ten different roles, even if they are all one dimensional, and what's worse, all along the same axis, requires some level of skill and determination, because there are such issues as continuity and threading that require care. So, in that context, rising above the rut of "meesai vecha Raja, meesai yedutha Ramu" (Raja with a moustache, and Ramu without) double action formula and doing ten dissimilar roles that have nothing in common is a herculian effort worth watching the movie for in itself. Ardent critics and anti-Kamal lobbyists will argue that the characters were too one dimensional (a foolish argument I myself forwarded immediately after leaving the hall), and that the make-up at times was too cartoonish. To those people, I have this to say: sift through the band-limited timeframes and cliches, and I will give you atleast two levels for atleast some of the characters:

Rangaraja Nambi: Pure devotion to god and ardent belief in his core values; preacher of peaceful coexistence
Govindaraja Naicker: Hero fighting for a cause and running from everyone in sight; agnostic posing as an atheist intended to be the final gear in the chaos drivetrain that leads to the indisputable existance of god
Fletcher: Evil incarnate a la Model 101; fanatic more than a perfectionist - revelaed in the climax
Khalifullah Khan: Simpleton; realising the simple but important truth of peace
George Bush: George bush the idiot; George bush the evil idiot

I am too tired right now to think about the others, so gofigure.

As for the makeup, Michael Westmore has given us aliens from outer space. He has given us green skinned slave girls, outsized craniums, 'N'-eyed monsters, and downright scary bad guys. So, if all he could manage were a few cartoonish masks, then a few cartoonish masks is probably the best you're going to get for a while, so live with it. Personally, I think the makeup was as believable as can be when transforming a semi-Caucasian-Dravidian to a White American or a Mongoloid.

Secondly, the story is as layered as a sleeprite mattress. While the interface is the "Ulagam Suttrum Valibhan" type inter-continental chase for the biogenic weapon (infact, the resemblance of this theme to that famous 1970s classic is so striking that it makes me wonder if Kamal didn't cash in on a winner here), the shell is about the triumph of good over evil and the existence of god, and the Kernel is steeped in Chaos theory. But at the assembly level is the printed circuit of human social patterns that do not change with time - the inherent necessity of human beings to fight one another over flimsy ideologies. And finally, the indexing of the ten characters is so complex that your query on the title Dasavatharam does not reveal much except the ten different roles. There is a direct correlation between the two Rajans for sure, but in a deeper sense, the other characters are also avatars. Like the Dasavatharam of Lord Vishnu, here we have:


Avatar Singh with his second chance through the assasin's stray bullet as a cause and effect relation to Matsya avataram,
The Comtemporary Scientist representing the Koorma avatar, who churns the biogenic weapon unintentionally out of his research,
Boovaragan who attempts to save the earth from the eco-plunderers like the Varaha avataram,
George Bush as Narasimha? No this one doesn't make sense - I put this one down to Kamal's gigantic and well justified self belief in himself.
The old lady as the Vamana avataram, who causes the arrogant players to run through hoops through her simple devotion to god,
The angry Nambi who is the Saivites' Parashuramar,
The Japanese Rama, who vanquishes evil to redeem his sister's life,
The ever too trusting and good natured Muslim Balarama,
The Telugu Krishna, who uses hook or crook for the triumph of good, and
Is it too much of a leap of faith to think of Fletcher as Kalki, the harbinger of doom to end evil once and for all?

Once again, my interpretation is limited by my own inadequencies, but some of these make logical sense, don't they?

As for the music and visual effects, while the former is nothing to write home about, save the first, scintillatingly brilliant effort, the latter is equal to anything ILM can dish out.


So, to end this long review, I want to give Dasavatharam a score of 7465 out of 100, but I am not Thengai Srinivasan, and this isn't about a test for Dasavatharam securing its place in history. In my opinion it already has. Right at the top of good cinema.