What’s the name of Nivin Pauly’s character in Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai? It’s a question you’re likely to grapple with as you watch the film that’s narrated as a story to a little boy by his aunt on what appears to be a boring train journey. To this boy, Nivin’s character goes by Hulk, an all-powerful superhero who has been alive for centuries. As for Soori, the other central character in this story, Nivin goes by Sir at first, until Soori begins to call him Karuppiah, the name of his village deity. As for the viewer, we’re told that this character has been immortal for millennia, drifting from one phase of history to the next in search of the woman he’s loved since he first saw her, 4,000 years ago.
In one of these flashbacks, the film pauses briefly in a period two thousand years ago, just to show you a shot of this mysterious woman getting attacked with stones by the people of her village. Given that the film cuts abruptly to a shot in the present day of the same woman cleaning a statue of Christ, it’s also fair game to refer to Nivin’s character as Jesus himself.
But this is not a film about a happy angel drifting from one period to another, just so he can fulfil his duties as a saviour. When we see this character for the first time inside an empty train compartment, what we’re seeing is a man who is exhausted by immortality. He appears to be in severe pain despite his brute physical strength and when asked why, he connects it to the frustration he feels at learning that human beings will never change.
An example of this comes in the form of the character played by Soori. He works in construction in the Middle East and he’s returning to India after eight years. This character too appears to not have a name, but if Nivin is some version of a superman, Soori is more an Everyman.
Their conversations go from Soori’s desire to see his son for the first time to a fight between both of them that results in Soori nearly killing a little mouse he sees on the train. When you analyse Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai alongside the themes of Ram’s two previous films, you realise this film too speaks about parenting. Soori’s character may have risen in life to be able to buy a house and send his son to a good school, but does he have the emotional qualities required to be a good father? This appears to be the question that results in several conflicts between the lead characters.
It’s not an easy film to get into, and what makes it even harder is the allegorical nature of everything it’s trying to say. The film’s timeline spans thousands of years and we see jarring visuals created using AI to manufacture this imagery. This includes a talking crocodile and a walking rabbit, a crying elephant and the image of a queen in Egypt. These images feel uneven and it takes genuine effort to suspend disbelief. But where the filmmaking pulls down the vision, the ideas more than make up for it.
What looked like a story about two angry men, slowly changes its texture as it moves into the second half. This is where the film goes deeper into the centuries-old love story between Nivin and Anjali’s characters. From feeling suffocated inside the train compartment for much of the first half, the film begins to breathe a little with wider shots in beautiful Dhanushkodi. The film also shows us the same events playing out again, but this time through the difference a woman like Anjali makes to the people around her.
The abstractions begin to take a more human form in the second half. If the film begins by painting Soori as a newly rich clown who drinks Gatorade instead of water, we soon see the tragic childhood that gave rise to his selfish survival instincts. As for Nivin, we see the poetic nature of his love for Anjali, with the film forcing us to reevaluate one question: Who really is the saviour here... Nivin’s character or Anjali’s?
It’s a densely packed film, loaded with philosophy about human nature and how we tend to repeat the same flaws across millennia without any real emotional evolution. It’s not a film that tries to offer easy resolutions or false hope. It’s director Ram making a film that only he could, as he tries to explain existential dread in the form of a short story you’d narrate to a little boy, as he’s stuck on a train, bored and waiting for his home to come.