24 frames per second

There is an exchange between Muthu, the protagonist and Paavai, the girl he is interested in sometime early in the second act of the film. She asks him where he is from; he replies with the name of his hamlet, and adds, by way of clarification, the name of a slightly larger place it is close to. The fact that even the larger place being referred to is not Tuticorin or Tirunelveli, let alone Chennai, is emblematic of the world his character has been transplanted to. This is not a gangster movie about dons and police commissioners and the like — it involves little screws in large organized crime machines, and their clear-eyed realism about where they are in the food chain permeates their every move.

It is easy to use adjectives such as “gritty” and “realistic” to describe this world. It is gritty, yes. But while the characters seem to inhabit the real world, their dialogue is tinged with such a hyper-awareness that you almost feel as though they are watching themselves from a distance while talking. It’s equal parts exposition, introspection, and realism. I do not say this as criticism — this stylistic choice is a Gautam Menon trademark (his characters have done this in voiceovers often enough before, and sometimes in dialogue as well), so the real question is whether it works in a film like this, or yanks us out of the world it has created.

The first big reason why it works is that, for the most part, you see the characters around Muthu do this, whereas Muthu himself seems, for the most part, to simply inhabit this world. His character always seems ill at ease with his surroundings and what he is doing, and the film brings us so gradually into this world that his discomfort becomes our own emotional anchor throughout the film. What is even more interesting is that his discomfort is clearly not just with his surroundings, but also with what he has discovered himself to be capable of. (What Silambarasan accomplishes here is nothing short of fantastic — this is his finest performance in years.)

Our focus on Muthu is not just because of Muthu himself. The film uses a sly device to get us even more involved — it provides him with a counterpart who mirrors his discomfort but diverges in terms of the decisions he makes. It is, in calculus terms, as though you get to see the partial derivative of Muthu’s arc with respect to Muthu’s choices!

The other big reason why the film’s big stylistic choice works is its running length. When characters talk like this, our instinctive reaction is, why are you telling me instead of showing me? Writers Jeyamohan and Gautam Menon counter this by making very few narrative jumps and building up to each major development slowly. When Muthu fires a gun for the first time, the development feels earned. Characters have an arc, but interestingly here, even the gun has an arc. You get the whole Chekhov’s gun thing, but the writers take it one step further, and that denouement is sort of surprising but fits what has happened so far.

What doesn’t fit, sadly, is the last 10 minutes — I understand that it is meant to tell us where the next installment is headed, but I would have been perfectly happy to have been kept in the dark. The tonal shift is jarring and, in my view, unnecessary. But this is a minor quibble about a film that has so much to offer.

I realize that I have spent most of this blog post talking about a specific aspect of the film, but trust me, there are several other delights. Rahman gives us a background score that reminds us of why we fell in love with his work in the first place so many years ago, and tops it off with an absolutely mesmerizing duet in Unna nenachadum (flashbacks to Viswanathan-Ramamoorthy’s Kodi Asaindhathum might have been entirely intentional). The camerawork gives you a real sense of how dirty and grimy Mumbai can be. It is hardly ever showy. Even familiar landmarks are viewed from the perspective of these characters. My favourite aspect of the cinematography and editing comes in the big fight that sets up the rest of the film — you find yourself plunged into chaos, same as the protagonist, but then, when the character finds focus in the middle of all this, so does the camera. It is a perfect example of how cinema can be such a visual storytelling medium.

Between this film and Vaanmagal, it feels a bit like we are seeing Gautam Vasudev Menon discover a new gear. In his romances and cop dramas, we saw a man comfortable in his skin as a storyteller. In Achcham Yenbadhu Madamaiyada and Enai Noki Paayum Thota, you could see him trying to take his characters to difficult places both physically and emotionally, but… I don’t know quite how to describe it, but it felt as though he flinched when it really counted. He isn’t flinching now.