Thoughts on Ponniyin Selvan (PS) - 1

 Ponniyin Selvan (PS) – 1 – Ratnam’s eloquently fallible retelling of epic literature.

Mani Ratnam’s unending attempts to create a cinematic rendition of Tamil Literature’s Ponniyin Selvan have finally come to fruition after 2 failed attempts across several decades. I haven’t read the novel which spans 5 books and has its epic heart at the right place by starting off with the line “Let’s go back a century every second and cross a millennium. After 10 seconds, we enter the Chola Dynasty”. Quite recognisably challenging to take this subject to the screen, Mani Ratnam mostly succeeds in the daunting task of cinematically telling the first half of the novel. Why mostly? 

The intimidating task to bring a novel (which is utterly dense in breadth and depth) to the world of cinema always has an inevitable sacrifice to regress the story. Ratnam said that he would be sticking to the core thread, which is, Vandiyadevan’s journey as an agent as well as a messenger in reticently knowing and spreading the word of internal conflicts that have risen in the Chola empire, to the Sundara Chola’s family ( Him and his 3 successors Adithya Karikalan, Kundavai, Arun Mozhi). It is through this long journey of receiving secrets and sending some, that his character crosses paths with not only Sundara Chola’s family but also a multitude of other characters, most notably Nandini (Centre for the charlatan and deceptive plans within the kingdom), Poonguzhali (the Jalasakhi a.k.a Samudra Kumari) and Azhwarkadiyan Nambi (the official Chola spy, always with a Vaishnava alias).

The retrograding of Kalki’s Literature is both a boon and a bane for the form it took under Ratnam’s vision. Firstly, I’ll discuss the boon. Mani Ratnam’s stories mostly are based on singular-simpler ideas, and universal themes, which with his gallantry direction would take shape into heart-melting cinema. His oeuvre was more on evoking naturalistic scenes, both in terms of human emotions and inanimate objects. In contrast, PS -1 is rather a dense, less abstract film with multiple-complex emotions filling a scene at the same time. Ratnam thankfully tantamounts to the dramatic richness of the original material and adroitly condenses it into a 2.5 hr film. Something that justifies Ratnam’s obsession with this project. The result is a rather fast-paced, scene after scene of grey, unpredictable characters conversing in an immersive period drama. In short, Mani Ratnam again proves his mastery over direction, especially when he conceives the character's interactions.

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Notice how Vandiyadevan is always looked down upon as the representative of an oppressed cast while introducing himself to other central characters. Except, when Kundavai herself showers some witty praises upon Vandiyadevan even before he could spell his name to her, explaining the quixotically romantic relationship they might be into, shortly. The best scenes always include Kundavai, Nandini or Vandiyadevan. The subtle, pugnacious, eye-to-eye face-off between Kundavai and Nandini and an almost mythical glimpse that Vandiyaven gets of Nandini the first time they meet, show how sumptuously layered the characters and the story is written. The profuse drama lifts more than half the dramatic weight on screen.

Ravi Varman’s tinted, flaring cinematography adds to this grandiloquent writing, a certain modish, sassy visual aesthetic. The initial thought to represent the era in Kurosawa-Esque symmetric yet imperfect frames brings an artistic finesse of International standard as the visuals pop and glide with colour like a painting with a fine grunge texture around the corners. The camera moves in circles, rake focuses, mirrors, smoothly pans out from a scene in the background to a scene in the foreground and noticeably shakes to show the emotional equation between the characters and also provide an engrossing experience as the scene plays out.

Adithya Karikalan (pulled off with ease by Vikram) gets introduced emerging from a cloud of mist indicating his mindset to escape from the mythical and unfathomable spell Nandini has cast over his bruised heart by just her mere presence in his life. During the pre-interval scene, as Adithya starts explaining the reason for his aching heart and why he only fights to forget Nandini, notice how the handheld camera starts swooning from the left to right along with zooming in and out over a mid-close of Vikram's face which gets covered in the background with smoke and mist. It shows how his head spins from the mere thought of Nandini as he loses his vision due to the thick clouds that start covering him the moment he remembers her. Kundavai gets introduced with a silhouette, her hair bow covering the sun, depicting a lionised, halo effect towards her officious demeanour. The jewellery over her bow, which has lines radially extending out of a central diamond, also resembles the sun-like exalting character she is. Nandini, who sort of coexists with Aishwarya Rai’s star persona, kind of provides an anti-thesis to Kundavai’s political reign as her enigmatic actions and presence is visually shown with her face gets heavily basked by soft light. While Kundavai forms a halo around her head with a naturalistic light from the sun, Nandini pulls all the light towards her to create a pink monochromatic glow to herself, artificially and morosely lighting the place around her. Call that glowing beauty with a rather acquisitive brain because even Kundavai mentions to Nandini, that she has carefully sucked all the beauty of Thanjavur into her. Even her introduction scene has a converging curtain, almost stopping the sun behind her and Vandiyadevan in front, to catch a glimpse. These converging, half-framed shots extend to a few more scenes between Vandiyadevan and Nandini signifying that he could only see the artificial seduction that the beauty is generating and never look beyond, understanding her evil intentions. 

