Super Deluxe (Film review)

In his second outing, the avant-garde film maker Thiagarajan Kumararaja transports us to a queer world full of failing men and women, kids and a transgender, a dead body and other beings, and engulfs it with existential questions ranging from God to illicit relations to religious conversions to sex workers to fleeting social norms and so on. He also attempts to provide aswers through funny plots, witty dialogues and a few convenient cinematic devices. And the ultimate solution presented is — sex. It is said in clear terms by way of a B-grade Tamil porn film inside the film, Vaazhvin Ragasiyam (Life’s secret), that is juxtaposed in the movie’s ending scenes. Vaazhvin Ragasiyam starts, as the end credits of Super Deluxe roll.

Written by a team that boasts of three iconic directors of Tamil cinema including Kumararaja, Super Deluxe will be counted among the boldest attempts in Kollywood. Four different script writers have worked independently on the project. Boundaries are pushed constantly; new worlds get opened regularly. It is a unique experiment in Tamil cinema writing.

   

  

The film has three main threads — a quirky story that kicks of when a teen boy gets the shock of his life, when he sees his mother as the central lead in a 3-D porn film that he sits to watch with his classmates, a plot replete with dark comedy that takes off when a lady confesses to her husband that she had a fling with her ex in her own bed and well, the ex just breathed his last in the bed, and thirdly a moving story about a person who returns to meet his family after eight long years, and more importantly after his sex change. Got it?  All the stories kick off with events connected to sex, and they confluence and end with a sex film. So now you get a fair idea where this stuff is going to lead you, right? Wrong. The movie surprises you. But the glitch is with the way it does it — at times the turns look like either forced way too much or boringly long drawn.

Be it the initial scene where he tries to chop the dead body, or the place where he gets to know the cop is no more, Fahad Fasil has proved that he is an extraordinary talent. Same goes with Vijay Sethupathi. His (Shilpa’s) second sequence at the police station, where he struggles it out to reach the bad cop Berlin will be remembered for ages — both for exceptional acting and staging. Oh the bad cop! Bucks (actor) will be lauded for Berlin, and Berlin is the newest and the nastiest face of police in Kollywood. Film maker (also a co-writer) Mysskin also has delivered in his trademark style that leaves you confused and yet satisfied, with his authenticity fused with eccentricity. Ramya Krishan as Leela sparkles in the scene where she almost looks into the camera, as if asking to us directly, why there was no one to help her out. It is a question the society needs to answer. Samantha has tried to breathe life into Vembu, the lady who is geting killed from within by guilt. She has pulled it off in a very demanding scene set inside the famous, old mill of Tamil cinemas. Beautiful! Wonderful! Marvellous! But there seems to be an underlying basic tiff between Samantha and Vembu.

From the bunch of teenage lads who are on the run, to the assorted ones ranging from the school principal who does an impactful dialogue sequence with only one word, to Ramaswamy, the aide of a self-declared guru Arputham (Mysskin), the newcomers have done exceedingly well. The hero among the adolescents  the boy in the cat shirt, is perhaps the find of the year. He is like super cool from his initial scene where he asks for a packet of chips. But wait, there was this Raasukutty (Ashwanth Ashokkumar), the little boy who is too eager to welcome his father. The film belongs to this wonder kid whenever he appears on screen. And how can you forget the place where he talks with his father-mother from behind the closed doors. Just the kid’s voice Vs. Sethupathi draining himself out performing as Shilpa. Decide the winner for yourself.

Yuvan Shankar Raja has a limited role in the film that mostly banks on the ambient sounds ranging from that of a flying aircraft to off screen cats to a dead man’s fart. But wherever the composer had an opportunity, he has experimented in top gear. It is interesting, exciting too. A lot of story gets conveyed in the background dialogues. Quite a lot. Expectedly, there are no songs. But I am not sure of that. The film uses a few popular Hindi disco songs, which is quite okay, but like the film ‘96 (Tamil, 2018), SD also takes so much liberty with Ilayaraja’s songs that you do not get a feel of a song-less film. May be it is just a tribute to the Maestro, or may be it is an easy tool that has been deployed to elevate the script. (Can you think of ’96 without ‘Yamunai aatrile..’?)

Two cinematographers (Nirav Shah of 2.0 fame, and P.S.Vinod) have seamlessly worked to give their best output — which is why there is no one particular place where you could shout ‘The visuals were so good!’; the picturisation is terrific but it does not stand out separately from the overall film craving for your attention. Eyes do not take over your hearts and heads. And I think that is also successful cinematography. But yes, in the sub-way meet between Shilpa and Arputham, the cameraman (whoever it was) strives to capture your eyeballs. May be, he watched Agni Natchatiram(Tamil, 1988) the previous night. The setting and the art work looked as if most of the stuff bought for Aaranya Kaandam have been reused. All the places are uniformly and identically run down; Filled up with the same old stuff like a glowing globe here, a cassette player there, worn out wooden furniture, and the like. Hopefully they are disposing off the stuff now.

Easy Rider (English, 1969) propelled Hollywood into a new phase, in terms of bringing in fresh aesthetics on screen, presenting bold narratives, weakening the studio systems, and much more. Sample this conversation from the film —

“Don’t tell anybody that they’re not free, because they’ll get busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are.

They’re gonna talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom.

But they see a free individual it’s gonna scare them.

Well, it don’t make them running scared.

No. It makes them dangerous.”

In Super Deluxe, Shilpa too prepares her kid with a similar talk. And the movie tries to stand by it; and almost succeeds too. Not entirely, because the film ultimately sticks to the billion-year old ending — Good should prevail; Evil must die. In this case the curse of a good woman brings about a terrible death of the bad. It is playing very much by the rule book. Nothing fresh or contra about it. But does it take away the credit from the experiment?

