Maranam Aayiram ...!!!

PRELOUGE: One week after the film, The author is still terrified at the sound of the word “Daddy”. He prays for justice to be done upon him.he laughs heartily till he cries inconsolably....he seeks divine intervention..he laughs again..he cries again.....!

 The film opens with an elderly man walking around the house spitting blood and speaking in a voice that sounds like he had just swallowed a scew-driver. No he is’nt a Dracula or something (common this is a goutham menon and not a steven speilberg film) this is our very own Mr Krishnan aka naina Surya the cool old screwed man playing his part flawlessly. A perfect exotic start for an audience so frustrated with their own life’s realities who came looking for a dreamy utopian world full of 6 pack suryas and sizzling hot sameeras. 

One look at the man and you feel he just ran out of a middle school fancy dress competition with his weird beard and a funny wig still sticking on. He is flanked by three woman who look anything but English but for some strange reason cant speak anything but English! Yeah, even when their captain courageous is well on his way to his heavenly abode. The point that some of this movie’s staunch defenders who call this a reflection of the “upper middle class urban Chennai” lifestyle seemed to have missed is that we are tamil speaking people who tend use English at times and these are English people who tend to use a word or two of mispronounced tamil at times! This becomes a dangerous reflection of reality because even the less than 5% of the audience at whome all this circus is aimed at fails to relate to it.

At the end of this gruesome death sequence of the unusual English man the screen flashes out and flashes in back as two overloaded helicopters struggle to take off from some god-forsaken corner ofIndia. On this very copter is Major Surya on his 3hr and 45 mins jolly ride to a rescue operation which he very effectively utilizes to recollect half a dozen love stories, a little over a dozen songs and oodles of romantic interludes. True to the theme of the movie he starts off with his dad first. The man whose greatest accomplishments in life was to have successfully wooed a pretty woman, ensured she lived a horrible life all through and motivated his son to do just that. How much more inspiring can a dad get? And to top it all off he calls his 25 yr old over grown army major son a ‘kido’! 

At this point the screen goes blank again, just when the audience start looking at each other anxiously fearing if this was the end of the movie or something the dracula surya alias Krishnan strikes back with vengeance with his ‘inspiring’ love story.

This is perhaps the fastest part of the movie, Scene 1 – surya sees simran and falls in love. Scene 2 – simran sees surya and falls in love and scene 3 – both start running around trees singing “mundhinam partheney…” . Wow!! That was a text book definition of a “breezy love story”. But gautham needs to be given some credit for a couple of things here, the detailing of the 80s set and the obviously more challenging accomplishment of turning simran and surya into a teenage couple and still making sure Sim does’t look like his akka. 

At this, Goutham(or may be it was the producer who thought the unnecessary flash back was getting rather too expensive who) pushes the fast forward button and brings us all back to 2008. But even after 28 yrs of fast forwarding Mr and Mrs Krishnan don’t seem to have gotten out of their hangover. The wise old man goes darling… darling for anything and everything and the good old lady can just not get finished with her own narration of how a man actually managed to fall in love with her and sustain the odd feeling for 28 long yrs! Aww struck by his mom’s inspiring bed time stories, Surya develops the ambition of his lifetime “to be able to find a woman more beautiful than what his dad found and successfully woo her into his looser life”, Sounds too soggy to be a hero’s lifetime motto? Try its latin version“Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur”. Cool huh? For some strange reason we are all so used to believing that all latin motto’s and Chinese proverbs carry a very deep meaning in them. 

Loaded with this ambition and a couple of other useless advices that his father gave him while dropping him off , Surya enters his 4 yrs of college. This is when the movie once again starts running at a breakneck speed as though it was on steroids. Before you even realize it is song 1, song 2 and boom, end of college. When college life ends so quickly in a movie you obviously know Surya has had no luck with his ambition. But according to his ‘inspiring’ dad, by virtue of being his son Surya should be ‘lucky’ with love. So there is just one last train journey back home before this virtue turns into a paradox. So it is imperative for our hero to find a hot looking gal and fall in love with her overnight to prevent his life from turning into an unsolvable paradox. This could have been a great suspense point to break for interval but the director some how seems to have missed it and struggles for the rest of the movie to find another such situation.   

Burdened with this thought Surya reluctantly boards the train. This is when you start wondering if this was some loverboy equivalent of Hogwarts express going to Gonmonaland or something! Wondering why I’m saying this? Sample this, what is the probability of finding a stunning hot girl sitting right in front of you on a train from trichy to Chennai who blushes everytime you ogle at her ??? 1/10^infinity I guess. Its like finding Pamela Anderson on a MTC bus going from mylapore to nochu kuppam! But before you realize all that, you are mesmerized by “nenjukul paydhidum maa mazhai…” taking you to the second high point of the film and you become almost numb to Goutham’s stupidity for the next half an hour or so. 

