24 frames per second

A few weeks ago , when my daughter asked me to tell her a bedtime story, I narrated Peter Bischel’s A table is a table to her. Bedtime isn’t exactly ideal to introduce a preteen to existential angst (2 pm on a Tuesday afternoon works better, FYI), so I tried to lighten the tone a bit. But later that night, I wondered how it would’ve been to have had a conversation with a polite old man who insisted on calling a table as something else. I could imagine myself catching on at some point that each word he uttered meant something else, and trying to work it out.

I mention this because I found myself doing the same thing after watching Pa Ranjith’s Thangalaan. The film isn’t content to tell a straight story and let us figure out the message. It wants to throw in supernatural elements, tons of allegory, rhetoric about Dalit emancipation and what not, to the point where I walked out a bit punch drunk, as though I had been bludgeoned on the head with a cryptic crossword.

The straight story is simply this: a Brit on the edge of bankruptcy gathers a bunch of locals to help him look for a famed but lost gold mine. The locals are a downtrodden bunch for whom the promise of a better life, good wages and some form of emancipation is the lure. And as with practically every story involving the search for gold, things don’t go as planned, both before and after the first nugget is sighted.

There is enough and more here to tell a good story and make a message movie at the same time. And Pa Ranjith is a good enough filmmaker to be able to do it. Trouble is, he’s not satisfied with the riches on offer. So he wants to make it a story that echoes across millenia, and a story about how politics and caste and religion and greed had a part to play in their history, and…

It is tragic because the film wastes a good idea and an incredible set of performances. Pasupathy and Parvathy create characters whose component parts don’t seem to exist in anything they’ve played before. And Vikram as usual swings for the fences, and connects. He creates an improbably coherent character arc in the middle of a bonkers plot.

The saddest thing, for me, was the set of early photographs of the Kolar gold mines that were shown during the closing credits. What I wouldn’t have given to watch a movie that simply recreated what was going on in those photos! I’m sure his audience would’ve taken home the message without all the hand wringing about what the gold means, what the white man’s greed means, what the ghost means… Pa Ranjith’s need to say more is the film’s undoing.

Kinda ironic when your plot becomes your own review.