'Diesel' Movie Review: Harish Kalyan Anchors A Lost, Lazy Film

With big, puppy dog eyes and an angular nose that could crater dimples into cheeks, facial hair that hoods over his lips, nimble legs that slip into skinny pants, a bicep wide enough to hold a strange tattoo of his dead mother as a mermaid, and a mop of hair so thick and wild, it requires its own continuity supervisor, actor Harish Kalyan finds the pitch of his character in Diesel, Vasu or Diesel Vasu, somewhere between the charming boy from a romantic film and the vengeful hero from an action one, between the lithe dance movements of Vijay and the handsome, brooding anger of Surya, not quite either, not quite both. 

Directed by Shanmugam Muthusamy, the film has been in conversation for over three years. Two years ago, they released the 'Beer Song' which had its own viral journey, waiting for a film to follow suit, which, having finally made landfall in the theaters, one wonders what the delay really was about. Scale is often an excuse for lacking intention. Diesel might be one such casualty, a film that keeps growing in size without really asking, what is it really that is expanding—the stakes or the world; they are not the same, though they are often confused by amateur filmmakers as one—till it is too late and the pot of hot air sizzles into an intercut climax that slashes all possibilities of resonance.  

In 1979, a pipeline was laid along the northern Chennai coastline, separating the fishing community from the coast. The protests against this failed, with the police raining down violence, and instead, the locals pivoted to siphoning some of this karuppu thangai or crude oil, to make a diesel mafia, whose proceeds can go back to the community the pipeline was harming in the first place. This is a brilliant piece of making your own justice when injustice is the reigning mood. Not demanding it, but literally, making it. 

One of the chief figures of this mafia is Manohar (Sai Kumar), who raises Vasu after both his parents die at sea—one due to an explosion of a boat filled with crude oil, and the other due to the tsunami. Vasu, a chemical engineer, helps run this syndicate, which gets challenged by Balamurugan who has the support of the local DCP Mayavel (Vinay Rai), a grotesque villain who insists on controlling the number of criminals, instead of fighting for the lack of criminals. His idea of justice is fascist, one of total control. When Vasu humiliates him, that, too, in front of his family, the story topples into full gear. 

The police come off as a rotting, violent institution in Diesel—nailing protestors, meddling into resolved affairs, with neither an eye on justice nor restoration, only revenge. They are essentially the stooge of the politicians, and when they are not, they insist on making the public their stooge. 

There is also a larger arc here, about vellai thangai—lithium—which will be exported from a port that Pathan (Sachin Kundelkar) wants to build so he can export this mined lithium from Kashmir, to Russia. The local fisherpeople, already burdened by the disappearing fish due to the pipeline, will be entirely displaced from this infrastructure project, and the film has to mobilize public action to prop up Vasu’s private heroism. (Frequent protests by fisherpeople against Adani ports and their expansion keep littering the news cycle.)

In the midst of this scheming, is a love story which is so underwritten, the only way for it to progress is constant coincidence—the first time they meet is narrative convenience, the second, third, and tenth instance is narrative laziness. What connects the two is a dream of the woman (Athulya Ravi) about being saved from drowning by a mermaid—the same mermaid on Vasu’s arms. The film is trying to connect cosmic dots, with such a feeble female presence, the film has to keep creating excuses to keep her in the film. After a point, she blurs out as the film’s central tensions—of corrupt development at the cost of the livelihood of the locals—come into focus, and, perhaps, it is for the better, for her presence is neither reprieve from the violence of the film, nor balm from its aftermath. 

What really troubled me was despite the apparent years swallowed by this film’s production, it has this fractured texture, where action and reaction feel divorced, as though they do not belong to the same motion. As though the lips and words do not belong to the same dialogue. As though the tattoo and the skin don’t belong to the same body, shifting constantly with the angles. As though romance and action—which have always found ways to make an uneasy cohabitation—don’t belong to the same movie. Scenes feel cut from the middle, to hasten the film, frames seem to have been hacked out, so mid-sentence the face has moved forward to a lagging dialogue in a film where being late is treated without urgency, in a climax where a central character dies in a hazy intercut between too many things. A film cannot hold the weight of its excitement if it cannot act on it with some semblance of intention.