The journey of the hero also mirrors the greater journey that India herself undertook from the thirties to the late eighties.
Nayagan is a rock solid saga set in changing eras of post independence India and spans nearly three generations. They are both about how the protagonists tackle fire with fire, but are ultimately flawed but righteous individuals. They are both set in pretty much the same world of lawlessness and justice for the previlaged. They both chart the lives of people from childhood through a troubling adolescence to their conclusions. Nayagan on the other hand, for all its overt homages to The Godfather, is fighting us every time we watch it and try to pick at it, to stay atop a tall hillock jostling to go back to the apex whenever it is shoved a little this way or that. Ratnam, why did you have to use a filter on every damn scene? Why did you have to go from Coppola to Carrot Top?īoth movies have their ups and down, but for Thalapathi, sadly, it is in a stable equilibrium at the bottom of a deep ravine. But, where everything fell into sonorous unison in Nayagan, this felt discordant, somehow. It also had a stellar cast, fantastic music and a solid story. It was a mishmash of ideas, ill-conceived sequences and very very poor acting. While Nayagan was like watching hot caramel sauce melting on vanilla ice cream, Thalapathi felt like being in a boiling sauna, under a UV lamp with an ice cream cone dribbling over your sticky hands. Mani Ratnam the director shined through as India's Francis Ford Coppola, as our very own version of Martin Scorsese.Īnd then, suddenly, it all hit the fan catastrophically with Thalapathi. Not just in Tamil, not just in India, but from around the world. That is why its on the all time greatest movies ever made list. It has a brilliant story arc, brilliant scenes and brilliant continuity. It has mesmerizing dialogues, mesmerizing flow and mesmerizing character development. It is a fantastic movie with a fantastic cast, fantastic music and fantastic camera work. Mani Ratnam, having reached the high water mark in Indian cinema with a masterpiece of unparalleled storytelling, seemed to have deigned that he has done enough, and gave a squarely middling performance in his next gangster flick.Įveryone, including Time Magazine have heaped lavish praise on Nayagan, and for good reason. This is precisely the case with Nayagan and Thalapathi.
Like a Markov process, cinema seems to be that bag of jellybeans from which your first pick might be a delectable strawberry while the next could as likely be a raw onion. Life throws up so many curve balls that there isn't necessarily a logical progression from one state to the next.
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