Thoongavanam

What if being a cop your son is kidnapped by the drug mafia in return for a bag of cocaine you got from them in a under cover operation? It definitely reads similar to a news item you may read sipping your morning coffee.

So what it takes to convert this simple thing into a watch-able story on screen ? That's what is all about thoongavanam the latest movie by Kamal Haasan and team.

It is a remake of a (some say without much alteration) French movie Nuit Blanche.

So this fact hangs in the back of my head while I watch it leaving me just to enjoy the movie as is than looking into it as a original creative piece.

I read the English translation of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It is undoubtedly in the top of my best reads. Not reading it in Russian did not in any way come in the way of enjoying the novel. It may be because whoever did the translation did full justice to it. The flow, the sequence, the narration, the dialogues all looked engrossing and natural.

So it does not matter whether you see the original or the duplicate as long as the essence of the original which could be the story, the screen play, the characters, visuals or action do not drop from what the original did. In fact if you can add subtle things that can make it more interesting then you have achieved your job of a remake.

The humour interlaced in the movie throughout , the people in the kitchen , the villain Prakash Raj, his assistant and the movie producer in the bar, all of them seem to add mild humour to the otherwise fast paced and a bit serious action and screen play. May be on a different note, if this humour was let off, the thrill element would have been little more.

So if you forget the fact that it is a remake and Kamal Haasan who gave some classics like Thevar Magan, Virumandi, Hey Ram is in here in a borrowed theme, you will thoroughly enjoy this movie.

The movie is definitely fast paced, no songs, no romances, very straight in what it is trying to say as a story, no need to break your head in complex non-linear narration, all happening over a night in a pub between a drug mafia, cops (good and bad), a little boy and a bag of cocaine.

It is not a movie that you will rave about definitely, say like a Hey Ram. All I can say is it has the finesse and is quite well executed without any rough edges. The background score is amazing.

Personally, I always like creativity and seeing it come alive in execution. It would be difficult for me to code on a project that I did not conceive of except for money. I guess that is what the makers of this film also would be aiming for. Execute cleanly and rapidly on a well established theme and make quick bucks. So we can only appreciate the execution which is crisp and professional.

Utthama Villain

Any reasonable human being born in this planet will think about death how much ever he is engrossed in living this life. Many a time the possibility of death staring at you in some form, may be some sort of a terminal disease or some ailment that is slowly killing you or even a heart attack from which you escaped brings that JOLT provided you are that type of person who notices it and think about it.

When you know you no longer can ignore time on this planet and every passing moment is important, you start to wonder what exactly are you here for. It is obviously not what you have been doing all along. Because if you look back why you went to school or why you got married or why you built that house or why you had kids or why you even got into friendship with some one, the deeper you think about them, the more empty they appear. Everything has just passed by and you have been a part of it. Looking back on life they bring this question of who you are who has been part of all that yet sitting pretty now and doing something completely disconnected with those past events ? Seriously who is this person? Why was he after all that as if he was possessed? Who is that who is sitting here and typing all this? Why does he do it? 

Without knowing who I am , it is very difficult to even associate anything that has been done. May be most times you were asleep so it all passed by without your knowledge. And that is truly the case with most of us. All our past happened without us being there fully. Can you recollect one instance where you were completely there ? If I say my body and mind was there in all the events that I came across, then it is also true that by the very fickle nature of the mind you were not there really. It was some wave of thoughts which was there all the time. The thoughts may not necessarily be reflective of the activity you were involved at any point in time. For example, I may type this and my mind is still flashing various images unrelated to what I am doing. I may recollect my son’s first year birthday in my mind now but I was probably half there. Remaining half I do not know. The meaninglessness and futility of this existence strikes you hard. The fact that I created my own meanings of my actions looks stupid. Yet we cannot ignore our desires. The ones we had relentlessly chased. That gave me the illusion that this person is so real. But death? 

When I am confronted with the possibility of dying in some form and it engulfs me, my senses suddenly become more clear. It is no longer the sleepy go ahead no matter what types. There is a lot more clarity on who this person is. It is no longer the unclear, sleepy me. The nonsense suddenly stops. You no longer kid yourself. You become straight. Your path is clear. You have finite time and not the imagined unlimited time in your hands. There is no more luxury in postponing stuff. Internally you are a lot focused. If you had wasted time thinking this and that about yourself, about others, about yourself as seen by others and so on all that confusion drops. The clearer YOU emerges. 

When this happens, living life is easy. You no longer start feeling that you are different from this life. You and Living become one. You are that. It is a irony that the possibility of death makes you live life better. But that is the truth. Even if you are not dying any time soon, the constant awareness of leaving this planet any moment makes you focus on things that matter. Unwanted noise gets filtered.

Uttama Villain is a movie by Kamal Haasan - A must watch if you are some one who has thought about death at some point in time in your life, would like to pause in the midst of your race and take a clean look, question things and bring focus and meaning to this life. Very rarely does a subject like this gets shown in movies with the level of all round performance by all actors, the colourful art forms, the heaviness and the humour, the poignant and thought provoking dialogues, great background score and visuals. 

Go watch it to get that JOLT.