Thar, Saani Kaayidham and the anatomy of revenge

This week’s two major OTT releases, director Arun Matheswaran’s Saani Kaayidham in Tamil and Raj Singh Chaudhary’s Thar in Hindi and Rajasthani, bear an uncanny eerie resemblance to one another in mood and theme.In both, the wronged protagonist sets off on an accelerated sanguinary vendetta spree after they are robbed of all that’s precious to them. The ensuing bloodbath that is not meant for the squeamish at all. In fact, Saani Kaayidham starts with a warning about the volume of violence in the content, and then quickly moves to one of the most savage prologues I’ve ever seen, with a drastically deglamorized Keerthy Suresh and her accomplice played by accomplished Selvaraghavan, gruesomely torturing a woman and then calmly setting her on fire.Heroines don’t do such things in our film, do they! At least not until recently. And Keerthy after a very impressive National-award winning performance as the legendary actress Savithri in Mahanati had slipped seamlessly into playing the gauzy typical airheaded Miss Neeta to the Rajinikants and Vishal Krishnas of Telugu and Tamil cinema.In Saani Kaayidham Keerthy Suresh, on a subliminal level, seems to be avenging the sins of marginalization that all heroines suffer in the South Indian industry. As Ponni in Saani Kaayidham Keerthy gets the rare opportunity to not only shoulder a film(she did that recently in the awful Dear Sakhi too) but also to play a character that is unabashed in its mission to avenge the wrongs done to her.Like Harsh Varrdhan Kapoor’s Siddharth in the much-inferior Thar, Keerthy’s Ponni has nothing to lose because she has already lost it all. She is fearless ferocious masculinized and relentless in her quest for self-justice, the law having failed her miserably.The manner in which she goes about torturing, mutilating and killing her tormentors is bound to be interpreted by the more conservative sections of the audience as gratuitous violence. That would be a huge mistake and a grave injustice done to Ponni’s single-minded pursuit of justice.The violence is graphic, yes. But look carefully: it is all done off-camera, and hence far more effective. When Ponni is brutally assaulted and gang-raped in a seedy shack by a gang of upper-caste traders to get even with her lower-caste husband (Kanna Ravi), the camera focuses on the empowered drunken ugly faces of her attackers as one by one they troop in to first hit her viciously and repeatedly and then take turns one, raping her.Throughout all this, we don’t see Ponni in camera range. We only hear her moans and screams of the unimaginable indescribable pain. The effect on the audience is chilling and nerve-wracking. But there is also a nagging question in the audiences’ minds. Why are we being shown the process of Ponni’s brutalization over and over again?If it is unbearable, then it is meant to be that way. Director Arun Matheswaran wants us to experience every wince of Ponni’s violation, humiliation and pain without actually showing any of the violence onscreen. I remember Shekhar Kapoor telling me about Phoolan’s gang rape in Bandit Queen that he wanted to focus on the male predator’s bare body rather than on the woman to make the act repulsive. In Saani Kaayidham the act of sexual violation is repugnant, revolting so that when Ponni strikes back with the same barbarism we are attuned to her savage state of mind. When in the rites of retribution Ponni tortures her adversaries to death — she even pours acid over their private parts—we don’t see her victims. We only hear their cries of pain. Music to our ears…All through this stunning treatise on injustice and vendetta, Keethy Suresh stands tall with a raging performance. Her lengthy one-shot monologue where she laments on how her little daughter’s body must have hurt when she was burnt alive, could easily have become an exercise in showmanship. Unlike Uma Thurman in Kill Bill or Dimple Kapadia in Zakhmi Sher, Keerthy Suresh is not in this to win awards. She is committed to standing up for the disempowered. In this, she has two allies, her co-star Selvaraghavan and cinematographer Yamini Yangnamurthy. Thar too is shot, and shot feelingly, by a female cinematographer Shreya Dev Dubey. Regrettably, she is not given much to mull over beyond a metaphorical barren and bleak landscape which is meant to typify the characters’ state of mind. Sad to say, the brutal conflicts buttressed by a passionate craving for revenge, are never quite convincing or even half as compelling as they are in Saani Kaayidham. If we don’t feel much for Harsh Varrdhan Kapor’s Siddharth it is because he distances himself from the audience in a stylish Brechtian fashion. This is noir cinema served up piping hot for festival audiences. The silent sullen brooder scarcely registers his pain by any other method except by perpetrating brutal violence on his wrongdoers.We see Siddharth’s pain. But we don’t feel it the way we do for Ponni in Saani Kaayidham.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.Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.