R ARIVANANTHAM
With the advent of young and talented writers joining hands with new breed of directors daring to venture on the untrodden path, Tamil cinema has come of age, really.
Without the usual cine masalas, ‘Kuthiraivaal’ is a new kind of an experimental film in Tamil cinema industry. The story written by G Rajesh and directed by Manoj Jahson and Shyam Sunder, and produced by Pa Ranjith and Vignesh Sundaresan under the banners Neelam Productions and Yaazhi Films.
Saravanan (played by Kalaiyarasan) is a banker who dreams of a horse without a tail, and when he wakes up, he has a horse tail grown behind him. How did the tail grow? What is it trying to tell him? He seeks answers from a soothsayer, a maths teacher and an astrologer, with each one giving their interpretation to the horse tail. The rest of the film deals with Saravanan’s journey to understand the meaning of the tail.
The film has Kalaiyarasan and Anjali Patil playing the lead roles while Chetan, Anandsami, Lakshmi Paati, and others play crucial supporting characters. The music is composed by Pradeep Kumar and Martin Visser, and the cinematography is by Karthik Muthukumar.
‘Kuthiraivaal’ begins exactly how Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis begins. A man wakes up and becomes an insect in Kafka’s story, but here, Kalaiyarasan grows a tail as he wakes up. There is a certain similarity between both these protagonists. Both have mundane 9-5 jobs, and are fed up with it. They find everything around them boring. And this new addition/transformation puts a lot of things into perspective for them.
The absurdity keeps growing as Saravanan keeps meeting different people. He meets an old lady who explains/interprets other people’s dreams, and she interprets this tail to be a part of his dream. A Maths Professor (Chetan) tells him that the tail is a symbol of his sexual needs. An astrologer tells him that it indicates oncoming impotency. With so many possibilities, the way the story ends is what is beautiful about ‘Kuthiraivaal.’ It’s one of those films that makes you exclaim loudly how beautiful the writing is.
However, the complexity in the writing is also what serves as its pitfall. The abstractness is too high, and at times we even forget what we saw a few minutes ago. It takes a lot of time to get used to this screenplay pattern, and there is a high chance of getting disconnected with the narrative. In addition to it, you have a lot of jargon thrown around like a chain reaction the engagement takes a hit at the end.
Despite these engagement issues, what keeps the film going is Pradeep Kumar and Martin Visser’s music, along with the sound effects. A testament to this would be the scene where Saravanan meets the astrologer.
The cinematography by Karthik Muthukumar has colours that create a psychedelic feel, and the tilted frames add on to the madness of the film that ‘Kuthiraivaal’ is. In short it is tough to describe what he has exactly done without spoiling the film, but it is nothing short of amazing.
It is tough to portray a character as complex and layered as Saravanan, but Kalaiyarasan does a fantastic job.
Score: 4.0/5.0
