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.
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.
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.
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