And what are we left with till the interval in Kalvan, till the main thing finally gets going and we reach that point where these characters actually start doing something interesting? Lots (and lots and lots) of nothing. Kemban (GV Prakash) is a thief. And with his best friend (who doubles as his aide) (Dheena), he tries burgles junctions to save money so he can bribe his way to a forest officer’s job. But that’s motivation behind our protagonist, and till we reach that ‘point’, the film flounders through an insipid romantic track, and a bunch of wannabe-smart comedic bits that aren’t half as funny as jokes about a wet towel. Kemban takes on an old man crippled with loneliness, and we are told he does so to impress Balamani (Ivana). But his real intention, we find out one not-so-surprising plot point down the line, is a much darker, complicated scheme taking Bharthiraja’s character as the centre. That Kemban is possibly a mad, grey character is one of the meagre handful of good things about the film. But the film rushes to that bit of information and never spends time to really delve into the grey areas of the character. Instead, it shimmies through a long, torturous screenplay heaved with director PV Shankar’s ‘humour’.
Director: PV Shankar
Cast: GV Prakash, Bharathiraja, Ivana, Dheena
Again, GV Prakash’s style (refusing to do anything interesting with his glumly amoral character) is at odds with the versatility of the craft skills that created him: Bharathiraja’s performance as Krishnamoorthy is varied and sensitive, yet everything he does is wasted on tediously uninspired sequences. Like everything else in the film, a scene in which Krishnamoorthy tames a tiger and rescues a girl has a theme that sounds decent on paper – I suppose kidnapping is a real issue for people like him? The veteran also brings a deliberately understated touch to this scene. But the comic and brutal abruptness of the scene-cutting, combined with a nervy absence of style – cutting back and forth from every single character’s reaction in a way that makes them seem they were each filmed in a different location at a different time, reacting to a different thing – and then the CGI tiger seeming to dissolve the whole thing in a garish puddle of uneroticised melodrama – means that we end up completely emotionally (or spatially) dissonant from the character. It’s a dynamic that repeats itself everywhere.
Kalvan’s other burden is vintage exposition, whose run-time legacy was to be buried 6 feet under. The film’s focus — love — is introduced as Kemban and his lads try to burgle Balamani’s house. After she outwits them and takes them to the police, Kemban instantly falls in love with her. Even she is wooed by him, albeit reluctantly, after she watches him adopt a destitute old man. We know love is blind but this blindness has new wings here, it has burgeoned to become a light dodge. Almost every commercial film these days has dialogues that sound more as exposition than characters speaking to each other. When it comes to Kalvan’s dialogue or exposition issues however, the film’s problem infects itself, with a cancer-like flow. The infected parts due to poor exposition grow in the film’s screenplay timeline and make you feel the end of the film kill the film. At the start, when supporting characters open their mouths you feel like they are shove-feeding you the plot. Soon it’s the primary characters, and then the protagonist himself starts explaining the plot again. The exposition continues; towards the end, the only interesting character in the film; to be replaced by Bharathiraja who narrates unedited exposition through a monologue. The one character who shows acting prowess; With backstory to the character, the film, with such commendable effort tries to force a square peg into a round hole, of course, failing. As the story picks up the speed in the third act, the film manages to push you into the ropes of attention for a very short while. A poignant scene in which Kemban encounters a herd of angry wild elephants is made with enough technical competence for you to wonder why the filmmakers didn’t make the rest of the film with the same earnestness they executed filming this sequence. From the embryonic, out-of-focus POV shot of Kemban, waking up to a herd of elephants charging at him, to the finale of the chase, by the end of it, almost everything you cherish from this single sequence is present in it — from intent, to choreography.
Featuring an episodic screenplay that staggers from one unnecessary setpiece to the next, and dialogue that renders serviceable performances ham-fisted, Kalvan boasts enough empty space to cause us to zone out and wonder why it was ever made.
