From 'Gentleman' To 'Game Changer': How Director Shankar Uses Songs In His Films

From new fears come new forms. The 1980s brought in a fear of cinema being effaced by the coming of television, easy piracy, and new terms of engagement with tentpole cinema. The very first issue of Screen magazine in 1984, even asked, rhetorically, in an exaggerated posture, if cinema could survive the gangrene glut of television. Cinema, that slimy old thing, would slither, as it does, forming new paths, when old ones are dammed. One of the architects of this new path would be Shankar, who would make his directorial debut in 1993 with Gentleman, challenging the very form of cinema through his treatment of song. 

Suddenly, the film was left dwarfed under the heavy presence of music, the visuals of the song dominating the discourse, and the film itself would flutter loosely around it. The fact that Shankar tends to tread the same story again and again—the powerless suffering, eventually trampling over the powerful—ignores that his films are as much about the story as they are about the appendages the story allows: the songs that digress, the visuals that are a sub-plot in and of themselves, the thoughtless scale that takes you from China to Brazil, New Zealand to New York. The upshot? People flocked to the theaters. 

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Who would not want the Jeans’ tour of the Taj Mahal, Pyramids, The Great Wall of China, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa for the price of a Sathyam theater ticket, with Aishwarya Rai Bachchan as tour guide? Who would not want to simmer in Indian’s bharat-darshan, where the couple shuffle into and out of marriage outfits from around India, a patriotism punched at the loom? 

Such is the logic that lubricated the success of Shankar’s early decades. 

While SP Muthuraman might have been among the first to overlay his images with animation in Raja Chinna Roja (1989), Shankar’s use of animation in ‘Chikku Bukku Rayile’ in his debut film—Prabhu Deva opening up his leather jacket to parcel an animated heart to Gautami, her swatting it away into shards; him sending her arrows of lust from his eyes towards her bosom, into her ear (a visual pun on penetration?), her chucking it into the bin; fat tears from his eyes hitting the floor, splintering—was both naughty and new. This newness came from its untamed audacity to be reckless and tacky. The question of ‘How can anyone think like this?’ and ‘Why would anyone want to think like this?’ often fused, expressed as one phrase—hunh?  

How does one respond to the image of two three-dimensional lovers being flattened into cardboard, finding each other among a crowd in a theater and leaving, two papers of people floating away from the city, into the mountains to resume their flesh and blood form, only to be carted back into flattened leaves being sent off as the song ends? 

It has been over 20 years since ‘Ennavale’ in Kadhalan (1994), and still it is impossible to disentangle what is ridiculous from what is admirable in Shankar’s vision. They exist, not as opposing, but spiralling pressures. Turning Aishwarya Rai in Jeans (1998)—whose beauty gets celebrated earlier in the film as a wonder of the world—into a balloon, a pencil, a whirlpool, a scroll, and finally a skeleton in ‘Kannodu Kanbathellam’ is playing with fire. 

Shankar often emerged unscorched. 

With his growing fame as what critic Baradwaj Rangan calls a “social spectacle” director, the shoots of his film songs became so far-fetched, laden with accidents and eccentricities, that some of his films even have their own “Production Of” pages on Wikipedia. For Enthiran (2010), a song called ‘Kilimanjaro’, after a mountain in Tanzania, would be shot in Peru’s Machu Picchu, with dancers in costumes of “Mexican Tribals”. At over four crores, it was, then, the most expensive Indian music video. 

Eight years later, with 2.0’s ‘Endhira Logathu Sundariye’, a song shot on a budget of around 20 crores, he scratched away his own record. Strangely, the robotic love-song—also a love-song of robots—was not even part of the narrative, shoved amidst the post-credits scroll. 

Seven years later, with Shankar’s upcoming Game Changer, this fetishising of money being thrown at the song peaked with official announcements and posts from producers revealing that over ₹75 crores were spent to film four songs: a “techno anthem”; the first Indian song to be shot with an infra-red camera; one song focusing on Indian diversity; and the other on the eco-friendly outfits of the dancers. 

Nothing about the descriptions of the songs leans on the film. It is almost as if the film leans on them. 

If television had advertisements, Shankar’s films had music — spaces where the narrative takes a pause, unhinges itself, and he stretches both his arms and imagination in a yawn that bends the logic of time, space, and the logic of logic itself to make points that might be banal — for example, her beauty is a wonder, at par with that of monuments in ‘Poovukkul’ from Jeans — or literalized, sending metaphors to kneel at the back of the class — for example, she is everything I see and touch, becoming dumb-bell, bike, sprout, and phone in ‘Mersalaayitten’ from I (2015). The grandness of love would be expressed as the “Babylonian” palace in ‘Vaaji Vaaji’ and its fragility in ‘Sahana Saral Thoo’ in Sivaji: The Boss (2007). Subtlety is for losers.

Sometimes, the songs would themselves serve as advertisements. The song ‘Ladio’ from I, is a montage of product advertisement, the heroine being a model, and the song being a catalogue of her work—crawling like a cat on the dials of a giant clock, holding the checked handbag in a checkered set producing aesthetic vertigo, ice-cream, coffee, chips, selling soda lounging on a giant lemon, chocolate, and bubblegum. 

Later, in the film, there is another montage of advertisements, this time both hero and heroine cataloguing their work and the time spent together, as lovers, reel and real—some like Brooke Bond Tea, Nippon Paint, Fair & Lovely, Bru, Derby Jeans Community, Sunfeast Dark Fantasy, being actual brands, paying money for this celluloid real estate, and others like Gillettin, which might have been Gillette. 

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These are, literally, ads playing as reprieves within the film. Unsurprising, then, that the film would hold onto memory through these songs, and not the film itself, which was watery and repetitive.

The ‘Calendar Song’ of Indian 2, a song shot in Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world, in Bolivia, is about the lecherous industrialist who has commissioned this shoot, and we as the audience partake in his lechery as the camera glides off the smooth skin of Demi-Leigh Tebow, the 2017 Miss Universe. We are being sold what is villainised: This is the ambivalence in Shankar’s movies, where justice is an aesthetic, not a moral, a narrative convenience, not a necessity.  

This excess might have worked through the 2000s, and even in the 2010s, by turning from humans into robots, from shooting the familiar monuments to unfamiliar, oversaturated wastelands of beauty. But as we push forward into a new era, and as fears further change, the form must bend, or the form shall wither.