What is Kamal Haasan doing in politics? He is a born actor, always was and will be… no two ways about it. Vikram which Lokesh Kanagaraj, Tamil Nadu’s answer to Guy Ritchie, directs for Kamal Haasan. The film is a celebration of aggression where the characters are drug lords and drug busters.
And what a stupendous outing into the dark world of crime and deceit this is! Vikram hits you hard in the guts. Its pelting violence and dark somber plunges into the world of despicable drug dealers secrete a wealth of mischievous innuendos which you are free to miss at your own risk.
Take, for example, the sequence where Sethupathi’s villainous character Chandan tries to escape arrest while Awaara hoon plays in the background. Of course, the song meant something very different from what Vijay Sethupathi represents. But really, who cares, as long as the villain knows what he wants. But does he?
There is a sense of spiralling senseless drama about Vikram, trigger-controlled by a director Kanagaraj who seems to know exactly how to control Kamal’s natural scene-stealing tactics. Kanagaraj lets Kamal Haasan do his own thing, and that includes an item song at the prelude which if I am not mistaken, Kamal sings himself.
But then here’s the thing. Soon after the self-indulgent song-and-dance, Kamal disappears, yes disappears from his own film. Of course, he makes a spectacular comeback for the bloody dusty deadly lengthy and rousing climax where he teams up with an infant to destroy villain Vijay Sethupathi’s evil empire.
It is an outrageous cinematic scheme, catapulted to credibility by some incredible actors—not only the titanic triumvirate of Kamal Haasan, Fahadh Faasil and Vijay Sethupathi but also some other marvellously kinetic supporting actors—and the coiling-recoiling twists and turns in the plot(this is one helluva brilliant screenplay, Lokesh Kanagaraj) that bully us the audience into helpless submission, persuading us to pardon the plot’s patently purple patches, such as a shoutout at a wedding which goes on and on while the wedding cooks sing a song in praise of mutton biryani.
When Vikram is not busy acting weird, it is a brilliant piece of cinema, saturated in unstoppable blood and vinegary violence; the bursts of anger are recorded with a self-pleasuring smugness. There is this whole fight where a female character whom we thought to be a simple straightlaced matriarch, bursts out in a feast of fury. Go ahead, applaud.
Mata Hari apart, there are no female characters in Vikram except the two women in the wonderful Fahadh Faasil’s life, one his wife (Gayathrie Shankar) and the other a prostitute (played by the scene-stealing Maya Krishnan) whom Fahadh visits just hours before his wedding… no-no, he doesn’t meet the sex worker for sex.
Nothing is that simple in Vikram. And if you are not a vigilant spectator you will miss a lot of the plot’s inner world inhabited by characters so devoid of a central core of self-worth that they appear to be nothing more than specks of nothingness in a universe infested with crime.
Fahadh Faasil is the Citizen Kane-styled hero of the plot. He plays a member of an extra-constitutional organization appointed to apprehend criminals when all fails. Like the investigative journalist in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane who sets out to piece together the life of a man who is declared dead, Fahadh’s Amar is on a mission to relive the dead person’s absurdly restless life.
Faasil’s fettered fury runs through the film’s robust veins irrigating its bloodied arteries. This is a film of great style and relatively subdued substance with Girish Gangadharan’s cinematography making almost every frame look like the storm before the calm. Except that the calm never comes.
The fidgety mode of storytelling is not only fascinating, but it also suits the pointedly portrayed sense of purposelessness that pervades the washed-up people in Vikram; none more so than Kamal Haasan’s titular character who has only one reason to live.
And that’s where the infant comes in.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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by Subhash K Jha
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