A great director and a great actor that are Vetrimaaran and Vijay Sethupathi are capable of making a mess together.
The fault really doesn’t lie with the Star. How is Sethupathi to blame if director Vetrimaaran, in all his wisdom, decided to split Viduthalai into two parts due to the inordinate length of the original content?
Director Vetrimaaran is to Tamil cinema what Anurag Kashyap tries to be for Hindi cinema. His hard-hitting, raw, and blunt indictment of a corrupt and insensitive establishment has often labelled Vetrimaaran a rebel with a cause.
With Vidhuthalai Part 2 now streaming on Amazon, I really feel it’s time for a pause. We have seen enough police brutality and social inequality in Vetrimaaran’s cinema. In Vidhuthalai, a lot of it appears redundant, not in the social but in the cinematic context. In how many ways can the director show tribals being showered with lathi blows by cops who seem to enjoy hearing the downtrodden whimpering and shrieking in pain?
In Vetrimaaran’s Visaranai (2016), police torture was carried to the extreme. The audience felt so immersed in the lockup torture it felt as if we had committed some unknown crime.
This is exactly what Vetrimaran wants us to feel while watching tribals from the forests being picked up and thrashed mercilessly. The women are stripped and vilified. It all begins to seem more oppressive than immersive after a while. It is almost a homage to homicide than a mirror image of a society based on inequality.
The one bright spark in the dark is the constable Kumaresan, played with splendid self-deprecatory energy by Soori, who is the lone sheep among the howling wolves of the task force sent into the jungle to nab the Naxals of the 1980s. Kumaresan has a genuine aversion to torture and brutality. Kumaresan is what the director of Vetrimaaran is. But neither can hide away from the fascism generated by inequality.
Vetrimaaran wants us, the spectators, to see and hear every thwack of the lathi on the disempowered back. In Viduthalai, he brings the women into the police-sanctioned torture chamber. The rites of police excesses on screen are meant to shame not so much the victims of torture on screen as us, the mute spectators.
Viduthalai is unrelentingly violent. It starts with a lengthy, stylish one-shot sequence of a train bombing and ends with a stretched-out shootout in which the most wanted leader of the People’s Army, Perumal(Vijay Sethupathi), is apprehended.
I had hoped this would end the orgy of police torture and that this time Vetrimaaran would focus more on the emotions than the thwacks. Woefully, Part 2 of Vidhuthalai is more of the same torture for the characters and for us. The relentless cast-based violence is hard to bear. After a point, it all seems redundant.
This time, Perumal is being taken through the thick jungles by the police while he narrates his story of the battle against cast oppression to the cops, who seem reluctant to listen to his tortuous tales. There is also his marriage to Malalaxmi (Manju Warrier), which scarcely registers in the brutal brouhaha.
Sethupathi, an actor of fathomless skills, is restricted by the righteous plot. Sometimes, tackling oppression can itself be oppressive. There is no dearth of “authentic violence” in Viduthalai. But it all seems more like a facsimile of real oppression, screaming, ranting high decibel background score and all, than the real thing.
