[Film Journal] - Virumaandi

Films that I admire - 1

I guess it is 2004, this film was released, after two or three years , it was streamed on Television , on some special occasion like Pongal or Diwali , and I don’t remember that. I am not really interested in that , and didn’t care about that at that time. I did get a chance to watch some scenes , it was really boring at that time. Being a 7 or 8 year old kid , I thought Kamal is really overrated and don’t have any idea why he is praised that much around the cinema world. After I joined college and witnessed a wholesome of films , I really regret not watching this film for a long time.

After watching Nayagan or Thalapathy , which everyone celebrates , I feel, these films are plain and don’t have an engaging screenplay experience. Of course Manirathnam is a legend in passing emotions via characters to the audience in an authentic way, at that time , these films were great , but for me not now (Personal opinion only :). So I mapped these emotional judgements to films like Virumaandi. But It is not, it is still engaging and contains a classic evergreen dense  screenplay. I am not going to talk about Rashomon Effect , Multi perspective and other world cinema syllabuses that this film has. Instead I’m going to write what attracts me personally as an art and why I consider this as one of my favourites.

We will witness many timelines of characters, contain  ensemble casting, humour, irony and finally it will give you a great lifetime experience.

This is one of the films that talk about their place , community and lifestyle of its people. So the amount of characters is vast and remarkable. If you see films like City of God, Angamali diaries , Gangs of Wasseypur we can group them under one cluster. In these films , the characters themselves narrate the story , we will witness many timelines of characters, contain ensemble casting, humour, irony and finally it will give you a great lifetime experience.

I personally like those films which have their cultural references , of their nation, clan , community or the place where the story narration exists. Let’s take a look at Godfather , the dialogue starts with “I believe in America..” and the scenes show how a marriage stages in that time and place , This list goes on. Because when you show the culture of the place , intuitively it fits the story that you are going to tell in that place. In Virumaandi,  Jallikattu , Bull , well, deity , Aruva (tool to cut, often as weapon) and dialogues that are perfectly shaped to fit the linguistics of that place.

Is it enough to just show these cultural references alone?, No Of Course. Great films blend these elements with their screenplay and stitch them in the geography of the scenes.

In Virumaandi the Bull is not just a cultural cliche , it is a character. Annalakshmi raises it , in the dead scene of her , the bull is a major thing that was staged. Bull itself often symbolically references the protagonist of the film. We can see a lot of examples like this. Well (Kinaru), Aruva , everything are the characters themselves and have a huge impact on a story. The local god ,deity, where we see in Thiruvizha Song named “Virumaandi” again a character itself, not just cultural cliches.

Another thing which really attracts me is unconventional staging of violence and script. This is one of the films where raw violence images are shown , not just visually , in terms of writing also. Take a scene where Nallamma Nayakkar is killed, this scene is way ahead of its time, and has all the elements of Irony and Humour that creators like Tarantino wrote. The Panchayat scene, another masterclass in staging and geography. There are a lot of scenes like above that blend humour. Like,  Kothala Thevan’s son screams , “Enga appana vettu virumaandi…Vidaathe” (Kill my father..), the scene in front of court before the climax and the scene in kothala thevan’s house after the massacre in Kondarasru’s home , everything is so well done. Little characters like Kondarasu , temple priest, everyone has their ironic humour and details in writing.

I watched Virumaandi many times , and I feel it still has a cult colour on it. It influenced me to search a lot of films like this. I am rarely successful in this search.