'Bison' Movie Review: Mari Selvaraj Rewrites Rules of the Sports Drama

Several aspects of Bison will urge you to keep rewatching the film, but if there’s one that kept surprising me, it was its editing. More than a smooth linear edit, Sakthi Thiru builds up scenes like he’s stacking Jenga blocks. Just when you feel too overwhelmed to absorb the layers playing out in one scene fully, he chooses to insert that with a tiny reaction shot or a cutaway that will immediately take you through the entire magnitude of Kittan’s (played by Dhruv Vikram) journey and how much he’s had to go through to get where he has. 

For example, a scene right at the start, when Kittan joins his school kabaddi team. We know kabaddi runs in his blood, but we also know the reasons why he’s unable to be a part of his village team. But just as a teacher encourages him to join the school team, we get crosscuts of a training montage, cut with minute shots of a pair of scissors chopping off multi-coloured bands tied to students’ wrists.

By now, we know that these bands are markers of caste among students and with these inserts, filmmaker Mari Selvaraj signifies the core point of this film and of how a sport is perhaps the only route to emancipation for boys like Kittan. More than bands, these are shackles that are being broken, showing you the power of kabbadi and what it can do.

When the movie opens with Kittan trying to wait his turn to play for India in the Asian Games, the opponent is Pakistan, nonetheless, increasing the stakes to an unimaginable degree. From the sidelines of this tournament, we go back to different experiences along Kittan’s life that made him who he is— an international player who hails from a village still steeped in segregation.

But as is always the case with Mari’s film, triumph is always served with a side of tragedy. Not for a moment do we feel life is ever going to get better for Kittan. Just when you feel he’s crossed one obstacle, we begin to feel instinctively about the next challenge awaiting Kittan. 

This largely makes this a sports drama in which the drama is always meant to be more important than sports. Kittan hails from an oppressed community in Thoothukudi and there’s not a single route that opens up for him by luck. In another beautifully edited sequence, Kittan is punished and forced to run around his school ground. But as he keeps running, unable to stop, the camera cuts to flashes of Kittan as a young boy, running behind a car as his mother is being taken to a hospital. Without any clues, we’re able to understand all that’s already happened in his life, giving us the feeling that we’re reading a novel from somewhere in the middle.

But the writing complements the editing so well that running isn’t just a visual echo throughout Bison. We hear Kittan talking about feeling exhausted from all the running he’s always had to do, right from when he was a boy. If it’s running away from the shackles of caste where it all begins, his life remains an attempt to run away from ground realities, one gruelling tournament after another.

Yet the metaphor that remained most impactful is how his life itself becomes a game of kabaddi. At first, we feel like the film might force us to take an obvious side between the two characters played by Ameer and Lal, both leaders and rivals of opposite caste groups within the film. But it’s not as simple as pledging your loyalty to Ameer’s character Pandiarajan alone. Even Lal’s Kandasamy, despite being from the oppressor community, gives Kittan reasons to question his standing.

This creates the effect that Kittan is always stuck between these two sides, always being forced to choose. As Pandiarajan himself puts it, after a battle, you either get people who want to hug you and join your fight, or you end up antagonising people who are looking for ways to kill you.

The intensity of this quandary is such that you feel like Kittan is stuck. This could either be the two sides of having to choose between his father and his school PT coach. Or later, when he has to choose between two political rivals. Throughout the film, you also sense this powerlessness in Kittan as though he’s being puppeted around by people much bigger than he is, within a world that has no place for him.

Dhruv doesn’t get more than 10 to 15 dialogues throughout the film, and yet he establishes his devastation with such minimal expressions that you begin to feel his powerlessness in your gut. This is also Mari’s most stunningly shot film, helped by Ezhil Arasu. He is incapable of composing a single ordinary frame, but there are literally hundreds of images you will never be able to shake off from Bison.

And just as much as you respect Dhruv’s performance, you also admire the writing that has gone into creating characters like Pandiyarajan and Kandasamy, making them some of the most complex in recent times.

It’s among the best films to have released this year and among the absolute best sports dramas to have emerged from Tamil cinema. It overwhelms you in places as much as it leaves you breathless, each time Kittan goes across the line, shouting Kabaddi, Kabaddi, Kabaddi...hoping he finds his way back home.