Naan Kadavul: Exterminate All the Brutes!
Before I descend into the maddening chaos of Naan Kadavul and try to put into so many words the twisted, discordant scapes it evoked in my head, and lest I lose myself again somewhere between the nightmare and the ecstasy, I would like to declare the enigmatic Bala’s latest opus to be not just an instance of powerful even revolutionary cinema but of cinema itself invoked as a dark art, as occult.
‘Naan Kadavul’ is unholy cinema- exploitative, perverse, nauseating, excessive and bleak beyond all redemption. It is cinema possessed by the darkest of demons. Demons, which arise from a terrifying void that director Bala’s warped vision locates beneath the flimsy veneer of ‘civilized’ society, deep inside the corridors of hell, in the core of the human soul.
It is an unwieldy film borrowing its aesthetic from subaltern cinema or as they say in trade parlance- ‘c’ grade cinema like Mithun-starrers (Chandal) and cut-rate mythologicals (Amman films); splitting at the seams and at times, plain jarring. The criticism that Bala’s earlier ‘Pithamagan’ is still the director’s most finely crafted film is definitely true but ‘Naan Kadavul’ is his most ambitious effort yet. While his earlier films tended to share its spoils with iconic male leads, here there is but one authority- the director himself. Ego-tripping, self-indulgence… all true but while we’re at it, let’s not forget ‘auteur’ cinema. Below the chaotic mess that is the structure of the film it has a distinct vision (apocalyptic) and voice (stark raving mad). With his fourth film, Bala has finally come to his own and offers the most uncompromised, bleak, even grandly deluded vision of life, the universe and everything else; this side of Gaspar Noe.
Unlike Bala’s earlier films where the general morbid fatality of it all was tempered with moments of genuine warmth, love and camaraderie, ‘Naan Kadavul’ chooses to be strangely aloof from the sentimentality that plays out, choosing to view the proceedings with a higher, greater, apathetic view that subsumes all humanity into a depraved caricature. This can be observed in the early scene where a father who has arrived in the holy city of Kashi in search of a son he abandoned fourteen years ago on the words of astrologer is vociferously berated by a pundit for his fickle, selfish act. The guilt-wrecked father crumbles at the pundit’s feet, groveling for forgiveness as the camera stares aloof, uncaring, ultimately damning till the father’s gesture seems depraved and pathetic. It becomes apparent that there is no redemption for him, a fact that his son who has since become an aghori also affirms on their first meeting.
The character of the son, Rudran is an enigmatic conceit. He is introduced in a scene that employs every commercial Tamizh cinema stock-in-trade clich'© that comes with the introduction of the hero, where his oaken body looms dizzyingly large and the camera circles around him in fever pitch and the soundtrack blares with maximum jingoism. What seems important now, in retrospect, is that he is seen in a yogic posture with his head down and feet up. Later, there is also a montage of him doing the typical heroes worth of scenes in the space of a five minute song. He struts, poses, gesticulates and fights, all the while looking way cooler than cool and an absolute bad ass. All the more he seems to have a penchant for declaring himself God, the supreme, the end all. Even later, however, when Rudran is instructed by his guru to return to his family and village, these very larger-than-life hero mannerisms begin to seem absurd and even, comical. The train sequence and the ones in the village where Rudran runs amok like an outsized animal among the local folk play out with subtle comic vibes as Bala de-centers, deconstructs and mocks the ‘Tamizh hero’. It is also as if by doing so, he is announcing the director as the last word, as if he is invoking the ‘auteur’ in commercial Tamizh cinema. For the rest of the film Rudran stays almost perfunctory, a conceit to be brought into action and given meaning only when the director decides so.
