logo

iView Author:
VASU
(Chennai, India)
Email :
vasuanish85 [at] gmail [dot] com

Katrathu Tamizh - An Anti-thesis of Escapist Cinema

Indian Cinema, for ages, has always revolved around escapist cinema and Tamil Cinema has been no exception. What MGR did decades ago is done by Rajini today. People spend their money to see their hero fight against all (’all’ ranging from a mean villain to the entire bureaucracy of this country) and emerge victorious. Hence we have come to see only successful protagonists and happy endings. Rarely do we find movies about losers in life; movies which delve into the psyche of a loser, even rarer. Those are the ones which actually raise questions, those are the ones that make you think, and those are the ones that have an impact.

Katrathu Tamizh is one such movie. The movie is as much about a seven-year innocent kid, Prabhakar, as it is about a 26 year-old maniac, Prabhakar. All Prabhakar needs in life is to regain his innocence, innocence that was lost when he was seven years old. His happiest moments in his life were then, when he was with his dearest, Anandhi. He tells Anandhi that he has a tiger for a friend for which she exclaims, ” Nijama than solriya?” (”Do you REALLY mean it?”) These words would echo throughout Prabhakar’s life for it would always bring him back to this very moment, his happiest moment in life, when he walks hand-in-hand with Anandhi, with no other thought in his mind, as innocent as one can be. It would be Anandhi’s happiest moment too, walking hand-in-hand with Prabhakar, thinking about a non-existent tiger. The search for the non-existent tiger would go on to become the metaphor for Prabhakar & Anandhi’s search for their lost innocence. The movie is at its best at this simplest level.

Prabhakar would go on to lose all his close ones, one by one, each one etching a deep scar in his mind. He then goes on to follow the footsteps of his mentor and sole companion, his Tamil teacher. He pursues a major in Tamil solely for the love of it even though his marks would have fetched him an engineering degree. His roommate, a computer science student, becomes an IT professional earning 2lakhs while he becomes a Tamil Teacher earning 2000. To top it all, he is humiliated by the police in front of his own school students for a petty reason. At one point of time, he is even accused of smuggling drugs. Each and every incident tearing down the already scarred mind, he loses control and releases all his anger bent up right from the moment he lost his little dog, his parents, his teacher, his love and all his innocence. The film has to be seen to go through the psyche of Prabhakar and experience it.

If at the simplest level the movie is about lost innocence, then at a higher level, it is about how a criminal is born in the mind of every other guy in the street who is unfortunate enough not to work in an IT/BPO centre and earn 2 lakhs or is poor enough to study to achieve the same or even worse: he is interested in History or Geography or Tamil, something that has absolutely no monetary value in the present day.

Prabhakar could be the guy who robs the guy who flaunts his wealth; he could be the guy who rapes a girl wearing a provocative dress; he could be the one shooting down a corrupt police. There could be absolutely no justification for whatever he does, there is none in the movie. The movie merely deals with how a lunatic is born from an innocent kid. Is there a solution to this? Can this situation be undone? The movie does not answer. Perhaps the answer is yet to be found. The movie asks us to ponder. And ponder we should do…!

Escapist cinema provides answers. Rajini’s Shivaji answered a parallel question, “Rich becoming richer, poor becoming poorer”, by conjuring MJR (Rajini again) to wipe all the problems out. That was a 3 hour answer.

Realistic cinema asks the questions. Katrathu Tamil has asked the question. It is for us to find the answer.