Notes from The Mani Ratnam Retrospective: 'What Else Is Left For Velu Naicker To Say?'

In Baradwaj Rangan’s Conversations With Mani Ratnam, Rangan asks Ratnam about the climax of Nayakan, an image burned into the annals of Indian cinema history — Kamal Haasan’s body in the character of Velu Naicker, an aged don who does not know, when asked by his grandson, if he is a good man or not, “Neenga nallavara kettavara?”

Naicker is shot at, collapses, and immediately dies. “No last words, no last looks. He drops — that’s it,” Rangan observes to which Ratnam replies, “He had two-plus hours to say whatever he wanted… What is left for him to say?”

Truly, what is left for him to say, a ‘him’ that is not just Naicker, this fictional gunned-dead don but also Ratnam, alive and kicking, who finds it odd, and slightly exhausting, that having made 28 films across genres, in five languages over four decades, three heart incidents, people still want him to say more.

There are films and there is discourse. Ratnam wants to live in a world where film is discourse. The rest of us are armed with questionnaires.

Economy — that is what director Vasan Bala responded when asked what specifically makes a Mani Ratnam film immediately identifiable, at the recently-concluded Ratnam retrospective at the G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture. In Ratnam’s films, there is a wounding precision, quick wit, and exhaustion with long windedness. Like cinema, like director. He cannot stand a sentence that goes nowhere.

Ratnam was present for two sessions where he interacted with his ADs — ADs who are directors in their own right but keep returning to Ratnam’s sets, including Bejoy Nambiar, Shaad Ali, Vijay Krishna Acharya, and Siva Ananth — and some of his actors — Madhavan, Abhishek Bachchan, and Aditi Rao Hydari. What emerged from these conversations is the nonchalance of Ratnam’s cinema. The scenes never linger. A beautiful shot is flipped over before it is absorbed, moments never suppurate. He shoots like that, too. Quickly. The songs of Kaatru Veliyidai — some involving -16 degrees temperature in Serbia and some involving Holi — were shot in a day, two maximum, three being a stretch.

Continuity exists, but you can see its seams fray, here and there, the way realism in his films fray, here and there. Fantasy is used in his movies, not as an opposition to realism, but an extension of it. Realism is a very fragile thing in his world.

The village in Bombay, for example, is a patchwork, where the house is in Pollachi, the song ‘Kehna Hi Kya’ was shot in Madurai, the fort from ‘Tu Hi Re’ is in Kochi, and the bridge crossing is in Kasargod. And yet, it is supposed to cohere as one village. These are the kind of continuities that Ratnam doesn’t tie himself in knots over. Most of Bombay was, in fact, not shot in Mumbai. They only had a three-day schedule where they canned shots of the city to suture it into the film, producing the illusion of place. No scenes from Kannathil Muthamittal were shot in Sri Lanka, since they felt Kerala was a close enough approximation. Fidelity and reality are two different aesthetics, Ratnam leaning into the latter. 

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This flipping nonchalance often pushes his actors against the wall. A regular anecdote that kept returning over the course of the retrospective was of the worry they felt when the efficiency with which scenes were being canned dawned on them, an efficiency that demanded they absorb the lines that much faster. As Madhavan notes, “The shock and awe of being on set was so much I was only able to see what I did years later. In retrospect I can understand how he designed a scene.”

Ratnam rarely takes more than two takes of a shot. A barrier for Ratnam becomes a pathway, a cul-de-sac becomes a portal. When Tabu came onto the sets of Iruvar, burning in fever, Ratnam realised his elaborate staging would not be possible, and so instead of her moving, she was laid flat on a bed and Santosh Sivan’s camera was placed above her, rotating slowly as it got closer to her face. Whatever happens — the shoot must never stop. In Yuva, when Vivek Oberoi broke his leg during the shoot, requiring bed rest for three months, stalling the filming, Ratnam decided to shoot the Tamil version of the film in the interim. His cinema accretes quickly, even as its effect unfolds gently.

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Questions demanding subtext, then, felt like they are talking at cross-purposes with his cinema. Someone asked Hydari about the use of the mirror in the scene where she gets proposed to in Kaatru Veliyidai, where she is leaning against the mirror, her face reflected. Is she looking at herself? Is that what this scene construction means? — a well meaning shovel of a question came to dig among the quicksands. They shot and moved on. Meaning was of the least import. 

Mani Ratnam’s presence in the retrospective, then, was an act of brevity. He joked — but, perhaps, half-heartedly — that what we see as a retrospective of his work is, from his vantage, a “humiliation”. As though we have collected fragments of flaws from his winding filmography and presented them, back to back, as an act of mockery. 

When Madhavan points our attention to a scene in Alaipayuthey (2000), where Ratnam, unhappy with the edit of a scene where the couple fights, decides to re-dub it entirely, with fresh dialogues overlaid on the older scene, Ratnam cringes. Madhavan uses this as an example to advise budding directors that they should not be so precious about continuity and perfection. Ratnam brushes this advice aside, clarifying in a laugh, that he did this only once in his filmography.

On the one hand, to see a filmmaker whose relationship to his cinema is not tainted by mythology is refreshing. For him, an artist does, and doing suffices. On the other hand, we demand insight, and what we get, instead, is more movies. Our questions are met with a promise — not of answers, but still more questions.