The other strand of the sprawling narrative begins with the camera immersing the viewer beneath the surface into a terrifying void- a subterranean ruin populated by the most wretched of souls who exist not as outcastes but as society’s refuse. The first scene where Thandavan, the hulking gargoyle-like chief of a beggar brigand sorts out his raggedy ranks is the kind of visceral gut-wrencher that reminded me of the controversial Herzog documentary ‘Land of Silence and Darkness’. It is unashamedly exploitative cinema and Bala makes no qualms about pushing the sensitive to a point where you debate flinching your eyes away from the screen. Thandavan, meanwhile matter-of-factly grades the deformity of his wards in accordance of monetary value. As one confronts uncomfortable questions of ethics, morality, and representation of reality, Bala cuts to a montage of the beggars at work. It’s a bruiser, a scathing critique, a questioning of the very foundations of one’s thought and of civilized society as a whole. We are shown a degenerate spectacle- of beggars dressed up as deformed, gothic representations of gods, of wretched souls crawling on the ground asking for alms in the name of god, of a complacent society that believes it can purge its own sins by dropping a rupee or two in a aluminum bowl. Bala tears away the pretensions and delusions of society to reveal a parasitic, mercenary structure, one that survives by leeching off and continually damning the weak and the unfortunate. Religion and god seem to be just another elaborate bluff concocted to keep this twisted cycle of life functional. A glorious god is but the luxury of the purist, the Brahmanical, the bourgeoisie. God for the unfortunate, like the film chooses to represent, is a limbless midget, one who doesn’t see and doesn’t answer back. He can only listen. Where, then, is righteousness? Certainly not in the law which Bala ridicules as corrupt, ineffectual and bureaucratic as Rudran is put to trial for a murder in broad daylight but under highly ridiculous circumstances, manages to escapes scot-free.
The weak and needlessly prolonged central narrative of the film, a perversion of a common template for mythological films, follows a blind beggar woman Hamsavalli who is first abducted by the law from her adopted family of street performers and sold into Thandavan’s beggar brigand. As the rest of the brigand get together and try to console a woeful Hamsavalli, the film takes a surprisingly humane turn. Bala momentarily breaks the gloom and explores the camaraderie and etches two fascinating characters- the wise-cracking beggar boy and Murugan, Thandavan’s deputy whose perpetual sense of guilt has made him a nuerotic drunk.
Soon, Thandavan has an offer to sell Hamsavalli as a consort to a rich man with hideously deformed face. Bala invokes his dues-ex-machina hero Rudran into a final combat with Thandavan. The fight is but a prelude to the explosive climax, one that permeates the conscience, rattling the very pillars of god, humanity, hope and redemption on which one has supported easy notions of reality.
God is a delusion and redemption its myth. If the only true redemption is in death, of what value is life. However, if god were to exist, would he care? What God do we deserve?
The irony of a film titled ‘Naan Kadavul’(I am God).
“If you can’t be just, be arbitrary,” wrote William S. Burroughs. Bala does just that and the end result is haunting and provocative, a film that doesn’t stop when it ends but wanders around in your psyche in search of a meaning.
A critique of the Tamizh hero, of religion, of the Brahmanical bourgeoisie, of the law, of the notion of god… what ‘Naan Kadavul’ ultimately seems to be attacking is the mainstream. The mis-en-scene of the film is proudly, swaggeringly subaltern. It’s the mis-en-scene of the outcast, of the rebel. Rarely has the mechanics of commercial cinema have been infiltrated with such subversion.
That Bala is an intelligent, rebellious film-maker is a given but his greatness lies in his intuition, the internal logic that connects the disparate, sprawling elements in his films. His legendary eccentricity and ego translates to the screen which is precisely what makes a Bala film a unique beast, unlike no other. With ‘Naan Kadavul’ he seems to have upped his ante. One can only ponder what he will be upto next. Until then one will have to just contend with the void.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Firstly, congrats on all ur achievements!
And, welcome back! Comments on the post later.
wow!!!
what a post!!
what an analysis.
Welcome back Siddharth.
In a span of a day we have two contrasting post on the movie!
Long since we have seen a movie that opens up totally divergent views and reactions from the audience.
The permeation of commercial by an ‘auteur’s vision’ We can have more of that…
aao thakur aao!
Spectacular post, though you missed some major plots in the movie. The prominent part of dialogue delivery by Rudran was quite based on the bhagvad saar, which is a must mention. Balaji is oh-so intuitive!He deserves a break..
a good movie..great analysis…
@Jaiganesh.. did you manage to see it yet, cause i don’t see your take on it on PFC
@Zumie.. I know i missed some chunks of the movie like that twisted spoof that unfolds in the police station.. but the movie is just such an epic sprawl it’s difficult to get it all at one
@ravptor.. hey thanks a lot, man.
Not yet Siddarth.
Not yet..
what in devil’s name is keeping you…
I am in the middle of nowhere and resisting the urge to see a pirated copy. I caught up with Vennila Kabadi Kuzhu as it was on Indiaglitz online theatre. Lets see what GOD has in his mind..