Movie Review: Jigarthanda (Tamil)
Jigarthanda, were you to ask me to sum it up in a one liner, is every bit a masterly oddball film. And if Pizza was an elaborate con job served as a delicious haunted house horror-thriller, Karthik Subbaraj's sophomore effort is all about deception and twists, but one that's dressed up as a hard-core gangster flick, and a "musical gangster story" at that. Plus it feels wonderful when a teaser trailer promises one thing and the actual movie turns out to be unexpectedly something else altogether (and for the better). Don't believe me? Just watch it again after you've seen the film. A clever and a neat bamboozling trick, that's what it is.
Jigarthanda is also a little meta. Actually, scratch that. It's a lot more meta than it really is. The hero, for a start, is named Karthik and he is an aspiring filmmaker. The opening scene begins with him, played by Siddharth, awaiting jury's results on a short film he has directed. The set-up is a television reality show, a semi-final round. Slowly and steadily, a war of words ensues between two celebrity judges, a famous national award winning director and a commercial film producer.
The director dismisses Karthik's directorial effort as a kuppai padam (read: rubbish film), and the producer, by way of settling a personal score against him, acclaims it the best of the lot. The shoot stops. The makers of the show intervene, somehow manage to pacify the feuding judges and call them on stage to announce the verdict. Karthik gets eliminated from the show, but the producer, now clearly enraged, signs him up, telling he will finance his first full-length feature in the heat of the moment.
Overjoyed and tensed at the same time, Karthik goes for a script narration, but is confronted with a taxing task at hand when the producer shows scant regard for his social message story and instead asks him to cook up a literally blood-soaked gangster movie. The fight between art-house and commercial cinema has always been there. And Subbaraj, who himself tasted fame with his short films through the Kalaignar TV reality show Naalaya Iyakunar (read: Tomorrow's Director) before making Pizza, knows this very well.
Here, he tries as much to strike a balance between the two and bring the discordant elements together. There's a lot of entertainment, fun and frolic, but it's also equally clever, quirky and bloody imaginative. The comedy scenes are a riot (not since Soodhu Kavvum have I laughed this much!), and the technical finesse of the film, be it Gavemic Ary's top-notch cinematography or Santhosh Narayanan's rollicking background score, blows your mind away.
The characters aren't your usual type too. The hero is not squeaky-clean. He is unscrupulous and unabashed to the point of using others to further his objective. The heroine (Lakshmi Menon as Kayal), for her part, has her sweet revenge, consequently setting the stage for a dramatic complication in the plot, when she realises he had "used" her under the pretext of love. The director's core idea, again going meta, is all about a filmmaker wanting to make a compromise-free film. And be smart and calculating enough even when he is forced to make one, exploiting it to his benefit and putting the worst of those circumstances to the best possible "use."
Thus when 'Assault' Sethu (Bobby Simhaa), the dreaded gangster who lords over the city of Madurai with an iron fist, manifests as Karthik's worst imaginable nightmare, he, being the ever opportunist that he is, "uses" him in what can be only summed up as an epic twist - there are shades of the Malayalam film Udayananu Tharam if I may add. Siddharth, Simhaa, Karuna, Lakshmi Menon and the entire cast deliver competent performances, however with a run time of 171 minutes, the film begins to sag a wee little bit post intermission.
The change of heart of both Karthik and Sethu are a little hard to accept as well, but these are trifling blemishes in an otherwise well-crafted movie. And for a director who had to make a "compromise" by first making Pizza, Jigarthanda affirms Karthik Subbaraj's position as one of the best filmmakers of our times. Unpredictable, spell-binding and genre-bending, it's that rarest of the rare film I've seen thrice since its release. Undeniably one of Tamil cinema's best in recent years!
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| Jigarthanda |
The director dismisses Karthik's directorial effort as a kuppai padam (read: rubbish film), and the producer, by way of settling a personal score against him, acclaims it the best of the lot. The shoot stops. The makers of the show intervene, somehow manage to pacify the feuding judges and call them on stage to announce the verdict. Karthik gets eliminated from the show, but the producer, now clearly enraged, signs him up, telling he will finance his first full-length feature in the heat of the moment.
Overjoyed and tensed at the same time, Karthik goes for a script narration, but is confronted with a taxing task at hand when the producer shows scant regard for his social message story and instead asks him to cook up a literally blood-soaked gangster movie. The fight between art-house and commercial cinema has always been there. And Subbaraj, who himself tasted fame with his short films through the Kalaignar TV reality show Naalaya Iyakunar (read: Tomorrow's Director) before making Pizza, knows this very well.
Here, he tries as much to strike a balance between the two and bring the discordant elements together. There's a lot of entertainment, fun and frolic, but it's also equally clever, quirky and bloody imaginative. The comedy scenes are a riot (not since Soodhu Kavvum have I laughed this much!), and the technical finesse of the film, be it Gavemic Ary's top-notch cinematography or Santhosh Narayanan's rollicking background score, blows your mind away.
The characters aren't your usual type too. The hero is not squeaky-clean. He is unscrupulous and unabashed to the point of using others to further his objective. The heroine (Lakshmi Menon as Kayal), for her part, has her sweet revenge, consequently setting the stage for a dramatic complication in the plot, when she realises he had "used" her under the pretext of love. The director's core idea, again going meta, is all about a filmmaker wanting to make a compromise-free film. And be smart and calculating enough even when he is forced to make one, exploiting it to his benefit and putting the worst of those circumstances to the best possible "use."
Thus when 'Assault' Sethu (Bobby Simhaa), the dreaded gangster who lords over the city of Madurai with an iron fist, manifests as Karthik's worst imaginable nightmare, he, being the ever opportunist that he is, "uses" him in what can be only summed up as an epic twist - there are shades of the Malayalam film Udayananu Tharam if I may add. Siddharth, Simhaa, Karuna, Lakshmi Menon and the entire cast deliver competent performances, however with a run time of 171 minutes, the film begins to sag a wee little bit post intermission.
The change of heart of both Karthik and Sethu are a little hard to accept as well, but these are trifling blemishes in an otherwise well-crafted movie. And for a director who had to make a "compromise" by first making Pizza, Jigarthanda affirms Karthik Subbaraj's position as one of the best filmmakers of our times. Unpredictable, spell-binding and genre-bending, it's that rarest of the rare film I've seen thrice since its release. Undeniably one of Tamil cinema's best in recent years!
Good review. We will watch the movie
ReplyDeleteThanks! And yes, it's definitely worth a watch!
DeleteThanks for this info wikivela
ReplyDeleteThanks for this info wikivela
ReplyDelete