salangai oli...

Just the other day, thanks to my fever, I was at home bunking office and I happened to watch Salangai Oli by K Viswanath. A great film, mind you it was dubbed in tamil from telugu (well i am not really sure about this), with exceptional performances by Jayapradha, Kamal Hassan and even his torn shoes. It is one of those movies that unfailingly make my eyes moist at least once before it ends. Most often (as with most of the audience I am sure), it is the scene where Jayapradha gives the national dance festival invitation to Kamal. Or the scene in which Kamal meets his dying mother. Or it might be even one of those scenes where drunkard old Kamal talks to Sarathbabu or his wife.

The immense strength of the film’s emotion comes from Illayaraja. Who else can possibly do that, if not the Raja? K Viswanath’s direction is just brilliant all through. And gosh!!! Jayapradha looks so divine. No wonder Satyajit Ray adorned her so much.

By mere coincidence, on the same day, I happened to read a review of Cinema Paradiso in an old issue of Anantha Vikatan. It is supposedly one of the greatest movies ever made on this earth. Is our own Salangai Oli any less? A Big NO is my answer.

If the western dickheads and those that are born in India who ape them don’t think so, I would give ‘em the middle finger! You might call me an emotional idiot. May be I am. May be not. I jus don’t give a damn! And most of the Indian “elite” that I have met just shove aside Indian films such as this as “tear jerkers” in the likes of Karan Johar (without him no discussion of Indian cinema would be complete, right? At least that’s what the national news channels make me think. Whether Karan Johar makes good films or not is another issue anyway.)

What is realism in films? Most often, we, the elite, tend to consider Hollywood as the god-sent standard with a totally unjustified reverence... So if you underplay like they do there, we have no qualms accepting you as a good actor. (i think this deserves another lengthy post!!!)

Most often, these “elite” friends of mine say they feel like fools when watching films like Salangai Oli. These films make you cry, so what? It is probably the unconscious resistance to show one’s “weakness”, if a heart (kind or otherwise) that identifies itself with a third person be it on screen or off screen, can ever be called a “weakness”.

Or it might be even our fear of emotions, either ours or others’. Probably it is a symptom of the fact that we are losing our skills to deal with emotions. And this argument seems to have a high chance of being true. With so many of us getting educated and becoming intelligent?!, we are capable of confronting violence or answering many intriguing puzzles of nature, but not our own emotions.

We have become so impervious to emotive stimuli (forgive my technical language!) that today we have to have blood spattering gruesomely on our faces to stir our animal instincts and make us understand that the actor is under pain. In the name of reality, all that we are doing is to provide sadistic pleasures and satisfy the bloody animal within.

It seems we are losing our understanding of the subtle language of emotions.