24 frames per second

Maharaja opens with an accident, and then a brief summary of a very self-contained life involving a father and daughter. (That this is done using a voice-over instead of better dialogue and a show-don’t-tell approach is a misstep, but a minor one.) The daughter sets off for a sports camp, and a little later, the man arrives at a police station, complaining about a stolen metal dustbin. The dustbin occupies pride of place in the household, because it saved the girl during the aforementioned accident by falling on her and shielding her from impact. But despite its sentimental attachment, anyone with two neurons to rub together comes to the conclusion that there is more to this complaint than a dustbin. Their confusion about his motives mirrors ours. And to make matters worse, we see a couple of parallel threads — one an incident involving a ward councillor and an ex-con, and another involving a ruthless criminal who runs an electrical supply store by day. For a while, the film seems to be hell-bent on putting a bunch of puzzle pieces on the table with no clue as to the underlying design. Then, about halfway in, things begin to cohere.

This is a very nonlinear script, and it takes a while to place the jumps chronologically. When we look back on the actual story, we realize that it is fairly straightforward, and there doesn’t seem to be a strong motivation to tell it in this fashion except to make it a lot more engaging to the viewer. In fact it feels like the other way round — an absurd plot device like a stolen dustbin would work only if the story were told nonlinearly. The film wants our attention, and its narrative structure earns it. To be fair, even when the film pulls the rug from under our feet (and this happens more than once), it doesn’t do it in an arbitrary manner. We are either intellectually or emotionally primed for them when they occur.

The only problem is that all this to-ing and fro-ing between timelines makes it harder for us to be emotionally invested. So our only real anchor becomes Vijay Sethupathi, and what an anchor it turns out to be! He gets abused, slapped around, jeered at… Through it all, he maintains this absurd story about three burglars who attack him at home and make off with a dustbin. And yet, Vijay Sethupathi makes you care. There are moments when he demonstrates his strength and capacity for violence, but for the most part, you see a man trying to almost shrink within himself. The composition and casting helps as well – in many scenes, he is a hulking presence, trying to diminish himself to nothing in front of people who are more slightly built but seem to have more power. And the more he does it, the more you wonder what lies beneath. His performance shepherds us through the series of revelations that dot the final third of the film — they change what we know, but not how we feel.

In fact, the single most affecting moment in Maharaja, and perhaps the best reason to watch the film, comes towards the end, when a crime scene is recreated. Singampuli is in the foreground, holding his arms a certain way. Natarajan Subramaniam (playing the cop) and Vijay Sethupathi are framed in the background. What you know, what the characters know, what they know or suspect the other characters know…. everything comes together in a moment of breathtaking visual poetry.

I have rewatched this scene three times, and my admiration has only gone up each time. But the reason I love it? A man who, fifty films into his career, is showing us that he can accomplish more in five seconds of stillness than most other actors manage in a lifetime.