Actor Prakashraj, who earns his cheques by hamming it up as villain or policeman, runs a production house that rolls out feel-good films about middle-class families. Other movies take the best of mainstream and parallel cinema and manage to be entertaining as well as thought-provoking.
What makes these films special is the casting of relatively unknown actors, the realistic settings, the intelligent integration of songs and dances into the plots, and the attention given to camerawork and production design. There have been countless Tamil movies about men being chased with sickles and choppers through paddy fields for falling in love with high-born women. They are set in the Tamil heartland (Paruthiveeran in a village, Subramaniapuram in Madurai) and are about young and aimless men who deal with forbidden love, violence and caste politics.
Both films belong to what I call the “rowdy genre".
A wide-ranging interview with the director M.Among the more interesting Tamil films in recent years are Ameer Sultan’s Paruthiveeran and Sasikumar’s Subramaniapuram. Essays by Preminda Jacob, Constantine Nakassis, Anand Pandian, and Baradwaj Rangan on the film’s cinematic context and social impact. Never-before-seen photos from the shooting of the film. Galleries of full-colour film stills and poster. A gripping English translation of the screenplay. Made on a tiny budget by a first-time director and a cast of newcomers, Subramaniyapuram was a smash hit with audiences all over South India-from the big cities to the villages-and has been cited as a major influence by some of India’s most respected filmmakers. A tale of friendship, betrayal, love and revenge set in Madurai in the early 1980s, the film pioneered a new, gritty aesthetic in Tamil movies that caught the attention of film lovers around the world. When Subramaniyapuram was released in 2008, it cut through the ostentatious glitz of mainstream Indian cinema like a machete.
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