Oru Thavaru Seidhal(1.5 / 5)
A film-within-a-film made up of a bunch of 40-year-olds in impeccably tailored suits and styled hair hamming up a gangster film like they’re the Keystone Cops, or some others simply lowering a Marilyn Monroe poster and a dummy propped with a speculum, table lowered, or some who are just plain bizarre… Illayaraja’s music is so beautiful that our ears sweat. The prose goes on and on… You really must read these books! The magic begins unspooling imperceptibly, like strands of nylon stretched so taut that they ultimately snap in two isn’t the punchline or the conceited make-up or the symbolic use of frogs but the literal meaning of the word: ‘no meaning’. Adil Hussain’s Instagram account is shamelessly self-promotional, but good for him. He deserves to be in the spotlight. The director’s name at the end of the movie was still a mystery. ‘This saga is set during my formative years,’ the digression went on. ‘That saga was called Aya Bari Kabar’ (1976). It is a gangster tale, he said: ‘If you want an analysis, I have lost nothing, I have not gained anything.’ ‘Did you?’ ‘I did.’ Was it a discussion about gangsters killing each other, or a discussion about state terror and murder, or was the saga actually blandly funny in the way adulthood is, once you grow up? ‘The malignant sores are not only caused due to STDs. You have no idea,’ the book-bashing preacher went on, setting a fine example for our youngsters. ‘You can end up dead.’ Pedestaling Kargil is a superblySelected, breathtakingly ordinary collection of soldiers: here’s a story from here, here’s one from there. The translation is as clunky as the solitary. All of this is Old News. Mani Dhamodharan’s political satire Oru Thavaru Seidhal starts with snippets of footage of homeless men sleeping in public. Cut to the main cast, also sleeping, because their landlord just threw them out of the house he rents to them in a Chennai suburb. There’s a whole lot of stuff the movie wants to say about jobless young adults, greedy politicians, people who vote like dolts, and so on. But the longer the movie runs, the thinner it gets. At best, it was a short film, which Mani pads to such an extreme that it goes limp.
Director: Mani Dhamodharan
Cast: MS Bhaskar, Ramchandran, Upasana RC, Paari, Srithar, Namo Narayan
There is virtually no plot in Oru Thavaru Seidhal. The little plot there is, concerns the aforementioned youth and their attempt to circulate a smear video against a politician so that one of his rivals can claim it as genuine and use it for electioneering purposes. The film is about how the gang goes about implementing the idea. So the gang makes a fake video of sorts, which it begins circulating via the internet. At one point a gang member asks their de facto leader (Paari Vasan) if people can really believe in the video as genuine. But it is with bemusing acceptance that the public, as well as the politician population, buy this video that is obviously fake.
In these days of AI-generated videos themselves becoming a quickly fading subject for conversation, the conceits of a movie like Oru Thavaru Seidhal – such as morphing and fake WhatsApp messages – seem like old hat. It’s the job of the filmmaker to sell it, and to make this believable. The film is not successful in achieving this. Why not come up with a more interesting idea – that of the social media weaponised in the hands of the wrong people – and clothes it in a phenomenon that better fits the zeitgeist; Rage Farming, perhaps? Then, we’d have a movie.
Even the non-political bits are embarrassing. One of the gang members is a woman: Upasana RC, and she’s the first one we meet in the film (beaming in her shorts and tights). There is nothing wrong with that, but for some reason her looks are something to joke about in a sleazy double-entendre way. The male gaze is vile, to put it mildly, and it isn’t as if she can’t see it; she says something, for instance, about how objectification works when she stands up to the police officer who tells her she’s a girl and she should put out. Then, a speech from Upasana’s character about what it really means to be a woman for oneself in Chennai. Only to then see what the film does with her, which is totally opposite of what she is as a woman.
Other than a bit of comic timing, MS Bhaskar finds no real use for his considerable gifts. It jokes of its unemployed-youthers (who include a doctor), that they have no moral compass towards their vote, which they would sell for money. It’s not that the makers wink; but it’s still what a product to hawk during an election year.
