Vaji Vaji Sivaji

Watched Sivaji over the weekend. Catching a Rajni movie in the first week of its release, amidst the legendary hysteria that accompanies such an event, was something I had always wanted to do, but never could.  This time I didn’t let the fact that I wasn’t in India, or the 40-mile drive to the theater at 10:30 at night, stop me. And I wasn’t disappointed.

Every minute of this extravagant excercise in post-modern kitsch can only be described by three small words. Over The Top. And I get the feeling that that was exactly what it was meant to be.

And not by a small margin either. There is no pretense, no attempt at vieling the glitz with layers of pseudo-intellectual dribble. No attempt at weaving a story or building characters, or deviating into complex narratives. It’s all grand entrances and dream sequences, dances where the screen explodes in colour, slapstick comedy and witty dialouges, coy heroines and instant love, evil villains and our hero taking them on. One at a time or all together. If there is a genre called Total Entertainment, this is it. Bollywood masala vendors, take note. THIS is how it is done.

Logic and storyline are the obvious casualties, not that anybody particularly cares. But there is a brazenness about the humour too. Of course, being linguistically challenged watching a Tamil movie, I had to rely on generous doses of interpretation. From what I could gather, the script writers probably had a mandate to go all out.

But truth be told, script and coherent storyline were the last things on my mind, as I spent 3 hours and 10 minutes coming to terms with the sensory overload of colour, Rahman’s music (though nowhere near his usual ethereal touch), larger than life characters, beautiful women, mind boggling sets, Matrix-inspired gravity defying slo-mo action, and the sheer spunk of a 58 year old man pulling it all off, in style!

I think what detractors of this school of film-making fail to realize is that they are judging such movies by their own standards. Yes, there is no logic behind an impromptu group dance on the side of a hill, or a single man single-handedly taking on a hundred armed musclemen. There is no depiction of reality because the makers are simply not trying to depict reality. No, this is not film-making gone wrong. There is a method to this seeming madness. It is deliberate. It is successful and it makes money. Lots of it.

As for the young Rajni fans, very few other species have undergone more psycho-analysis in people’s minds than this group. To the average person, the concept of perfectly reasonable, mature, intelligent people behaving hysterically at the sight of a balding middle-aged man in a wig performing impossible stunts and romancing girls a third of his age on screen, is undoubtedly difficult to grasp. And no, we aren’t talking about James Bond minus a wig (though one wonders why nobody seems to mind his fans doing the same). But watching a few of them in action on Friday evening, I got the feeling that the adulation was not really for the man himself, but for the triumph-of-the-underdog quality he represents, the coolness and sheer style he portays through his on-screen persona. But isn’t that true for all the reel-life ‘heroes’ in the history of modern cinema, Indian or otherwise?

So, did I enjoy the movie? Loved every minute of it. The three hours passed by in a psychedelic daze, though the ringing in my ears and the spots in front of my eyes took much longer to dissipate!
 

~ by Shubho on June 17, 2007.