Films like Vanangaan make you wonder if a directorial signature can be a double-edged sword. In the case of filmmaker Bala, it’s harder to enter the screens without any presumptions about the experience that awaits you. In the ten feature films he has made till now, Bala has staunchly stuck to his themes and archetypes — his stories pivot around the most marginalised, downtrodden communities, his lens largely meant to appeal to your sympathies; his heroes are outcasts, often with a violent streak, unleashing themselves for the only familial relationship that gives them something resembling meaning.
But without solid reasoning, purpose, and backing from the writing, archetypes become stereotypes, and Bala’s recent works like Tharai Thappattai and Naachiyaar have been suffering from both a decay of purpose and a thinning of plot. Vanangaan, which was expected to be Bala’s return to form, and much hyped given the previous involvement of a superstar, too falls victim to this.
This time, Bala takes you to the coasts of Kaniyakumari to tell the story of two orphaned souls. With crowded streets and beaches, the town comes alive with tourists and locals, and there’s communal harmony (but you are asked to overlook a racist remark about Chinese tourists that’s passed under the guise of a joke).
Kottee (Arun Vijay; gives his all in a career-defining role), a deaf and speech-impaired man, does many small jobs to look after himself and his sister, Devi (Ridha), who works as a tattoo artist. Their well-wishers include a Church priest (Balasivaji; there’s a hilarious jab at his resemblance to Sivaji Ganesan), Tina (Roshni Prakash), a travel guide, and her London-obsessed parents. Comedy hasn’t been Bala’s strong suit, and scenes that set up these characters and their dynamics test you, especially Roshni’s annoyingly animated performance as Tina (Remember Varalaxmi from Tharai Thappattai? This is just a notch below that). Tina is head-over-heels in love with Kottee. But you wonder what she sees in him. This is a man who, in their very first scene, jovially hits her as a retort for teasing him. We have seen casual violence among couples in films before, but here, she is left bleeding, and we are asked to take this problematic trait as a joke! Beyond political correctness, this becomes a huge blotch in writing, adding inconsistency to Kottee’s and Tina’s characters. More on Kottee later, but Tina is an educated woman with enough agency, someone who wouldn’t take this as a joke but as a problem.
Kottee of course has his own truckloads of problems. Depicted as a do-gooder who looks after the town folks, he is the typical crusader of justice who struggles to hold himself back at the sight of atrocities. The matter goes out of hand when he ransacks an illegal liquor shop and fries the owner’s face with a hot pan. To ensure he stays disciplined and out of trouble, Kottee’s well-wishers get him a day job at a special home for the underprivileged.
With such limited characters and spaces, it is easy to guess what follows next. A troublemaker with no financial or political support, a female dependent family member, and a home for the underprivileged. Does something morose happen to Devi, unleashing Kottee in a gory quest for revenge? Think worse, because Bala’s inclination to go after our weak hearts with spine-chilling situations knows no bounds here. Three men enter the restroom at the underprivileged home, to feast their eyes on the blind young women. As if showing these women enter the open bathing stalls and men looking in isn’t enough, Bala’s camera shows them taking off their clothes, reaching a voyeuristic peak to show them applying soap on their hips (!!). It’s a scene that deserves brickbats for its insensitive staging.
What follows is a mess, and how our crusader of justice goes about it is confusingly off-character and dim-witted. Sure, he isn’t going to the police — his disregard for the justice system is shown right in the beginning — but something must have happened for this god-fearing kind man to turn into this beast, isn’t it? You await a flashback that shows the travesties he must have gone through, or the laththi marks that make him regard a police station and a liquor bar as the same. Such character details are lost in the wind, and so is the scope to find any justification for why he does what he does in the later half of the story when his actions fail his own family.
Ridha, Roshni Prakash, and Balasivaji in a still from ‘Vanangaan’
| Photo Credit:
V House Productions/YouTube
A major setback for Vanangaan is the lack of a strong antagonist; you get nothing in seeing a typical vigilante easily take down one-dimensional perverts. The bigger issue is how the film uses the plight of these underprivileged women as mere pawns to milk our sympathies. A problematic aspect of Bala’s films is the gaze; you can’t shake the feeling if the filmmaker, in claiming to document harsh realities, wields a voyeuristic lens himself, demanding sympathies with his close-ups of the neglected social groups. Even if you miss it in an unhinged entry like Naan Kadavul, the malnourished plot of Vanangaan offers no such respite.
This is also why you feel hardly impressed by the climax, a typical Bala scene. Vanangaan has a layer that speaks about how the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami are still searching for what they lost, literally and metaphorically. In a different film, the climax would have reminded you of the Bala of the Nandhaa days. In Vanangaan, the effect withers soon, as does a commendable cameo by Mysskin.
It’s time for Bala to take a conscious step towards reinventing his cinema. In today’s Tamil cinema, one enriched by his school of cinema in the 2000s, mere shock value goes nowhere.
Vanangaan is currently running in theatres
Published – January 10, 2025 07:52 pm IST
Tamil cinema
/
Indian cinema
