Why the Tamil film Visaaranai must be watched
Tamil filmmaker Vetri Maaran's new film, Visaaranai (Interrogation), produced by the star of his first two films Dhanush, is one whose premise doesn't seem extraordinary on first glance. Four young men are wrongly arrested by the police. The men are from Tamil Nadu; working in Andhra Pradesh, a region which, as the highly economical opening portions of the movie inform us, is highly hostile towards Tamil-speaking people.
The protagonist Pandi's (played by Dinesh) boss, a provision store owner, is threatened that he will be arrested too if his employee doesn't confess to the charge against him. The cops are well aware that the charge, that of a high profile case of robbery which involved about a million rupees, is a false one; but want to make these men confess because there's pressure from the politicians to solve the case quickly: as is natural when the robbed party is an influential and powerful one.
Why these men? Their very description makes them utterly disposable individuals in the eyes to those who exploit them. It is revealed that they have no families to bail them out. They are homeless, do meager jobs by the day and sleep at a public garden at night (ie don't even have an official address.) Given the near anonymous nature of their jobs, no one is likely to stand up for them.
Visaaranai is a fictionalised account of a real life story, based on the novel Lock Up by M Chandrakumar, an autorickshaw driver in Coimbatore and one of the real-life counterparts of the characters, who was evidently proud when he attended the premiere of Visaaranai at the 2015 edition of the Venice Film Festival, where the film won the Amnesty International Italia Award.
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The premise is sure to inspire intrigue especially when one is aware of the fact that most of this really did happen. But frankly, many of such films - which attempt to portray how the system can be unsparingly cruel or to present an against-all-odds account of an individual's struggle against the system - fall prey to art house clichés of the subgenre; sometimes turning an exploitative gaze towards the misery of their characters (as the recent film The Silent Heroes did its hearing impaired protagonists), sometimes going for convenient labelling of certain characters as bad and pandering to those seeking quick-fix answers to incredibly complex questions (see: Talvar, which squarely shifts the blame onto certain characters who are really just hollow archetypes - the buffoonish cop, the sophisticated-looking but rotten from within director of the investigation bureau.)
Visaaranai breathes new air into the genre by constantly shifting the audience's sympathies between characters. It's easy to point out the basic difference which distinguishes Visaaranai from something like Talvar - the latter is a spiteful film which places certain characters (and the audience) above others, hastily reaching at a conclusion which instantly demonises the so-called "system", the former a film of immense humaneness. It's worth noting that the "bad" guys in Visaaranai (scare quotes because the film never asks us to consider some guys bad and others good) commit far more ghastly acts than those in Talvar - at least one bad guy in the latter is a complete idiot and causes harm to others due to blithe negligence; whereas the perpetrators of the injustice and violence in Visaaranai almost always do it intentionally.
The masterstroke on Vetri Maaran's part is that he splits the story down middle into two visually and thematically contrasting halves. In the first one, the protagonist is nothing but a hapless and helpless victim of the system, essentially a puppet not exactly passive but with next to zero agency and control on things; while in the second half, the same protagonist becomes a complicit in precisely the same sort of ploy which he was a victim of. By having the same character traverse the whole scope of the spectrum, the film skillfully achieves something much more profound than simple name calling.
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This is not Pandi's story alone, and the Tamil Nadu cop Muthuvel figures importantly in the film's balancing act of perspective. Inspector Muthuvel is the person who, while on a small assignment in Andhra Pradesh, helps rescue Pandi and his three companions from the lock up. There's a whole lot of moral ambiguity here because what Muthuvel later resorts to do is more or less similar to what the Andhra cop does to our band of protagonists. One is made to consider the possibility that the cruel Andhra cop may well be doing what he thinks is necessary, not for selfishness but for lack of choice. The empathetic worldview of the film drives our attention to the strong possibility and the big shot, who was robbed isn't aware that innocent men are being implicated for him.
The film is aided by excellent sound design and cinematography. Particularly of note is its use of light and shadow to create an incredibly immersive atmosphere in the first half and the striking lack thereof in the portions after the interval.
More importantly, though, while very much a film about the cruelty of the system, Visaaranai does not reduce its conflict to an "us-versus-them" game. It's a film that understands that the "system" is nothing else but people.