The film runs for close to 3 hours with a couple of redundant dialogues and stagnant phases. A tighter presentation would have made the creation ever-green and engrossing like AK. While Aaranya Kaandam was pure story telling, Super Deluxe aspires to be a philosopher with funny oddities.

Duper Seluxe!

Bonus read:
There is an edgy scene in a gully where Shilpa searches for her missing son. Here I’m not sure. I remember seeing a wall in the background with the words ‘Magic events’ scribbled on it with a contact number below it. (As in, a wall ad for a guy who perhaps arranges magic events for birthday parties, etc.) The very next moment, when Shilpa crosses the same place again, two new words, ‘Real life’, seem to have appeared above those two words. Let me know if I was hallucinating, or actually the film maker wanted to surprise us. SD presents us with such moments. 

Vaazhvin Ragasiyam’s film poster has an outline of a ‘door key’ as a part of its title design, apparently to mean it was the key that unlocks the life’s secrets;  Tastefully, throughout the film, a key dangles in the jeep the couple use to dispose off the dead body of the lady’s ex with whom she had just slept. Life’s secret, eh? 

The couple’s track, that of two cross fit personalities thrown into the same bed by the institution of arranged marriage and the painful path they have to tread to warm up to each other, is designed on the lines of Mouna Raagam (Tamil, 1986). It is nice to see that the maker has acknowledged this. The gesture is no small thing especially in a place like Kollywood, where even entire films get unofficially ‘remade’ — without even the slightest hint of gratitude.

What do you do when you find a sea turtle egg…

While our planet is plundered by all of us, a few of us wage a war to save it. I was happy to be on the minority side for a night. The volunteers of the Students Sea Turtle Conservation Network, Chennai have been walking along a 7 km sea stretch every single night of the Olive ridley sea turtles nesting season. The arribada is roughly from January to March, every year. And the SSTCN team have been doing these walks for about three decades now. One segment of the walk typically starts from the Neelankarai beach and ends near the Adyar estuary. During the weekends, a shortened version of the walk (‘turtle walk’) is open for the general public. And that is how I ended up being on the right side for a night. There were about 20 others like me.

It was around an hour and half past midnight, when we rose up to embark on our walk. We had a good, elaborate sensitisation session prior to that. Just to make us more readily connected to the purpose, the SSTCN team had brought along a group of turtle hatchlings, to be left free in the sea water. These tiny turtles were from the early eggs of the season. It is a sight to witness the struggle and ultimate success of these babies as they crawl the beach sand, and guided by light from the torches of the volunteers as they begin their journey into the vast expanse of water, the sea. In any lot, there is that one smart and strong hatchling that desperately pushes the floor with its flippers, crawls across the damp sand, never loses sight of the light beam, braves the occasional fierce wave that topples it, and finally takes to the seawater and swims freely towards the horizon. At a deeper level that baby turtle took me to the realm when one brave and curious ape, very hesitatingly yet in need of something, left behind its group, got down from the tree branches and touched the land for the first time.

The sea turtles have a strong bonding with their places of birth, as wherever they swim, when it comes to the question of forming a nest and having children the females return to the very same nesting ground — from where it all began for them. I will be happy to welcome back the lucky ones from this lot.

These turtles are almost at the top of the food chain of the seas. They do get eaten up often by someone superior and hungry lurking under the salty, warm tropical waters. But the natural survival rate of oliver ridley turtles is abysmal, as only the luckiest one among one thousand hatchlings grows into an adult. These creatures also need ample doses of luck to escape the hands of humans that stretches into the seas. During the course of our walk, we came across a stranded carcass of a turtle. Most likely it got dragged by a fishing net under water for hours that did not make it possible for the olive ridley to come up for a breath of air. And eventually killed it.

More worrisome is the danger the shore line holds. One of us asked the SSTCN guys, ‘Are these Olive ridley turtles some endangered species or what?’. The reply was steeped in philosophy, though it was most practical and sensitive answer we could have wished for. ‘Other than the humans, all species on this planet are endangered’. Other than the usual suspects like stray dogs and poachers, the Chennai coast offers the nests the added problem of ‘development’. At some places along the coast, housing apartments are so close to the beach that you get a feeling perhaps these concrete giants were present even before the beach came into existence. As they break their shells from the inside, instinctively the baby turtles move towards light sources. In this part of the world, it could be the flood lights on the beach road, fancy lamps dangling from sea shore bungalows and light from the fishermen’s settlements abetting the high tide limits. In other parts of the world there are debates on the need for conservation of these turtles, and the efficacy of the efforts. It is fuzzy. Here, the response served with philosophy we got should serve as the lighthouse.

Once a while, our lives long for the presence of people who have surrendered themselves to higher purposes. I was lucky to have met a few such souls in one night.

The volunteers move with a single point agenda. To locate the underground nests and move the eggs to safe zones. These turtles come up the shores, make sub terrain conical nests, lay eggs that could be roughly around one hundred in number, cover up the place with beach sand, and dive back into the deep seas. The trained eyes are able to spot the underground nests by tracking the flipper imprints on the beach sand. Once identified, the experts deduce the exact depth at which the eggs are incubating, free of care for the world above them. Systematically, the nest is dug up and the eggs are collected. These eggs have soft, malleable shells. It is kind of surreal and strange to our fingers that are used to those eggs that need steel spoons to tap and break their shells. Soon, the spherical eggs are moved to a protected, natural hatchery on the same shoreline so that they don’t feel out of place.

In due course, the tiny babies that emerge are guided into the sea. And the cylce of life is made to go round — for one more time.