VIRUMAANDI - AN EPIC OF SOUND AND FURY
By Subhash K. Jha. (19 March 2004)

The first thing that hits you while watching Kamal Haasan's 'Virumaandi' is the violence in an ethnic Tamil culture depicted in such graphic detail that the squeamish are bound to recoil in distaste. In one sequence, the villainous patriarchs of the heroine Annalachumi's (Abirami) family torture her. One of them kicks her in the stomach and wrenches her 'mangalsutra' away from to get her to write off her portion of the family land.

"You should see how they cheer in those scenes of violence in the interior parts of Tamil Nadu. Domestic violence, wife beating, women being pushed around... all this is alien to us in the cities. But for the villages and smaller towns, women are still treated as objects of aggression," says Tamil Nadu's most accomplished actor.

'Virumaandi' is Kamal Haasan's most successful film in recent years. The box office takings are equivalent to the big Kamal Haasan starrers 'Indian' and 'Tenali. Its impact is being felt at cash counters across Tamil Nadu. "It was designed as a blockbuster. It hit bull's eye, and not just because I combat bulls in the film," chuckles the star as he relaxes in his well appointed home in central Chennai. The traffic, just outside, seems to have been left miles behind.

The quietude is in clashing contrast with the riot of noise, colour, sound, fury and violence that I've just witnessed in 'Virumaandi'. Set in Chinnakkolarpatti in Theni district of Tamil Nadu, the film traces the belligerent journey into life's vicissitudes of Virumaandi (Kamal Haasan), the local good-hearted ruffian who annoys more than a few people in the village with his macho antics. The blend of colours and noise hits our senses from the word go. 'Virumaandi' is Kamal Haasan's most massy film in years. After a series of extremely urban comedies he has put his foot in the mud -- quite literally.

In the sequence where the protagonist loses his beloved grandmother and jumps into her grief-laden muddy grave, we see Kamal Haasan returning to his rustic roots in full-throttled flamboyance. The film offers him a chance to play an archetypal hero of the masses. The character is more what M.G. Ramachandran would have favoured rather than Kamal Haasan's mentor Sivaji Ganesan.

Kamal Haasan agrees: "It certainly is a massy subject. My character is a loud loveable lout."But for crying out loud! Is this the brilliant actor's forte? "Why not?" he defends the film's elevated octave. "You should see how people react in the villages to my bull fights." In its clannish rusticity, 'Virumaandi' replicates the earlier Kamal Haasan blockbuster 'Thevar Megan'.

But 'Virumaandi' is far more virile and brutal. There are sequences of carnage (hauntingly shot by cameraman Keshav Prakash) cluttering the narrative and clutching it in a clamorous clasp of aggressive entertainment. When two clans clash in Virumaandi's village, the repercussions are recorded in rippling detail. A woman's baby is thrown into the well. A man leaves his family to the mobs and locks himself into a cupboard...

The regional war would be hard for audiences outside Tamil Nadu to follow. So is this the absolute 'interiorisation' of Kamal Haasan? "Not the least," he laughs. "With my next film I move into a very universal cosmopolitan subject. 'Virumaandi' is one for the Tamil masses. Its references and cross-references cannot be fathomed by people outside the Tamilian culture. That's the beauty of the film. It contains its ireful preoccupations within the given region and doesn't peer anxiously to see if the others are looking."

The film's endoscopic ethnicity suddenly widens its horizons for the nerve-shattering climax where Virumaandi, now in death row in prison for ostensibly slaying his enemies, suddenly assumes a messianic avatar and rescues the jailer (played by an old Kamal Haasan associate Nasser) from rioting prisoners.

The riot sequences in prison celebrate violence with a pungent force and wicked witticism (the TV journalist, played by Rohini, runs for her life and for a scoop, in tormented tandem). It is characteristic of the narrative as a whole. Throughout the plot, limbs get chopped off, torsos become mutilated and the characters indulge in what can only be called barbaric rites of redemption.

The love scenes between Kamal Haasan and newcomer Abirami are prolonged and primeval so that brutality and tenderness almost become interchangeable. Standing as a colossus at the vortex of the epic mayhem is Kamal Haasan. Both as director and actor he's at his bravura best. Projecting the acme of histrionic power and creative vision, Kamal Haasan invents a whole new-millennium lexicon of lumbering virility that has the adrenaline pumping.

The sheer brute force of 'Virumaandi' grips the audiences' senses like very few films in recent times. The entire ambience is thick with the smouldering smoke of savage retribution. Several recurrent themes from Kamal Haasan's oeuvre (the spunky matriarch, the beloved wife who dies brutally leaving the protagonist bereft, forcing him to channelise his sexual energy into violence) strike across the film with devastating effect.

The film leans heavily towards a Brahminical system of governance. 'Virumaandi' is all about the passions of landed classes in rural Tamil Nadu.

For the actor-filmmaker to appeal to the non-landed classes, he'd have to now act in a film about the peasant class. "But that would anger landlords who love 'Virumaandi'," laughs Kamal Haasan.