How long will Rajinikanth keep pulling the same trick?
Age is just a number. Script is just an excuse. To see a 64-year-old eclipse everything around him on the screen with a mere flick of trend-proof hairpiece after all these years underlines what glamour is all about.
Rajinikanth is back with Lingaa, released smartly on his birthday December 12. The makers are in no tension over whether the film will make money. Their greatest tension was well and truly over the day Superstar Rajini signed the film. For legions of fans, watching a Rajinikanth film is never about entertainment. It is a ritual that must be observed.
We use the word "star" in a rather loose context. Anyone who has faced the movie camera is dubbed a star. Dilution of the term over the years egged the bigger names in business to stamp their box-office dominance by prefixing "super" to "star", hence the word superstar was born.
For Rajini fans, mere mention of the actor as superstar will not do. So, the grandest explosion in the credits of his films is the one that announces him as "Superstar Rajini". Superstar is a term that officially demands a prefix to Rajini’s name, his films seem to suggest — just as the word Dr is tagged before a man of medicine or letters. If the idea seems as gloriously absurd as some of the stunts the man pulls off on screen, he is doing what not many other superstars would get away doing on the wrong side of 60. But then — forget fans, fan clubs and their frenzy — Rajinikanth is the only Indian celebrity with an entire website dedicated to jokes on him!
Lingaa does not deviate from what Rajini always stood for. It lets him play out a demigod image. Despite his 64 years, he essays a character half his age, romances two heroines half his age, fights a villain half his age and nearly double his size, dances, frolics, goes ballistic with dialogues and fills the screen with trademark swagger. Barring a few early films that is what Rajinikanth has been doing for nearly four decades now. Contemporary superstars who thrived on larger-than-life glamour anywhere in India have taken to character roles, joined politics, forayed television for a makeover or simply retired. Rajini inexplicably continues playing hero, revelling in a sort of mass madness that cannot be masterminded by PR tactics, one that lets him openly maintain a divide between an imperfect off-screen image and the uber-cool strut in his countless hits. How does he manage to score with the same tricks every time, despite his years?
Two reasons. First, he pretty much set the template for over-the-top entertainment so he is the original. No one does it as Rajini can. Second, we live in an era when the focus of cinema at large seems to be realism. Even commercial biggies are trying to get authentic with milieu and characters. As every other big name lunges for believability, Rajini’s bag of excesses makes him exclusive. The question is not how Rajini manages to keep doing it — pundits have stopped mulling over that bit, resorting to sustained hysteria as the only viable explanation. The question is how long he will manage to continue with the same tricks.
Rajini fans would tell you only the superstar has that answer. The man, after all, even knows Victoria’s Secret.