This marks a showcase entry for the ravishing Sameera, the saving grace of this movie. Off late you get a feeling that tamil directors are all turning masters at this craft of showcasing actresses. Aishwarya Rai in Jeans, Shreya in Shivaji , Kajol in Minsara Kanavu and Asin in Gazini were all arguably the best portrayal of their careers.  I guess it must have been a realization of sorts for these woman themselves to discover this stunning side of them revealed so artistically by our very own brand of directors. Its perhaps the frustration of growing up in Chennai that turns these ordinary men into masters in this craft. How I wish these guys could do something about the girls in my college as well J  

 The next 45 mins of the movie is a breeze. The director all of a sudden transforms from “Memoirs of gheisha” mode to “Fifty first dates” mode. For a moment you feel the poet in Goutham has over powered the sadistic story teller in him. He actually takes you into a utopian world where people build successful business and large mansions overnight. Lover boy surya suddenly turns entrepreneur over a period of one song (For the uninitiated “the period of one song” is a popular unit of measuring time in tamil cinema. One unit of “period of one song” falls somewhere between one year and one light year units. This is typically the time taken for a protagonist to go from rags to riches, riches to rags, coma patient to Olympic runner, shepherd to industrialist or simply lover boy to entrepreneur as in this case). This is not all, after making loads of money its now time to make some love. Off goes surya to San Francisco where over a period of a couple of more songs avar matter ah mudikiraaru ! (sorry guys, just couldn’t find an English equivalent as precise and fitting as this ;-) 

 Just when you think all is well about this movie, the sadistic story teller strikes back again and strikes hard this time. With one mighty blow to the sceenplay he takes away all the happiness from the lives of both Surya and the audience. But thanks to some “revolutionary thinkers” like bala and ameer, tamil audiences these days have kinda become numb to tragic climaxes. We have started accepting it as a way of life in cinema where some director’s like goutham build their female lead’s role so skillfully that beyond a point they don’t know what to do with such a goddess of a character that they have built and end up killing it for the sake of convenience. But the real tragedy is yet to strike. Just when you are trying to come to terms with tragedy part1 but at the same time are quite satisfied to have watched a reasonably good movie considering the kinda crap that you are forced to watch these days and are waiting to see the “The End” coming up on the screen you are surprised with the tragedy part 2. The screen reads “Interval” ! You get bamboozled, you clinch in your seat wishing this was some sort of a spelling mistake or something. But hey, nowhere in the world do they misspell ‘the end’ as ‘interval’ no, not even in China. Then what the hell is this all about? Is the director not done yet?  What more does he have to say? And how could he … what the.. common… ahhhh…!!! By the time you come to terms with yourself its end of the intermission(you have just missed your golden chance to escape unhurt) and Surya and Goutham are already back to haunt you once again.

This is when you get reminded once again that Surya is presently on his way to a pani poori shop  errr..!! I’m sorry a rescue operation in his overloaded copter and still has several hours to go and several stories to tell. Goutham shows some ingenuity here by characterizing his terrorists as very patient human beings eagerly awaiting Surya’s arrival to shoot them all down. This gives our hero enough time to recollect some more soggy stories from his and his father’s life. After “memoirs of gheisha” and “fifty first dates” its now time for the doping act. 

Surya calls back home from SF to announce “operation success but patient dead!” and he is now on his way back. Enter, the bald ‘good samaritan’ who gives up his business class seat from SF to India for a seat next to our depressed hero so that he could have some free entertainment over the long boring flight(how sadistic!). He is one of those signature Goutham Menon characters that you would find only in his movies but surprise surprise his name is not Ezha Maaran or Anbu Chelvan this time. And glad there is no “kavalai padathey saghodhara ….” type song on the plane. This helps Surya save some precious time to get home and get back to business quickly. Not the company that he once started, that has now been abandoned for the sake of convenience. This time it is the doping habit that he has just acquired. This is the moment when the movie starts sagging. Though the portrayal of Surya in these sequences is laudable and his acting commendable this could well have been a movie by itself. By the time we get done with all this trauma the audience is dead and out. They need to be on steroids to be able to sit up and watch anything after this. But our director is far from done yet. 

An unnecessary trip to Kashmir, child abduction in Delhi and all this followed by Surya busting a child trafficking network there in a very childish manner pushes our ability to sustain crap to an all new level. There is a whole new ‘Mahaanadi’ dimension added to the movie all of a sudden. Somewhere around this time I fell asleep and woke up after a while to find Surya doing some army exercise routine! I thought this was the second interval and they were playing the trailer of Goutham’s next movie which looked more of a sequel to Kaakha Kaakha (the military equivalent of it). To my horror I discovered this was all a part of this very movie. Though Surya is in amazing shape and he seems to have done a great job turning his family pack into a six pack and fits this new dimension to his role to a T, this is all unbearable after 3 hours of soggy story telling. This could well have been another movie by itself. To add to the mess is another romantic interlude with Ramya which feels anything but romantic. By now we have watched 5 different movies under one title and are not done yet.

All this is frantically topped of with the rescue mission that major Surya had set out on several hours ago where a caricature of Burkha Dutt is being rescued from the clutches of some Kasmiri militants (remember: those patient men we spoke about). This is followed by the quintessential home coming and reunion and with this the four hour long roller coaster ride finally comes to a grinding halt.

When the lights come back on the theatre looks more like the rescue operation site with people looking traumatized and distressed with what they just went through. You see in their eyes the longing for another army commando to rescue them out of this mess they have put themselves into. No, not Surya once again for god’s sake, anybody else would do. Yeah yeah even captain vijaykanth is fine.

This is like watching the entire Lord of the Rings series along with the matrix trilogy back to back. It is the cinematic equivalent of a rain intercepted test match. Perhaps the tamil cinema equivalent of a psychometric test where the ultimate mental ability of a person to take shit is plotted against the control he has over his emotions to determine his sustainability to mental stress. This a movie straight to the brain rather than a movie straight from the heart as Goutham fondly describes it. There is no one really who can defend the second half of this movie, nah.. not even the Indian Army!