Over five minutes, a trembling long shot opens Viduthalai Part 1. A terrorist outfit, Makkal Padai or the People’s Army, has bombed a train because the government is bringing mining corporations into the mountains — to hack it for profits that never trickles down to the people whose land is hollowed out. This five-minute shot takes us through the debris of the explosion an hour after it has taken place. The police are scurrying, with evacuations still in progress, the politician has arrived, stretchers roving, the women mourning, the men crippled. A journalist who begins photographing the tragedy ends up becoming one of the volunteers helping evacuate a child. All hands on deck. The camera loops into and out of compartments, smoothly sliding through the aisles, then agitatedly shaking through, swirling through the scene, panning over conversations, sliding over heights, moving horizontally and vertically with just as much lubricated ease. The shot ends with a train compartment that is precariously dangling over the bridge, collapsing into the ground in slow motion. How do you know it is slow-motion? This isn’t apparent. You have to see the stretched motion of the people gathered around to figure, such is the subtle slowing down of time.
When we feel awe and when we feel terror — how different are these feelings? Both leave us in this asphyxiating, wide eyed, submissive posture. Smartly, then, writer and director Vetrimaaran evokes awe in us while depicting terror on screen. It is a masterclass in how cinema can approximate the emotional landscape of what it is showing, in us, the audience.
To make us feel the thud of a slap, Vetrimaaran will have a shot of a jeep’s door being shut, followed by a sharp cut to the slap. The suddenness of the cut, the timber of both the metallic slam and the skinned slap side by side creates a moment of jerking violence. This is style used as substance, to a point where you are unable, unwilling to distinguish between the two.
Viduthalai, based on a Jeymohan short story, is cinema, pure and distilled. It sharply, smartly evokes what the characters are going through using cinematic language and the grammar of a shot. It is Vetrimaaran’s finest work yet, taking the sophistication of Visaranai, the density of Aadukalam and Vada Chennai, and the masala grammar of Asuran, and creating its own grammar of violence — one that isn’t gratuitous but casual and crippling.
Suri plays Kumeresan, a kind-hearted police officer, capable of both seeing and fighting for goodness. He has been sent to the dense, forested mountains as a driver. The officers are all recruited as part of “Ghost Hunt” — similar to the Operation Green Hunt that the Chhattisgarh police officers carried to violently clamp down on Maoists. This Ghost Hunt is trying to pin down Perumal (Vijay Sethupathi), the man behind Makkal Padai. The police looking for him don’t even know how he looks. Only that he is called “Vadhiyar” because he used to teach and “Ghost” because he is just as slippery and elusive. The film’s frame is Kumeresan narrating his life to his mother through a letter.
The letter unfolds Kumaresan’s gradual recognition of not just the violence of his uniform, but how easy it is to slip into it. When you are pinned against the wall, the choice is either to take a life or give yours up. Which life, then, is more valuable, more valid? Kumaresan falls in love with Tamizharasi (Bhavani Sre), a girl from one of the nearby villages, and suddenly his beliefs — in law and order, in love, in violence — are tested. The same flashback, of a police station being plundered and bludgeoned by Perumal, is narrated twice, the second twisting the first.
This is part one of a two-part epic. The focus here, the journey here is not that of Perumal, but of Kumaresan. Kumaresan isn’t a hero as much as a righteous, wide eyed spectator. When, in a moment of heroism towards the end, he jumps across rooftops, we see how the tile crumbles under his weight, how they slip, how he stumbles, crouches. It is heroism that we can believe in, not necessarily aspire for. Because Vetrimaaran asks provocatively — what are the tragedies we must experience in order to become heroes? What kind of a broken world this is that needs a hero.
This film, like Vetrimaaran’s filmography, is entirely unsympathetic to the police. The police is a moral quicksand, nothing worthy of kindness or tenderness survives its sludge. Gautham Vasudev Menon, who plays a higher ranked officer, is a portrait of power. One that starts as empowering, endearing, polished, and ends as desperate, opportunistic, and violent. That he never raises his voice, never grins in villainy, never speaks in villainy, does not mean he isn’t capable of being a villain. Such is the deadening, flattening tendency of the police force. So Kumaresan is eventually called by his number “1563” and not his name when being referred to. The terrorists, on the other hand, are really rebels fighting for justice, for Viduthalai, freedom. They are, what Arundhati Roy, calls Gandhians With Guns. In one moment, Perumal says that violence isn’t their language. That it is one they were forced to adopt. He is careful about the lives of villages. What about the train accident he orchestrated, then, killing and maiming ordinary people? This, Vetrimaaran leaves for Part Two.
Unfussy about a scene lingering, Vetrimaaran will cut away from a moment before its impact is even felt, because the impact of it is not in its festering but in its unrelentingness. That this violence will keep happening, there is no point mourning so forcefully for life that is so dispensable. To be fair, there is something unkempt and unpolished about his films, too, something we are used to in the rushed releases of his films. The dubbing is hastily done. The color corrections keep shifting, from dryness to wetness of color. Then, there is the animated, rushed prologue that hurls you into his film as much as holds your hand into it, a dizzying rush of details, of context, of information — the dense scaffolding of a broken world that Vetrimaaran wants us to squeeze and squirm through.
