Movies and shows, old and new, have helped us to live vicariously through them. They have allowed us to travel far and wide at a time borders are shut and people are restricted to homes. In our new column What's In A Setting, we explore the inseparable association of a story with its setting, how the location complements the narrative, and how these cultural windows to the world have helped broaden our imagination.
*
I missed Taramani for the first time at Park Street in 2017. Something in the air on that humid August evening made all four syllables Ta-Ra-Ma-Ni reverberate with totemic power in my head.
Where I stood was one of Kolkata’s oldest and most cosmopolitan locales, famous for its nightlife, and home to India’s earliest jazz scene. Where my mind lay was a world of glass and concrete, comprising some of Chennai’s major colleges and corporate offices, where there was youth but no culture, given the recency of its development as an Information Technology hub.
I had spent a formative period of my 20s in both places. At Park Street, I came of age as a curious but confused man with a head full of creative ambitions, which have since been dulled by pragmatism. At Taramani, I got myself a diploma certifying that I am professionally equipped to swim with the sharks in Modi-era journalism.
While I stood in front of my college at Park Street that evening, what brought Taramani to mind was director Ram’s 2017 Tamil film of the same name. All through 2017, the ghost of a college romance originating in Taramani and ending in Delhi haunted me in Kolkata. I had just returned home after spending a year in the capital. Watching Taramani made matters worse.
Part of Ram’s unofficial globalisation trilogy, Taramani was his final film to look at the tussle between a contemporary Tamilian and emerging value systems in post-liberalisation India, the others being Kattradhu Thamizh (2007) and Thanga Meengal (2013).
Taramani follows the romantic relationship between the provincial and chauvinistic Prabhunath (Vasanth Ravi) and Althea (Andrea Jeremiah), a career woman and single mother who has no patience for his theatrical tantrums. The upscale office buildings and residential complexes in Taramani are a state of mind in which Althea has found a home, but not Prabhunath, despite his MA degree in English.
- Vasanth Ravi and Andrea Jeremiah in Taramani (2017). Courtesy: Catamaran Productions/JSK Film Corporation
Both characters are decidedly weird. Prabhu is Devdas in the flesh when Althea runs into him, serendipitously the first time, and purposely thereafter. Prabhu’s acidic tongue is only rivalled by his unapologetic sexism. One glance at Althea tells him her waist is size 28, and therefore, “You cannot be a married woman as married women are larger,” Prabhunath concludes. One Yuvan Shankar Raja song later, they are in a live-in relationship.
It’s not that Prabhu and Althea’s relationship reminded me of mine. Like all pop songs have a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-
What got to me rather was Ram’s extensive geographic coverage of Taramani. The visuals wouldn’t let me forget the city’s distinctive MRTS railway stations, the halogen street lamps bathing the stretch from the MGR film school to IIT Madras in yellow, and the endless Hot Chips restaurants, all of which served as the backdrop to two relationships, one real and the other reel.
- Taramani at night. Photo by Raghavi Garg
That evening, my mind drew a complex connection between my carryings-on across two colleges in two cities. This was possibly triggered by the news of the recent Mumbai floods which brought back memories of the 2015 Chennai floods during my stay in Taramani, when a week-long power cut made dalliances inevitable in a co-ed campus without a generator.
As I revisited the film on Netflix India while writing this piece, I thought of how my memories of Taramani and my attitude towards the film have changed since 2017.
At one point, I had made the film’s song 'Unnai Unnai' the theme music for my heartbreak. The opening verse goes, “You, you, you, my love for you is as vast as the oceans; My hatred for you is as stronger than mountains.” It’s a great tune that communicates Prabhu and Althea’s masochistic relationship.
What always had me hooked was the whistling in the beginning. Quite like the whistling in 'Ei Raat Tomar Amar,' the Hemanta Mukherjee classic from the Bengali film Deep Jwele Jaai (1959), this too had an element of longing and nostalgia.
- Still from Taramani. Courtesy: Catamaran Productions/JSK Film Corporation
Together with the film’s images of overcast Taramani, its shadowy railway station, and the beaches of which every Chennai couple has memories, the song made me want to go back and walk the same roads or eat in the same cafés as my ex and I did. I wanted to, how shall I put it, cremate my memories. This essay is also a warning against watching too many Tamil melodramas.
