Spoilers ahead, tread lightly.
I can understand why people warmed up to Modha Rathri (now out on Netflix). In a landscape ransacked by Anirudh’s BGM shoring up reluctant films and heroes whose heroism is leaning more towards parody than piety, here is a film and filmmaker—debutante Raja Karuppasamy—who dared to tell an intimate, many-splendoured story set over the course of a day. Based on events that director Karuppasamy has himself witnessed and endured, casting family members, there is a warmth here that filters through even the most devious observations of its heady, nauseating cast of characters, and a desire to tell a story that means something, where reformed characters are, in fact, part of the arc—but Karuppasamy does this without flat finger-wagging. A clutter-breaking miracle.
Muthu (Anishma Anilkumar) and Maruthu (Rishikanth) are getting married in Thekkur. Maruthu, arriving from Dubai on the day of his wedding, does not even know that he is getting hitched. He arrives at the airport unshaven and moody.
Muthu, on the other hand, is in love with another man (Karuppusamy), and hopes he arrives in time for them to elope—but that man slept through his alarm and is now late for his own elopement, the irresponsible kind whose words rarely shape action, but speak so much, and with such idealism, you hope, something, somewhere will act up.
At the beginning of the film, you have two families desperate to marry off these two, who refuse to marry, and by the end, you get the two families desperate to separate these two, who now refuse to separate.
The symmetry is gorgeous. The more I write about the film, its grand designs and intimate desires feel not just refreshing, but radical. In the midst of the film, for example, Karuppuswamy gives space to a woman who refuses to let her daughter go to college, for fear of her pursuing some man. But he also allows for that woman’s own past, where she had to let go of a future in athletics to get married and mother a daughter, whom she is now bent on throttling. Violence is a cascading, generational malaise. Soft gazes get exchanged in the midst of loud arguments.
But to get at the soft gaze, I have to endure the loud argument. To get to the mother’s past, I have to endure her present. To arrive at this love for the film, I have to erase what I felt watching it—the irritation, the migraine, the slumping. Perhaps there is no love in the first place, if it can only find space by retrofitting.
The first hour and a half sets up this chaotic wedding day—the bed for the first night that needs to be delivered; the groom who has not yet arrived; the relatives who are breaking out in ripping anger at the slightest provocation; women suffering from headaches; men suffering from constipation. Here, you see what the film wants to be—a bumbling, messy, entertaining, potboiler, noisy but not shrill, silly but not slapstick.
But the tonality immediately slips, and instead, the film succumbs to all the vices it wanted to avoid—a shrill, slapstick sheen. Characters don’t speak, they screech at each other. Decibels are breached, slaps exchanged, as people are ushered into noisy panic. You can feel the film dial up the paranoia of its characters, fan those fires, as opposed to being the canvas on which their innate paranoia can take shape. It is this design that is too obvious, a thick barrier that makes it impossible to enter the film.
Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Taking Murphy’s Law as inspiration, Modha Rathri has a tonally schizophrenic first half—where the background score leans comical in one dialogue and sombre in the immediate next. Lunging from arguments to fist fights to arguments to concessions to arguments, the film might have benefited from some moderation—not because it is too chaotic, but because its chaos is too irritating. In the midst, we keep getting reminders of the number of hours till the first night—why, pray? There is no sense of tension in the build up. Why, then, should there be a payoff?
We have had films strike out in chaos around marriages and funerals—from Members of a Problematic Family this year to Ponman and Su for So from the previous year, where the chaos builds a sense of unmoored, witty, reckless threads of plot that unravel, an unraveling that is paced and pieced well together.
Here, the desire to showcase chaos—look, how chaotic this scene is—triumphs over the inhabiting of that chaos. The camera will keep panning from one end of the room to the other, where dialogues are being ricocheted, and this gives not the sense of dynamism, or a kind of freefall verbal rat-tat-tat, but a headache. At least, pan to the rhythm of the dialogue?
It is when Muthu and Maruthu finally get married that the film settles into a new, less painful flow. At the mandapam, Maruthu—reluctant and angry—looks at Muthu, who seems just as reluctant and angry, and in that recognition, something in him softens.
It is the softening that takes us through the second half—the first night. The women are sleeping outside their room. The men are getting drunk elsewhere. Both bride and groom have a secret past that the family are trying to keep hidden, while play-pretending revelry. Muthu’s lover is trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing to reach the home they are in.
Even as the film approaches its acme—where Muthu is given space to scream, a nihilistic scream that on paper can silence everything around her, a scream which in reality accomplishes none of that—the tenderness of the budding love story anchors the flailing bodies. Social commentary enters the film here, in unsubtle, but not heavy-handed ways. A small, framing device of a temple priest (Chetan) cursing the wedding to be doomed, but ultimately blessing it, loses its polish when the film refuses to build on the possibility of its supernatural power. Here, you can feel the film’s fear of breaching a boundary of realism. Why, then, set it up with such promise and noisy fanfare?
I can feel in Modha Rathri the excitement for the form of cinema—and what it is capable of saying, doing, and undoing—but there is such a chasm between the design and the delivery, the hope and the hang-up, I would rather not make that leap. Instead, I will appreciate the promise from the vast distance.