Vaazhai Review: Mari Selvaraj’s Devastating Drama Is Half-Undone By Its Strained Beauty

Set in the 1990s in the village of Karunkulam, Mari Selvaraj’s Vaazhai is a big, punchy work, infused with a modest temper. Disparate dualities collide, some achingly, others less effectively. Holding up the film is Ponvel’s lead performance as the thirteen-year-old Sivanaindhan. The screenplay’s effervescence sings in the effortless exchanges between Ponvel and a crackling Raghul, playing Sivanaindhan’s best friend, Sekar. There’s a Rajinikanth-Kamal Haasan running gag belying their friendship, among the film’s more memorable playful conceits. Snatches of humour, riffing on cultural legacies, lighten fleetingly the mood in the film’s journey towards emotional wreckage.

At its best, Vaazhai is a flamboyant showcase for these two young actors. Ponvel is revelatory, thrillingly switching between a lively ball of energy and pained withdrawal.  His performance has the grounded, shifting specificity, a key element amiss in massive chunks of the film. The setting evokes several worlds jostling within. Besides the geographic isolation, a hopeless cycle of debt and deprivation, varied chasms in the village come to the fore. Power and privilege exist in layers, revealing themselves in the degree of knowledge/oblivion of the discomfort of others. There are several caste denominations in the village and those on its edges. The school teacher, Poonkodi ( Nikhila Vimal, luminous in an under-written role), who’s not from the village, is blissfully unaware of the boy’s overwhelming plight. Their relationship, etched in a slew of gushing songs, never acknowledges the place he comes from or the harshness of his circumstances. Sivanaindhan tucks it out when she’s around. Ponvel beautifully plays the rushing desire to express, failing and retrying impishly. Not that the teacher shows the slightest interest. Selvaraj is careful to base the relationship in a sweet, illusory space, in a conscious remove from the boy’s pitiless situations.Other teachers’ sole flicker of curiosity in the boy limits itself to the bruises on his neck, from hauling the plantain load for hours on end.

His mother (Janaki) is saddled with debt to the trader. There’s an advance she took to keep the family afloat, after her husband, a card-carrying communist,was found dead. To get themselves unbound, the family of three have no choice but to lug. All the escape-eyeing Sivanaindhan wants is to attend school and stick to homework. Education may enable a job but how far can it cut into historical lack of access to a life of dignity? The bleak emphasis strays to how cooped up the villagers are in misery and neglect. Their chief livelihood springs from lugging the plantain combs from the fields to the lorry. Generations slip by yet there’s little difference in their social status. Protests of the villagers for a one-rupee wage hike naturally comes at a price. The one steady thing through decades of inherited labour is public humiliation at the slimmest reluctance.

Vaazhai suffers from commercial trappings. There are misjudgements in the choice of proportions with which the director orchestrates certain trajectories. The bloom in the relationship between the boy and the teacher begins through an over-stretched subplot involving a handkerchief. Selvaraj maintains a fine grip on the awkwardness and flutters of unworldliness in this equation. But its development takes up too much screentime, without deepening the bond any further. It threatens to become one-note in its cloying quality. Some of this is also due to Santosh Narayanan’s score. For sure, it’s a thing of extravagant beauty. Spiked with all-consuming grandeur and force, the music lends epic dimension to this intimate narrative. But it also clouds the scope for quieter moments. Everything’s a tad too dialled up, in keeping with the mainstream cinema registers.

Vaazhai is about innocence and its unsalvageable-ness in historically oppressive structures. It’s the story of a childhood ruptured beyond reckoning. Sivanaindhan’s coming-of-age has no luxury of just being. Selvaraj keeps the viewer peeled on the sweeping sense of tragedy. The film takes wrenching turns but there’s always a smattering of beauty preceding it.

This poses a vital question: how much beauty is too much? Cinematographer Theni Eshwar imbues the film with an expansive scale, embedding the story amidst natural elements. There’s a lot, a lot of wide and top shots, capitalising on the sheer scenic spectacle girdling the village. Indeed, the terrain plays a significant role. Muddy fields the villagers have to trudge through, the maze of banana plantations that act as a space for both cruelty and romance, the river, even the birds circling in the sky-these are inseparable from Sivanaindhan’s journey.

After a point, however, these become diverting, despite a designed contrast between the beauty and the daily toil it hides. You get a strong sense the camera wishes to luxuriate in gorgeous vistas rather than prise hyper-specific world building. Juxtapositions between the people’s strife and the lush vicinity start feeling imposed . It’s in the pre-climactic stretches Selvaraj truly intwines nature and man in a shattering mix. This section is a masterclass in how to twist hope into unspeakable brutality. The very food, the banana cultivation and sale of which are tied to the villagers, is a basic right that goes denied by the traders/land holders. Heat, hunger, desperation and numbing grief combine in a horror-filled parade. The director spins together every element of the landscape. He creates a delirium, capping the section in an unforgettable moment when the battered boy finally grabs a meal. The lead up to it is a breathless piece of filmmaking. But even here there’s a caveat. Selvaraj superbly amps up the mounting dread. However all the summoned force simply deflates with melodramatic excess. In the propping up of a forceful, overt visual depiction, the might of the build up flattens.

Vaazhai also blends in sequences in blackand white. This interpellation swings between the prosaic and the gutting, reaching its power in the disorienting climax. The intermission in this film does act like a solid divider of two discrete, self-immersed chunks. Black-and-white cutaways interject the narrative fabric, funnelling a scrambling loss. These interruptions are haphazard. Whenever Selvaraj cuts back into black and white, the film weakens its hold, caught in a repetitive rut. Nevertheless, Vaazhai exerts a primal emotional explosion towards its close. It’s so raw and Ponvel so visceral you feel someone has sliced through the fibre of your being.