Language: Tamil
The one objection I hear to most of my film criticism is, “I don’t think the director intended that!” I’ve always believed that despite the lack of bad intentions or even the presence of good ones, filmmakers can and do make terrible films. Vignesh Karthick’s Thittam Irandu is one such film.
Athira, played by a confused Aishwarya Rajesh, is a young police officer. In an awkward bus journey to Chennai, she falls in love with a thoughtful Arjun. Within a few days on her new job, she learns that her childhood friend, Surya, has gone missing. The discoveries she makes while investigating the crime forms the rest of the film.
The love story is starkly Gautham Menon-esque. Athira gets uneasy voice overs like “enakku avana romba pudichiruchu. Yen-nu solla theriyala” (I liked him a lot, I didn’t know why). They cinematically light their house with a hundred candles during a power cut. After their first kiss — which is also strangely shot out-of-focus — they have an unnatural conversation about why they like each other.
The investigation side of the story, which one might expect to offer relief from this saccharine romance, is worse by comparison. Athira asks the most basic questions, with clues just finding her. The red herring, who is repeatedly referred to as the “physically challenged” person is ridiculous. How can Athira be the only person who suspects murder when the car that crashed into a tree and caught on fire is in neutral!
The editing is staccato. There is a point in the film where Athira is calmly talking to her colleagues inside a house. The next thing we know she is landing on the ground, after what looks like a big jump, chasing a suspect. Aishwarya Rajesh also appears throughout the film as if she’s having second thoughts. The only expression in the toolkit she carried for this film seems to be opening her eyes wide in shock at things that should have been obvious to anyone with logical reasoning skills. Thittam Irandu is a criminal waste of the actor she is.
The only thing going for the film is that it holds up the suspense until the final reveal. Even when events are incoherent and coincidences everywhere, the film keeps us hooked till the end to see who is committing these murders and why. The final reveal, however, is a monstrous disappointment.
Vignesh Karthick aims to deliver an important social message but gets it awfully jumbled. It is easy to imagine that this is his idea of a sensitive take on the issue, but it is so unconsidered that it seems he’s written his film from news reports and TV debates. There couldn’t have been this level of insensitivity if he’d ever seriously involved someone with lived experience in his writing room.
(Spoilers ahead)
In a mangled effort to say that ‘transmen are men’, the film sidesteps the very problem it claims to address.
Vignesh Karthick writes Thittam Irandu like Minnale with a trans man as the hero. “Yes, I lied. But not because I wanted to cheat you. Only because I want to live with you,” argues Arjun. In making the comparison between Minnale and Thittam Irandu, I don’t mean that Arjun being a transman is the deception, of course. I am referring to Arjun’s relationship with Athira’s past, the falsehoods he lets her believe in the present, and the belief that he can keep up the lie around Surya’s death until he almost gets caught. All of these serve only to dilute the romance that Vignesh Karthick had set up.
The film casts a cisgender man and a cisgender woman to play the role of the trans man. Surya’s husband, a cisgender man explains the trans experience to Arjun and facilitates the transition. Arjun’s best friend for years intuits nothing. The film casually uses “in a world where rapists live freely, you can too because it’s not your fault.” In fact, a few minutes later, Arjun argues, “men who raped young children are forgiven, but transpeople aren’t accepted,” trivialising both rape and trans experiences.
Most of all, it suggests that faking his own death is the only option Arjun had. Every deceptive shot of Arjun feels cruel.
(Spoilers end)
If filmmakers want to be allies, they should do better — much better — than Thittam Irandu. They must educate themselves and be more sensitive about adding to the misinformation. Most importantly, they need to form diverse teams of people with lived experiences informing the writing. Thittam Irandu shows no evidence of any of these.
Thittam Irandu is streaming on Sony LIV.
Rating: 1.5
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