Kamal@70: The Motto He Believes In

'Kamal has surfed and navigated a lot of tidal waves, manoeuvring the peaks and troughs, combining rare intelligence and commonly available intuitions to overcome unimaginable crises all his life.'
'There is no looking back at the past, for his only motto has been 'Tomorrow belongs to us'!'

How does the great Kamal Haasan choose his films?

What makes him say yes to a Vishwaroopam 2 or a Vikram?

On Kamal Haasan's 70th birthday on November 7, we follow him on his recent celluloid excursions through this fascinating excerpt from K Hariharan's book Kamal Haasan: A Cinematic Journey.

Let us pause a moment to locate Kamal in his journey through Tamil cinema.

In 2013, he took on the ambitious two-part project titled Vishwaroopam I where he played Wisam Ahmed Kashmiri, an Indian military agent delegated to eliminate a senior ISIS leader to protect the sovereignty of a world at severe risk of survival. Cut.

Before he decided to don the greasepaint for Vikram 2 in 2021, Kamal did an amazing film called Papanasam(Vanquishing One's Sins; 2015), directed by Jiju Joseph, where he played an ordinary satellite cable TV agent named Suyambulingam, who accidentally gets involved in a murder and tries to save himself and his family from the fallout.

This film was a phenomenal box office hit, asserting Kamal's capability to channelise a good script into a more superior form of cinema through his convincing performance.

While Papanasam (a remake of the Malayalam hit Drishyam), was a delicate Hitchcockian family thriller, Vishwaroopam attempted to give Indian cinema a very nuanced Rambo/James Bond-like experience in a global ecosystem.

After Papanasam, Kamal headed out to finish an old commitment, Vishwaroopam 2 in which Wisam tries to balance the guilty emotions of a good military man having to sort out interpersonal issues in the forces with the need to enter the chambers of a cruel ISIS tyrant/leader and eliminate him and his global associates. This film, though, turned out to be a box-office disaster.

Surely this would have put Kamal in a quandary.

Would the market allow for another actor-dominated film like Papanasam to become a success? Or should it be a film dedicated to sheer action-domination, the current market favourite genre?

Kamal chose the latter.

With his penchant for experimentation, the time had also come for him to enter a new arena with a more global formula, namely the big-budget super-action drama.

Kamal reopened Vikram, an older franchise of his company, by announcing the production of Vikram 2 in 2021 to navigate the spectacle of excess, such as in the fantastic sci-fi world virtually propelled by Marvel Studios' 'Cinematic Universe', which dominates theatres and OTT platforms across the world with multi-star casts, lavish sets, extensive use of computer graphics, loud music and thrilling action sequences.

The villain in Vikram 2, Sandhanam, is a clownish Joker-like character played by Vijay Sethupathi. The Joker in the DC Universe is often considered Batman's antithesis.

While Batman is driven by a desire for justice, the Joker operates without a clear motive, only wanting to spread chaos. The Joker's existence serves to highlight and challenge Batman's own principles and beliefs.

In Vikram 2, Sandhanam, introduced like a hulk, plays a narcotic drug manufacturer, producing cocaine on a 'massive scale', who supposedly has the power of destroying not only India but the whole world.

The story remains silent on the veracity of such high-volume drug business in 'real' India. And we have all accepted that clarifying such information is not necessary at all. Fake news has become reality.

The masquerade or secrecy surrounding such 'mythological' characters and organisations ends up serving as a narrative tool to explore the themes of power, responsibility and accountability.

In Vikram 2, a local drug lord's daughter's marriage scene shows Sandhanam waiting to attack while cooks sing out cookery ads and visitors dance to popular music.

In such a bizarre intersection, masked men (headed by Kamal, also in a mask) enter on motorcycles, wipe out Sandhanam's men and even end up kidnapping the drug lord.

The portrayal of unregistered or 'secret' national security forces can be interpreted as a commentary on real-world concerns related to government secrecy, classified operations and the lack of transparency.

But does it resolve the balance between national security imperatives and the public's right to know in any tangible manner? No.

The narrative thus mimics the opacity of existing news media, mostly packed with opinions and even fake news.

Superhero narratives have a long history of reflecting and commenting on contemporary social and political issues.

The portrayal of secret national security forces may resonate with concerns about the expansion of government surveillance, but the use of covert military operations and the implications of unchecked power in the real world provide a new level of credibility for modern-day governments.

I am sure that Kamal is aware of such dangerous intersections and implications in real-day politics, where he is a committed player, and therefore the structuring of logic and reasoning into a film like this becomes important.

One can clearly see this in the insertion of a scene with Vikram's chosen members where he delivers a five-minute-long sermon about his rationale for doing whatever is being staged in the film.

The setting is a dim basement packed with all kinds of ammunition.

Vikram's team members are feeling unsure about the plan and he replies, 'So, you think I am doing all this to take revenge for my son's murder?

My son died to give us a drug-free society. Should we not respect his sacrifice?

This drug will soon take us back to the law of the jungle, namely, to multiply and procreate with no awareness of who your mother, sister or daughter is. You all came to me because of an ideology.

Whoever we have killed is not murder, but a statement to clean the crap out of our society.

And a masked face is necessary nowadays to carry out even a good deed.

I am an agent and known for my secrecy. I have a success track record which I cannot reveal to the world because I am an honest militant.

And our society should know that is the legacy we want to leave behind and for that Sandhanam must be killed.

One man's terrorism is another man's revolution. The freedom song of yesteryears has become our national anthem today.

Rebel is not a curse word, but a virtue. Sorry boys, I am lecturing. We are warriors of tomorrow but now, grow up, guys!'

The Preamble to our Constitution assures for all citizens 'justice, social, economic and political' and a rejection of violence as a means to achieve justice. With this 'statement' in the film, is Kamal propagating the need for violence as a contingent measure when law and order go out of hand? Or is he announcing the new 'Wagnerian' narrative as the norm?

Acknowledging this monologue in the film as a 'lecture' is in fact Kamal's statement to his audience. Most of the lines spoken here are in the English language, subtitled in Tamil.

Watching so much English spoken here and in many other Tamil films today is a clear indication of the 'surplus enjoyment' provided.

Finally, the tone and delivery of Vikram's speech here is a tribute to the legendary Sivaji Ganesan, Kamal's idol.

Registering such a memory also portrays Kamal's disposition to the well-proven narrative, namely, the need to clearly register the hero as a 'positive' person with no ambiguity at all which, strangely, is clearly not the narrative of the Hollywood superhero films.

Kamal has surfed and navigated a lot of tidal waves, manoeuvring the peaks and troughs, combining rare intelligence and commonly available intuitions to overcome unimaginable crises all his life.

There is no looking back at the past, for his only motto has been 'Tomorrow belongs to us'!

Excerpted from Kamal Haasan: A Cinematic Journey by K Hariharan, with the kind permission from the publishers HarperCollins India.