One
show host asks him as to how he felt on receiving this valued award.
Thiagarajan Kumararaja smiles as if to ask, “What answer do you expect?” He
mutters something like, “What shall I say!” He moves to leave the stage saying,
“I am happy as ever. That is all.” But the host is persistent. “Many important
screenplay writers and directors present here have praised you! What have you
got to tell them?” He smiles disarmingly as he says, “What is there to be said!
I should thank them!” and walks off the stage. That is Thiagarajan Kumararaja
for you! He is a man entirely different from all the film personalities that I
have met so far.
He does
not have much to tell us about himself. “I am not an intellectual, not a genius
nor anybody extraordinary. I have none of the listed good qualities like a deep
reading, regular travels, continuous viewing of films or a deep love for the
world cinema or art cinema. I am middle class family boy born in Porur area of
Chennai, growing up roaming around mostly Chennai. Even today, I do not have at
home either an internet connection or DTH TV. I am not particularly interested
in them either”.
He says
that he is in no way connected to the Face book or Twitter accounts that are
operated in his name. It has been many years since he left watching television.
He has not seen many Tamil films. And, he says, he has seen none of the recent
Tamil movies! This is how Thiagarajan Kumararaja, rated by many as a Director
who can take Tamil movies to the next level of excellence, introduces himself
to anyone who insists on knowing about him!
His Aranya Kaandam had its maiden screening at the
World Film Festival held at New York. But the film had not been completed at
that time. It was a raw first print where colour and light balancing had not
been done, the background score was yet to be done. Yet Aranya Kaandam won the Jury’s Award for the Best
Film!
But
Thiagarajan Kumararaja’s simple take on the film is that “It is not a realistic
film or an art film, not an experimental film nor a parallel film. I am
frightened by its categorization as a ‘Noir’ or ‘Neo Noir’ film. It is just a
commercial film with quite a few flaws and compromises. I might say it is a
‘masala’ movie. It has every ingredient of such a film like fight scenes,
murders, bedroom scenes and comedy scenes.” That may be true. But we have not
seen these things written in this fashion or filmed like this before in Tamil
cinema! The raw and very evident fact is that Aranya
Kaandam shook all traditions
of Tamil commercial films and false dramas of novelty like ‘novel and nothing
like anything before’.
Thiagarajan
Kumararaja picturises the macho symbol of Hindi films, Jackie Shroff, as a
sexually weakened man yet a terrorizing villain. No effort has been made to
artificially prop up the character of Jackie Shroff and he has been portrayed
as one among many other artistes! Jackie Shroff, as a matter of fact, lacks a
‘Tamil’ face. One could say he has a Gujarati face with some Nepali features.
But it does not strain our thoughts to view him as a Tamilian featured parading
as the king of crime-ridden lanes of Chennai’s under world! Thiagarajan
Kumararaja, thus, smashes the worn-out cliché of reality Tamil cinema that you
need faces with characteristic racial features to establish the reality of the
screen characters.
The
committee of Film Censors in Chennai had decreed that Aranya Kaandam cannot be released without the 52
cuts of portions that offended it. The Appeals Committee of Film Censors in New
Delhi overruled the order and passed it for exhibition without any cuts. But
the dialogues had to be muted at countless places! The bleep sounds of this
muting exercise harass the viewers from following the narration of the story
easily. In this age where violent scenes that freeze our minds parade before us
on the drawing room television screens and every conceivable kind of sexual
perversions are on ‘free’ play through the Internet, it is difficult to see for
whose benefit the Censors are exercising with such vengeance on a film meant
for adult audience!
Aranya
Kaandam was not
a commercial success. I think it failed as it was not properly publicised or
widely released. There is no doubt in my mind, that Aranya Kaandam was a film that had all the
ingredients of a great commercial success. There are production house heads
here who had invited this ‘commercially unsuccessful’ director told him condescendingly,
“I do not like your film at all. However, as it has something of appeal here
and there, I am quite willing to offer you another chance at remaking one of
our Hindi films into Tamil.” But I do not blame them. After all their daily
dealings are with the kind who are ever ready and willing to compromise on
everything for the sake of opportunities, money and fame!
Aranya
Kaandam won two
National Awards for The Best Debutant Director and The Best Editing. Even at
that stage not many in Tamilnadu had seen the film. In a land where the illicit
DVDs of even the best guarded films of Top Stars are sold from day one, neither
the licit nor the illicit DVD of Aranya
Kaandam was available
anywhere. It is a miracle that DVDs of Aranya
Kaandam of any kind was and
is unavailable! It would appear that somebody has taken great care and gone to
all kinds of lengths to ensure that the film is not seen by the public! People
all over the world have seen and continue to see this film by downloading it
from Internet, even though the dim print makes for a dismal viewing experience.
Aranyam
refers to forest. That part of Ramayana where Rama and Sita are portrayed
living in the forest is called Aranya
Kaandam. Thiagarajan
Kumararaja’s Aranya Kaandam is the story of human beasts that prey
and play without let or hindrance in the terrible forest that is Chennai
metropolis. The central theme of the film is that men are often terrible beasts
that roam the forest called life. They live with names indicative of beasts
like Singaperumal, Kaalaiyan, Pasupati, Gajendran and Gajapati.
Singaperumal
is the king of forests, the Lion. Gajendran and Gajapati are wild elephants.
