If the lead character in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya had had a best buddy who joined him during the killing sprees, the resulting movie would have been something like Pattiyal. As in Satya, here too, a guy-next-door is a killer. Here too, he falls for a girl-next-door who does not know what he does for a living and is devastated when she finds out. Here too, his love for the girl gets in the way of his work. Here too, the antagonists are only fuzzily defined because they’re really not much more than targets to be killed. And here too, the audience is asked to empathise with protagonists who deserve no empathy because of the work they do.
But if I’ve made Pattiyal sound like a remake of Satya, it really isn’t. (It’s reportedly a remake of the Thai film Bangkok Dangerous, but that’s another matter altogether.) It’s about Kosi (Arya) and Selva (Bharath), friends who are killers for hire and who learn the hard way that violence begets violence. There’s a scene where Kosi and Selva are given something wrapped in an old Tamil newspaper; when they open the package, there’s a gleaming gun inside. That’s a good visual metaphor for this film. While we usually have movies where the material is familiar but the packaging is fresh – old wine, new bottle – it’s quite the opposite here. The material is fresh, and it’s presented through the familiar constructs of Tamil masala cinema (the love angle, the buddy-buddy angle, the hero-avenging-the-rape-of-a-loved-one angle, the hero-avenging-the-death-of-a-loved-one angle, and so on). I guess we could label it: new wine, old bottle.
Very early on, director Vishnuvardhan establishes that our heroes’ lives revolve around death. It’s not just that they kill people; they also dance at funeral processions, a seemingly minor plot detail that assumes heartbreaking proportions later on. But the mood of the movie is anything but funereal. As is only to be expected, Selva and Kosi fall in love – with Sandhya (Pooja) and Saro (Padmapriya) respectively. (Both heroines perfectly bring out the contrasting kinds of love they share with their men; Selva and Sandhya make shy eyes at each other, while Kosi and Saro can’t stop bickering for a second.) These three relationships – the heroes with the heroines, and with each other – are presented with such warmth, love and good cheer that we take these people to heart. We know Kosi and Selva are orphans brought up in the slums, so if they weren’t taught right from wrong as kids, we want them to learn soon enough so they won’t get hurt. We want them – and their movie – to have a happy end.
It says a lot about the acting and the writing that we end up caring so much. Arya is clearly a big star now. When he first appears on screen, he gets not only claps and catcalls and whistles, but… paper confetti. (That’s when you know someone’s really a big star.) He has a muscular screen presence and he’s perfectly cast as the more aggressive of the duo. Bharath, on the other hand, is the meek one. (If you’re in the mood for movie association, you could think back to the films that Kamal and Rajini starred in together, films like Moondru Mudichu or Aval Appadithaan, where Rajini was the aggressive one, Kamal the opposite.) At first I thought Bharath’s dangerously close to repeating himself so soon after the meek one he just played in Kaadhal, but he’s also deaf-mute here, and his character triggers the most unexpected twists in the screenplay. There’s a scene where he’s escorting his girl to her house, and she stops, having reached her destination, while he keeps walking, unaware that she’s no longer by his side. It’s just one of the many wonderful vignettes that show us that these killers are only human.
Could Pattiyal have been better? Sure! In a story this true to life, I could have lived without the masala sound effects. (Selva’s head turns to the right; the soundtrack goes whoosh. He looks left; whoosh again!) There’s one dreadful attempt at comedy, involving an actor who’s playing hard-to-get and who’s paid a little visit by our boys. Yuvan Shankar Raja’s songs are unimaginatively shot. (The composer gives us a sprightly number sung by his father that somehow integrates Chitra Singh’s sentimental solo from Saath Saath, Yun zindagi ki raah mein, and Aadaludan Paadal Kettu, MGR’s raucous bhangra hit from Kudiyirundha Kovil.) And there are times the story seems to forget about secondary characters – like the co-worker who harasses Saro – only to bring them back long after we’ve forgotten they even existed.
But you know the movie is working when such things don’t matter much. At the end, what Pattiyal represented to me was not just a good story affectingly told, but a pointer that Tamil cinema has come a long way in its representation of real people. Kosi and Selva are from the slums, and when Kosi faints, Selva sees a pot of water nearby. In an earlier film, he’d have cupped some water in his palm and sprinkled it on Kosi to revive him. Here, he just drops the pot on Kosi’s head. The gesture gets laughs, all right, but it also gets it right. The people here look and feel real. They’re rowdies, yes, but not one person has a scarf knotted around his neck or a big, fake mole on his cheek or wears a lungi propped up by a studded belt or speaks in that exaggerated Madras-thamizh lingo that Kamal Haasan uses in every other comedy of his. You’ll also be happy to know that not one person answers to the name of Jambu.