During my latest rewatch, my romanticism with perhaps one of Chennai’s most boring-looking places embarrassed me. All these planned city-types like Taramani, Noida in Uttar Pradesh, or Salt Lake in Kolkata cannot inspire poetry.
What they can inspire instead is commentary on class, gender, and politics, because such artificially created pools of progress are like petri dishes to study social conflict generated by the sudden influx of capital. And this Taramani is packed with, in the form of director Ram’s voiceover, which I hadn’t paid attention to four years ago as I was obsessing over the scenery.
- Graffiti at Taramani. Photo by Raghavi Garg
Ram keeps punctuating scenes with his ruminations on the physical world around Prabhu and Althea, whose story has nothing to do with their creator’s whimsical thoughts on, say, a cricket match and fishermen in Rameswaram that begin the movie.
The film has quite a few aerial shots of Taramani, bringing to view how high-rises have indiscriminately popped up over marshlands — one of the major reasons for frequent water-logging in the area. Ram asks us if we are wondering why Prabhu and Althea are hooking up despite being evidently unsuitable for each other. He then says, “Did you ask why, when they built so many things on this wetland?”
- Still from Taramani. Courtesy: Catamaran Productions/JSK Film Corporation
This time, I was stunned by how beautiful the boggy terrain of Taramani could look from inside a plush apartment during sundown. A pigeon keeps flying into this flat where Prabhu and Althea live. Ram says the pigeon is searching for its partner in the marshlands, and wonders if it can still call this place its home despite getting lost in a maze of apartment buildings.
In another scene, Ram apologises for the excess of English words in the song that is to come, because a Tamilian doesn’t know how to translate “torture” and “flirt” into English. In the end, he tells the audience that his voiceover was just the same as someone’s “Facebook status updates”.
These snippets of Ram’s mind are like an appendix to his dissertation on man-woman relationship which derives its uniqueness from being based in his version of the place called Taramani.
- Still from Taramani. Courtesy: Catamaran Productions/JSK Film Corporation
I have a fondness for onscreen romances that absorb from and reflect upon the space and time they unfold in. Maybe, it is the materialist in me. For instance, the nascent relationship in Buddhadeb Dasgupta's Bengali film Grihajuddha (1982) follows a Leftist woman in 1970s Kolkata struggling to reconcile her relationship with her careerist lover, just when the corporates have become vicious following the Naxalite movement's end. It is similar to how the political volatility of events leading up to the Paris riots of 1968 play out between the erotically charged threesome who have locked themselves away from the streets in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003). Neither can La La Land (2016) exist outside the entertainment industry of Los Angeles nor can the recently released Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar (2020) happen without Delhi-NCR.
Similarly, could Prabhu, who left Cooum village for Chennai where he imagines himself lost and tortured, and Althea, who can live with dignity only in some semblance of a metropolis, exist without the precondition of Taramani? Like Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind (2004) has more to do with the malleability of memories than romance, Taramani is actually about a clash of ethics, moralities, and sensibilities, than it is about the love between two romantic partners.
Along with Ram’s wry and cynical voiceover, A Sreekar Prasad’s editing makes Taramani crackle with frenetic energy, quite like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002). Yuvan Shankar Raja’s temperamental electropop keeps intruding in scene after scene, constantly keeping the narrative tense. What makes Taramani’s otherwise commonplace story of a toxic relationship unique is Ram’s left-field perspective, which I had missed in my early viewings.
My memories of Taramani have since mutated to foreground my time spent with friends or the city’s musicians and artists. The rest has decomposed like exposed nitrate film. The walls and alleys of Taramani that once shimmered in my mind are now just pixels in JPEG files. "We don't remember... we rewrite memory as much as history is rewritten," the narrator says in Sans Soleil (1983), Chris Marker's documentary about the limitations of remembering. Perhaps, we remember only what we want to remember. Five years later, I might recall Taramani as a throwaway footnote not unlike Ram's pithy asides.
Read more from the What's in a Setting series here.
from Firstpost Bollywood Latest News https://ift.tt/3A1NC8L
0 Comments