Pasupati is the cow. He is the sacrificial animal. Kaalaiyan who arranges the
cockfight is the old bull and a candidate for slaughter! ‘Sappai’ and ‘Subbu’,
the characters that play the love theme in the film, are not beasts. They may
even be humans! In this film one does not see love scenes that are melodramatic
or outbursts of artificial emotions nor do we see the usual display of navels
or cleavages.
There
are four stories proceeding on different platforms. There are six central
characters of equal importance. There are three different climaxes. Thus Aranya Kaandam avoids all clichés of Tamil
cinema. In the end we are presented with a woman as the most important
character. Here it becomes a film with a feministic view. Thiagarajan
Kumararaja says: “It is a totally imaginary world. In all my life, I have not
seen the men of the underworld or criminals, not even a petty thief. But I
believe that I have succeeded in creating, with a degree of credibility, the
world that I wanted to tell everyone about.”
The
language used in this film is the local dialect of today’s Chennai, especially
the North Chennai. There is a clever use of the new raft of words spawned by
the cell phone and cricket culture. Picturisation and the camera angles that
broke the grammar of Cinema have taken the film to an entirely different level.
Lightings that remind us of 16th Century
Renaissance paintings impart a poetic touch to the scenes of the film. It
conveys the reality of seeing the events unfold in the dim lights of the real
world narrow lanes and sparely illuminated rooms that blush unseen with
fluctuations of voltage.
Thiagarajan
Kumararaja might have been aided by the influence cast by many films from Godfather to Pulp
Fiction that stand to the
names of illustrious film makers like Quentin Tarantino, Bryan De Palma,
Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. He might even have borrowed the
technique of multiple stories unfolding simultaneously on parallel stages from
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu in conceiving his screenplay. But no one can call Aranya Kaandam as a film that is based on or
mimicking of another film.
The
background score in the film is not that of a jaded melodrama. Yuvan Shankar
Raja's Aranya Kaandam the background score is, I must
say, impossibly good. And he has won many awards and much fame for his background
score in the film. Thiagarajan
Kumararaja has an in-depth knowledge of popular music. Rock is his favourite
genre of music. At one stage of his life, he was particularly fond of Heavy
Metal, a form of Rock. He had a big repertoire of western songs for listening
like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Pink Floyd, Guns and Roses, Bon Jovi and
Chemical Brothers. He was an ardent fan of R.D.Burman’s Hindi compositions. In
Tamil he likes most of the songs of M.S.Viswanathan but above all, as far as
Tamil songs go, he is a great fan of Ilaiyaraja. He has magically woven into
the background score of Aranya
Kaandam, a movie without any
song, many Ilaiyaraja songs as a part of the atmospherics. Thiagarajan
Kumararaja says that when he listens to his favourite music, they keep running
in his mind as countless visuals.
Though
the movie is replete with brilliant portrayals by all the important artistes
like Jackie Shroff, Yasmin Ponnappa, Ravi Krishna and Sampat Raj, I have never
seen in any film before, anything like the role of Kaalaiyan portrayed by
‘Koothu Pattarai’ Somasundaram! Every thing about the character like its
concept, direction and dialogues is absolutely scintillating! Nothing in my
memory of any portrayal in any film can hold a candle to Somasundaram’s class
act that is quite simply the most brilliant one! Thiagarajan Kumararaja has
been able to wring the best out of all his actors, natural yet creative,
without the device of anything like novelty for the sake of novelty or a
differentiation for the sake of difference.
The
film places before us the important question: “Do you like Kamal Haasan or
Rajnikant?” The character ‘Sappai’ loves only Kamal. In his films, he is the
‘King of Love’. He kisses the girls, fully on their lips! But, from the point
of view of ‘Subbu’, Sappai’s girl friend, Rajini is more important than Kamal.
He may look ordinary, but he is the ‘Baasha’, the emperor! She loves another
hero of Tamil Vijaykant even more as he keeps saving India from Pakistan!
This is
merely Thiagarajan Kumararaja’s way of satirizing the Tamil commercial cinema.
He shows up the absurdities of conception and picturisation in our films. The
Censor Board was said to have been very adamant that Thiagarajan Kumararaja
should bring permission letters from Rajni and Kamal before they allow the
dialogues of ‘Sappai’ and ‘Subbu’! Look at the generosity of our Censors
towards Directors who are true to their calling!
Thiagarajan
Kumararaja left his budding college education within months of starting it to
pamper his whim to direct a film. He did not work as an Assistant with any
Director. He is very emphatic when he says that he is the creation of
Doordarshan, the television channel that is a joke for many in the film world!
The little that he reads, he reads carefully. The few films that he watches, he
evaluates with utmost attention.
“I was
never an assistant to anybody. But many youngsters call on me to become my
assistants. I am happy about it. I do not believe in moralizing through my
films. I only want to depict natural human instincts. Crime is a natural human
instinct! I have not done anything after Aranya
Kaandam. But, now I am
writing a screenplay. I will shoot it if it turns out to my satisfaction.
Writing alone is very important to me. If that comes out fine, I need only a
month or two to finish a film! I am a restless person and do not like sitting
in one place. I keep wandering at all times. That is when I watch people with
great care. That and that alone is my cinema education.”
Thiagarajan
Kumararaja, with his dangerous honesty, dominance with a difference,
refreshingly novel takes and a unique evaluation of cinema’s place in society,
is a lone traveler in our film world. Aranya
Kaandam ran for four weeks in
just one cinema theatre in Chennai. I saw its last show on the last day of its
screening. Thiagarajan Kumararaja was there, as a person who bought his ticket,
seated quietly, anonymous to all!
(December 2011)