Thota Tharani’s production design displays wonderful diversity concerning the geography that the story expands, something rarely found in today’s period dramas. There’s always a Tyndal effect within the spaces with only partial lighting from the sun, resembling the state of unsettling peace and still a fragmentary influence of Sundara Chola’s successors as the rulers of the Chola Kingdom. 

 

The inevitable sacrifice discussed earlier ebbing the vastness of the book for fitting it into a 2.5hr film led also to some revealing problems in the movie. The biggest bane of the film is the loss of coherence within the screenplay. This is utterly revealing in the last 1 hr of the film where the unabashed edit by Sreekar Prasad cuts down the florid detailing which establishes each character's motives and actions. To cover the content faster, instead of taking 10 scenes to establish the dynamics of each character, revelation and the consequences, the synoptically edited latter half takes just 2 scenes to largely stride past a character’s action directly to the consequence without any backstory to justify it. Also, the other alternative approach taken to avoid such sudden jumps is to vociferously dump pages of information to get through the content quickly. This problem is not limited to the second half but is evident in the entire film because we don’t get the time to breathe in and comprehend the twists which could generate proper curiosity that only comes from a solid understanding and connection with the story. While the movie is never sluggish, it also never sinks in.

Editing by Sreekar Prasad (coincidentally he won a National Award on the day of PS-1 release), along with creating problems mentioned before, also implicitly contains some distracting errings. The decision to curtail the movie to less than 3hrs created an Emotional Discontinuity of the characters as mentioned before. The fight sequences are shot in a realistic, “amidst the characters” fashion feel giddy as the swords swing across the screen, people start falling over us and blood gets splashed on our faces. Though effective in creating the Kurosawa-Esque expedient atmosphere in war and fight sequences, Ravi Varman’s close-ups should have been balanced with the wides, so that the positioning of the actors and the impact of the punches and hits could have been felt without a subconscious confusion that got by having extensively used close-ups through editing. Similar to Ratnam’s previous outing Chekka Chivantha Vaanam, the scenes here have been cross-cut to speed up the proceedings, which sometimes creates a jarring effect as the core idea between each scene is recognisably different. The same goes with the songs too.

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AR Rahman’s music is completely underutilised. Again, a repercussion of cutting down the run time to below 3hrs. The songs composed by Rahman are on average 4 mins long, which surprisingly is inimically butchered to about 1-1.5 min by cross-cutting their starts with scenes and ending the pieces mid-way. The song “Sye”  (“Sol” in Tamil) which creates a reflection of the inner turmoil of Kundavai about her love for Vandiyadevan is a testament to Rahman’s genius as he combines the periodic drop-ticking sound with pestering ask or tease by Vanaathi as she is anxious in knowing Kundavai’s feelings. Unfortunately, the song is edited out of the film and the same is the case with the Nataraja score that we heard in the trailer. Rahman extends the same adroitness to his background score for all the scenes except the fight sequences. The one which stayed with me was the shrill, extending hymn for Nandini which rises and flats out unpredictably (it’s in the last shot of the trailer). The Hindustani fusion of its alaap with tabla and contemporary beats that accentuate the face-off between Kundavai and Nandini also is a memorable score.

In a nutshell, PS-1’s second half stands vitiated in comparison to the sumptuously dramatic first half where rather than action sequences and VFX (rendered poorly), the scenes are fundamentally conversations, staged beautifully and played by the strength of Mani Ratnam. In the last 40 mins of the film, where the scenes feel rushed to ultimately reach the action-filled climax that takes on a ship amidst the tempestuous Indian Ocean, the episode took down all the wild energy that was created from the world-building. With a poor background score and choppy editing along with cursory VFX, the climax is a big letdown. Though the movie ends on a suspenseful note along with an arresting twist to mount up excitement for the second half, the movie could have helped with a few more scenes to show how the untimely death caused destructive ripples across the Chola Kingdom.

Clearly, Ratnam has to learn from Baahubali Director Rajamouli who let the movie stay with the audience post the climax as Jeeva Nadhi's song starts playing with visuals of the Second Part. Rajamouli easily won over Ratnam in generating curiosity for the next part, just because the latter never had scenes to show. If that was not the case and Ratnam, with a few more scenes with his brilliance, garnered the attention back after the climax, Ponniyin Selvan would have been remembered as Ponniyin Selvan only, for the political drama it is, rather than a competitor or a Tamil counterpart to Baahubali, which is a period fantasy adventure.