Sivakumar Murugesan's Thaai Kizhavi is one of the emptiest, most unimaginative, creatively bankrupt, facile, and emotionally vulgar films I have seen recently. It's the kind of half-baked nonsense that makes you wonder how it was ever written, produced, performed, filmed, and screened. What's more shocking is that when I opened Wikipedia, I found that Thaai Kizhavi was critically acclaimed and was a box office hit. What dimension am I living in? My first instinct was to get into a meeting with those critics so that they could explain what hidden symphony they heard in this orchestra of rubbish. Murugesan is neither a competent maker of images nor does he show any talent for writing characters who could be described as "vivid" or "distinct." All he can offer is three or four funny one-liners, but they are insufficient to sustain a thin two-hour-and-thirty-minute film.
Thaai Kizhavi translates to "Godmother," and this title is bestowed upon Pavunuthaayi (Radhika Sarathkumar). She is a fierce, independent moneylender with an intimidating presence in her locality. The residents of Kadupatti village tremble and hide from Pavunuthaayi, particularly those who owe her money. This is why the entire village starts celebrating when Pavunuthaayi falls ill. She lies on her deathbed, unable to speak. She does, however, move her left hand as if trying to communicate something. But it's not just the villagers who want this moneylender to die; even her own sons—Uppiliyaan (Singampuli), Vijayan (Aruldoss), and Selvam (Bala Saravanan)—care little about her fate until they learn that she possesses about 160 sovereigns of gold jewelry. These men are losers, and their wives, like them, show no interest in Pavunuthaayi until they, too, are told about the jewelry.
It's only Suruli (Raichal Rabecca), Pavunuthaayi's daughter, who genuinely adores Pavunuthaayi. She is good, and Murugesan's idea of goodness is to present the character as an almost mute, dull, personalityless stick figure. Rabecca, though, adds emotional weight to her role with expressions that explode with fervor, like the one where she weeps and smiles after hearing good news. Even Radhika wonderfully looms over everybody with her gutsy, don't-mess-with-me demeanor. Unfortunately for them, they are left in the care of a lousy filmmaker lacking intellectual substance and cinematic vision. I suspect Murugesan's brief to his editor, San Lokesh, was that the images should RUN. No scene is allowed to breathe in the hands of Murugesan. The cuts are so frantic that Thaai Kizhavi could have been played in the ICU to resuscitate Pavunuthaayi through sheer tempo. At the same time, though, I don't want to complain too much about the rapid pace because, given how insipid the film is, I was glad I didn't have to suffer through any one scene for too long. Murugesan keeps throwing one thing after another. Since what he throws begins to repeat itself after a while, the movie settles into monotonous rhythms.
The sons are greedy losers, their wives are no different, and other men, like 2 Rooba Idly (Muthukumar), Suruli's estranged husband, aren't any better either. Pennycuick (Munishkanth), too, needs money, but only for his marriage. Why is he so desperate to get married? The reason he offers stands in direct contradiction to the message that Pavunuthaayi—and by extension the film—provides to the audience. Pennycuick wants a wife because he, too, wants a woman who will taunt him, nag him, and give him a child. He also wants to receive invitations to various functions. Pavunuthaayi, on the other hand, tells the women in her family that girls should chase independence. Learn a skill, earn money, and be free of men and their stupidity. But why should only women be told not to depend on men for happiness? Why can't men be instilled with the same outlook? Both genders should strive for freedom; both genders should be able to stand on their own feet instead of wasting so much of their time desperately searching for a partner for comfort and fulfilment—like Pennycuick.
Murugesan, then, for all his celebration of women's empowerment, is, at the core, very regressive and very simple-minded. The two strong women in Thaai Kizhavi, Pavunuthaayi and Suruli, are essentially relegated to the sidelines, as more screen time is allotted to the not-so-progressive characters. Pavunuthaayi is made unconscious and sent to the hospital, while Suruli is little more than a mute observer. Murugesan reduces both to mouthpieces, distributing platitudes about how women should be self-sufficient in all respects. This preachy remark comes from a director who doesn't bother elevating Pavunuthaayi and Suruli with a rich inner life, a comprehensive worldview, and personal opinions. What does Suruli think about the whole circus? What are her thoughts about her sisters-in-law? Suruli knows how to work, but does she like her job? Are there other skills she would like to learn? Pavunuthaayi, it's revealed, used to go to the city for shopping, for movies, for street food. Did she ever think about bringing Suruli with her? What did Pavunuthaayi learn from these trips? Did she ever compare city women with the women in her rural area?
As far as Murugesan is concerned, a woman becomes a force to be reckoned with by merely donning an external robe of badassery and defiance. They don't need to possess unique tastes or intricate opinions; they simply need to echo the dime-store moralism found in women's magazines and Twitter threads. Additionally, if Murugesan and his glib creation, Pavunuthaayi, really cared for women, they wouldn't have undermined their theories with a foolish ending in which Suruli is made to marry Pennycuick without anybody asking her if she really wants to marry him—or even marry at all. Thaai Kizhavi's moral lessons are as shallow as its gallery of caricatures. Murugesan is solely concerned with jokes, which is why the movie is mainly focused on cartoons and their cartoonish business. A man is paid to keep a lamp burning for Pavunuthaayi's good health; the sisters-in-law follow Suruli everywhere for close surveillance; and a man plays only Kamal Haasan's songs during every occasion. It feels weird when these cartoons collide with serious subjects. When Selvam, for instance, encounters a family waiting for the auspicious time to let granny off the ventilator, something just doesn't make sense. Sure, you groan at Murugesan for highlighting the film's central message, but the fact that this incident yields nothing more than temporary reflection turns you off and strengthens your opinion about the filmmaker: he's a cheap manipulator.
If Thaai Kizhavi is all it takes nowadays for critics to orgasm, then we are in deep trouble. If people can criticize Dhurandhar for being propaganda, they should also possess the intelligence to recognize a film that hides its amateurishness behind a facade of "progressive" messages. Like Jawan and Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, Thaai Kizhavi earns its brownie points by throwing its audience into an echo chamber. And like Su From So, it supplies stick figures wrapped in easy-to-digest, slipshod lessons so that viewers can congratulate themselves for their righteousness. India, now more than ever, needs filmmakers who can challenge, who can offer a view of resistance, who can break traditional and oppressive outlooks with their boldness and imagination. The country urgently needs defiant voices. But resistance shouldn't come at the cost of cinematic vision. Thaai Kizhavi will tell you what you want to hear and become a commercial and critical success. A director like Murugesan, in other words, is celebrated for being clumsy and obvious. If people continue making hits out of hacky detritus simply because it validates their opinions, then, I fear, the art of movies will end up in deep, deep trouble.
Written by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times