Mani Ratnam is one of my favorite directors working at the moment. His films are intricately beautiful from start to finish, offering up worlds that I rarely see in other films. I was a huge fan of the box office and critical failure, Kaatru Veliyidai, because of how well it studied the characters in the film and the gorgeous visuals that took me away to another time. It certainly took a lot of risks and wasn’t a conventional film by most means. Chekka Chivantha Vaanam on the other hand is a very conventional film that plays it’s characters very safely and doesn’t really indulge in them as much as I would’ve wanted it to. Though the visuals here are once again spectacular with the music complimenting it beautifully, there are also plenty of scenes that just don’t work because we never really understand the characters in the first place.
The first half of this film is what I expected from a Mani film. It was beautifully shot, the music from A.R Rahman and Vairamuthu was amazing, and the story development was also intricate and interesting. There are some unneeded action sequences, like the one in the brothel, which are clearly put in there to please a larger audience, but I thought that was fine too. Certainly I didn’t expect this film to do anything that different from your regular gangster film, it doesn’t really set itself up to be anything that different either. Though what this film makes abundantly clear from the start is that this is a film filled with characters upon characters, with their own ambitions and thoughts on how to go about achieving their goals, and I loved this aspect of it. Though this starts off like a regular gangster film, these characters really make this film its own. They seem to have intricate backstories that layer this film and that drive it from scene to scene. Even moments when nothing is happening and these characters are just sitting around and talking, you begin to think about why each character is saying what they did, what they are planning to do and so on; there is a lot of tension in these sequences that remind me just how great a master filmmaker Mani Ratnam is. The acting here by Arvind Swamy, Sethupathi and the entire cast is also spot on.
However, the second half unbelievably throws all of this out of the window. It just dissolves into fight scene after fight scene. And when a film does this without fully exploring the characters that it set up before hand, the entire actions sequences just become boring. The first half of the film does a great job at introducing the characters to us but that’s it. The second half doesn’t take these characters forward from there, and you never really come to understand these characters in the way that the first half led on that you would. There is beautiful scene in the second half of the film where one of the sons is talking to his mother who is begging him to stop the violence that he is wreaking on his brother, and I didn’t feel anything because their relationship was never explored up to that point, and when we do see this scene we realize that there was so much more going on between them that was just simply never talked about. Even the love triangle between Swamy, Jyothika and Aditi Rao Hydari was really intriguing but the second half, again, just throws it away. Like what was the point of introducing all this to us if it was not going to be explored?
Not only that but you being to realize, as the bodies fall, that many of these characters that you were introduced to simply don’t matter and you don’t really feel anything. The second half throws its complex characterization out and instead focuses on fight scenes which because the characters are never really explored in any meaningful way, depreciated into mindless and boring violence. It’s all frustrating because I feel as though there was a much bigger film here, where the characters are better explored and the fight scenes are more intense, like the first half of the film led on, but as it stands this is just a messy film that never really goes anywhere.
I wish the film took more time to explore it’s characters, it would’ve ended up a much better film than what we have now. I love to see explosive action scenes, especially in gangster films like this, because each shot matters. These are not superheros, they are humans and watching them navigate through what is happening around them is extremely satisfying and can be filled with alot of tension. But this can only be achieved when you come to care or understand the characters at play. And I’m sad to say that never happened to me with this film. The first half of the film is quite amazing, and gives way to what this film could’ve been, but by the end of the second half it all just becomes like an average gangster film and a below average Mani film. It pains me to say it but that’s how I feel.
