24 frames per second

Bugs and bugfixes

Ashwath Marimuthu, now two films old, seems to have a pattern to his screenplays: he places a flawed hero amidst a crowd of perfectly reasonable people, and then creates a situation that holds the keys to his eventual redemption.

In Dragon, his eponymous hero spends years being an utter wastrel and college dropout until a personal crisis leads him to want to become successful. His means to that end are a mix of cheating (a fake degree) and hard work. And when there comes a reckoning for his cheating, it is in the form of an opportunity for redemption. This process repeats more than once in the film.

This seems like the plot of about two million and three movies, and it is. What makes it special is how incredibly reasonable and level-headed the people around him are. You don’t get manufactured melodrama.

Take the college Principal, for instance. At a broad plot level, this is essentially the Boman Irani character in Munnabhai MBBS and 3 Idiots, and it would’ve been so easy to make him exactly that kind of archetype. Instead, we get a warm, empathetic character who not only believes that people can be the best version of themselves, but that they should. He serves as the moral centre of the film. The ex-girlfriend, played by Anupama Parameswaran, could’ve so easily written out of the script after the initial portions, but the script gives her innate goodness its due.

The only bug is within the hero, and the film is essentially a debugging exercise.

Parantheses

It is incredible how many early scenes find later echoes. Right at the beginning, we see the hero as a “good boy” — studious, well-groomed and inclined to square away his academics before expressing his feelings to a girl he loves. Much later, you see another character on the exact same path, and the echo from Dragon’s past resonates exactly when it needs to. You see a certain “gethu” archetype in college twice — once as Dragon and then as someone who idolizes him, and the second time is used as a commentary on the first. A line about how our mistakes haunt us finds echoes both before and after it is uttered. Even a small montage involving the hero putting in insane hours at his workplace finds an echo in something his ex does. This is extraordinarily well thought out writing.

User Experience

I have so far made it seem like Dragon is a serious morality tale. It is very much a morality tale, but it is also very entertaining.

Dragon meets a girl through the arranged marriage route, and she wants to go out on a date with him to see if he ticks off all her boxes. (Imagine a romantic version of the interview process in Thillu Mullu, if you will.) The way that date unfolds, with no drama but a quiet affirmation of all those things she’s looking for, is beautiful. There’s a moment in a club where I can imagine ninety six out of a hundred directors wanting to put in a fight sequence where the hero rescues the girl from a drunk, bellicose letch. What you get, instead, is something far simpler that still tells her what she needs to know. And when you do get a fight sequence later in the film, it is scored to perhaps the most innovative background I have seen in a long time.

Even visually, the film does some very interesting things in this regard. There is a moment in a lecture hall where the camera is placed roughly at the point of view of the lecturer. The focus is first on a young man who has an instant crush on the lecturer, but then shifts to an older one who is her ex. It is easy to play it for laughs, but when you consider the fact that the younger man has modeled himself after the older one, you realize that there’s a deeper layer here — the lecturer is dealing with the older man, and her memory of his (and her) younger self. This is brilliant framing.

Easter eggs

For those of you who are movie buffs, there is a little basket of hidden delights. An unrequited childhood love is referenced by the number 96. A bunch of wastrels in college refer to a Malayalam movie about a similar bunch. And when the chief wastrel among them has a crush on a teacher, a different Malayalam movie is referenced (that the teacher in question is also connected is a bonus on top of the bonus).

docstring

Ashwath Marimuthu makes you think of Frank Capra and Rajkumar Hirani, but this is actually a pretty high ask — you can be all heart while thinking of the plot, but the head needs to take care of business while writing the script and while filming it.

To extend the analogy just once more, Marimuthu doesn’t falter either at compile time or at run time.