TRUE SOUTH
THE MOST REVELATORY MOVIEGOING EXPERIENCE I HAD last year was seeing Vetri Maaran’s Vada Chennai in a parking-garage movie theater in North Bergen in New Jersey. It is an intricately plotted, stabbingly violent gangster saga that is so richly detailed that I could almost feel the texture of the leather hilts on the machetes thrusting this Shakespearean tale of deception into action. Intended to be part one of a trilogy, it is the third collaboration between the Tamil writer-director Vetri Maaran and star Dhanush. Their films together are deeply researched dives into Tamil subcultures, from the aimless unemployed youth of the director’s raucous debut Ruthless Man (2007) to the cockfighters in the National Film Award–winning Arena (2011). Vetri Maaran’s one film without Dhanush as a leading man is the art house-aimed Interrogation (2015), a harrowing story of migrant laborers sucked into the torturous hell of the prison system; premiered in Venice, it was India’s submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Vetri Maaran and Dhanush rolled out their fourth collaboration with Asuran (Tamil for “demon”), a bloody revenge drama that opened worldwide in October. The new film furthers their exploration of modern Indian history as one of unethical land grabs: the hero is a rural farmer seeking vengeance against a capitalist elite. Asuran is the latest in Vetri Maaran and Dhanush’s formidable catalogue of underclass action melodramas that should be much better known outside of India.
In the West, Indian cinema has become synonymous with Hindi-language Bollywood productions, despite the existence of thriving regional film industries outside of Mumbai, whose products are becoming more and more popular at the national level. The top-grossing Indian films (2018, made in Chennai, aka the home of Kollywood) and the Telugu and Tamil-language (2017, shot in Hyderabad, aka the home of Tollywood). In the introduction to the essay collection , M.K. Raghavendra argues that Bollywood’s publicity advantage is due to the fact that “Hindi mainstream cinema has been a national cinema in a way that regionallanguage cinemas have not.” Speaking directly to their populace, regional cinemas revel in specificity, which explains some of the appeal of a Tamil director like Vetri Maaran, who spends years researching neighborhoods before shooting his films.
