C Prem Kumar's Meiyazhagan Is A Beauty To Behold

IN JR MOEHRINGER'S MEMOIR The Tender Bar, there is a passage about the meaningless quest for plots in books. Or in any form of storytelling. It talks about sucking the joy out of a medium, be it a book or a film. Moehringer goes on to say that every story is about emotions, love, death and pain. It is about words — and ultimately everything “is about man dealing with life”. At some point in the future, someone is bound to annoy this writer by asking for the plot of C Prem Kumar’s Meiyazhagan. What is the story of Meiyazhagan, the filmmaker’s follow-up to 2018’s 96? What is the plot? After a long time in Tamil mainstream cinema, someone’s made a plotless film. Meiyazhagan is about all that—love, loss, pain and longing. It is about a man dealing with life—past and present. Nothing more. And as the title suggests, it is a beauty to behold.

A lot of Meiyazhagan is about listening. The opening scene portends weighty ramifications but what we see is so airy and light that you can crumble it to pieces of grace. It sets the tone of this film, tuning our registers just right for what’s to come. A family is preparing to move from their home in Thanjavur to the city of Madras in 1996, leaving and losing everything behind. The young man of the family, Arulmozhi (Arvind Swami; Saran Sakthi playing the younger Arul), cannot bear to leave but he must. If we listen, we can notice that he not only leaves his heart and soul, that is the house, but also something more personal and tangible. A yearning ballad from Govind Vasantha—Poren Naa Poren—gives wings to Prem Kumar’s writing, as if the house is singing to the departing Arul in Kamal Haasan’s voice. But it is not the house, it is something else. We just need to listen carefully.

We listen to one of Arul’s several cousins who has about three scenes. Arul travels to his hometown of Needamangalam for his sister’s wedding. It is 2018 and he is returning home after twenty-two years just to appease his sister. He would have otherwise never set foot on these parts again. He doesn’t plan to stay the night to attend the wedding, only long enough to hand over the present at the reception. This cousin is the first to recognise him. She is overjoyed, comes over to him, asks after him and briefly shares stories about her painful married life. She adds, with that ubiquitous tinge of yearning again, that her life might have been better if she and Arul had gotten married, as intended, as per family tradition if the families had stayed together. But these are expressions and moments you don’t see in real life often, much less in recent Tamil cinema. A middle-aged woman expressing a note of regret in as many words to her middle-aged cousin. It is sad and beautiful; it adds baggage to what Arul walked away from in 1996.

Most of all, we listen to Karthi’s stories and ramblings that make up most of Meiyazhagan. Karthi plays this gregarious young man that Arul cannot recognise, he claims he spent the 1994 summer holidays in Arul’s house, but Arul has no recollection. He is Arul’s chaperone at the wedding reception (so let’s refer to him as chaperone) and calls Arul 'athaan'. The chaperone has endless stories and anecdotes—from the recent past, their childhood, the time of civil war and a fight for a homeland, and even the historic past of kings and conquerors. We listen to all of them. The film comes alive right from the opening scene, but it blooms into a living breathing multicellular organism in the second half. This is not the pitter-patter conversational laser tag between two people, it is mostly just the chaperone delivering a soliloquy, sober at first and inebriated later into the night. We meet these characters in cinema, those terribly joyous ones are too happy-go-lucky and come across as mawkish and corny. Or they suffer from some terminal illness or have a tragic past. But Prem Kumar is not one for such cliches. What we see and hear is what we get with the man played by Karthi. And, boy, do we get a lot!

We listen to the chaperone’s childhood stories, what excited him the most, what accompanied him through good times and bad. Arul never shares his side of the story; he is a passive listener like us but only on the outside. The insides meet with a blitzkrieg of emotions as we hear stories of kings, wars, of Eelam struggle and Sterlite protests. It is not Prem Kumar centring politics or making statements but simply presenting the varied dimensions of a man. Through listening, we learn about the chaperone as a family man, as a lovable rogue, as one with a deep sense of history and identity, as an activist, as a spiritual seeker, as a righteous gentleman and most of all, as a loving human being. This growing affinity gnaws at Arul, the Arul who claims to love all, one who feeds birds on his terrace in Madras, one whose family includes his cats and dogs. This is why an earlier scene between Arul and his sister at her reception is played at a heightened level of drama. Arul assumed that to be the pinnacle of love, but, within a few hours, he encounters something unimaginable and bizarre in Karthi, who seems to contain boundless and multitudes of compassion for all forms. He brushes away the snake in his backyard as just another member of his house, even referring to it as the older tenant.

Karthi’s performance is an immense balancing act—the latent enthusiasm, the burst of forceful energy and the gift of the gab, while remaining vulnerable to events around him. When he is drunk, we learn what keeps him awake at night, sometimes the most important tell in a man. Arvind Swami plays Arul as a man with pride and longing, one who might be set in his ways after losing a lot at a young age but remaining teachable through it all. It is what pulls him back to his chaperone in the end. They share intangible love for some tangible things. Like a house. Like a temple. Like people. Like the shots of temples, churches and public spaces that are littered throughout the film. They are men who lean stronger towards their softer side. These are the kind of men Tamil cinema needs now. This is also the kind of movie Tamil cinema needs now. And for that, Meiyazhagan will forever remain that gorgeous house that Prem Kumar built.