Conversations with Manirathnam — Baradwaj Rangan
Baradwaj Rangan has written a very good book titled ‘Conversations With Maniratnam”. Rangan has a lot of strengths which he has used to good effect in this book. Some aspects of this book pleasantly surprised me and some aligned with my criticisms of Rangan’s work overall as a film critic. But lets start with the positives.
This book took me back in time and made me relive the joys of watching movies during my childhood years. While in college, my favorite movie director was Manirathnam. And this trait I probably share with almost everybody else in my generation of Thamizh people. Manirathnam was the reason many urban madras Thamizh boys started tuning into Tamil movies as opposed to limiting themselves to just watching English movies. Rangan’s book drills and explores deep into a lot of decisions that Manirathnam made in his career as a director. I so wanted to know those details. A lot of of the information revealed in the book was new to me. Rangan is definitely a thinker and has a taste that articulates how Madras boys felt about movies and Manirathnam in general. Usually in interviews the interviewer asks a lot of bland questions that have already been asked by several magazines and news channels. This leads to stock answers and sound bytes. To Rangan’s credit he never asks whether Nayakan was lifted from Godfather (though Mani brings it up). He doesn’t even mention Amorres Perros. I liked that.
Several times Rangan pushes Mani in a specific angle or direction. This actually brings out a lot of Mani’s true opinions and thoughts that otherwise might not have come if he hadn’t been pushed. In those moments you realize that Mani is a sharp thinker and a remarkably balanced person. The chapter on Iruvar was the longest and my favorite (disclaimer: Maybe its my biased view — I have a special affinity to that movie). Every chapter had questions that weren’t asked that I badly wanted to ask. But among those — Kannathil Mutthamittal is the most under-explored chapter. Nayagan was before my time (i.e before I learned to enjoy movies or appreciate a director’s work in the movie), so I was unable to resonate with Rangan’s viewing experience upon release. If I may be bold enough to say so — I wouldn’t even rank Nayakan among Mani’s top 3 movies. But I get the point behind the chapter and why people like it. A.R.Rahman’s foreword was actually very impressive. It was a great start to the book.
Rangan’s introduction piece could have very well ruined the book. It was very unreadable and made me think he was pulling his usual problem of writing normal English and then replacing all regular words with synonyms from Barron’s wordlist.(there is sentence that goes “just as words bind themselves better to pristine parchment than to palimpsests..”). No one writes like this. at least not real people. Certainly no Madras boy uses words like ‘peripatetic’ in a real verbal conversation. I don’t buy the whole ‘this comes naturally to him’. Rangan also over-pushes the ‘madras based movies’ of Manirathnam. Mani had a perspective of a urban filmmaker that was absent then. But barring Agni Nakshathiram, I cant think of a Madras movie by Mani.
I remember reading somewhere that the easiest way to irritate a poet is to explain the poem to him. I guess this extends to movies and other creative streams as well. Rangan at many points in time tries to instantiate or interpret or explain scenes and other ‘directorial touches’ to Mani. Maybe I am over-interpreting this, which would be ironic, but I could feel Mani’s rising irritation as he tries to respond to Rangan’s line of questions on this angle. This lead me to another nit about the book. However, before going further one must appreciate Rangan’s integrity in reproducing the content into the book in a honest way that allowed me to express the nit.
Rangan, as his is style, overreaches for underlying message or subtext in movies. A few times he does catch what the director is trying to say between the lines. But many times he reads into things which simply aren’t there (or wasn’t conciously intended by the director). I don’t think he overreaches because he wants to position himself differently from other critics. Its probably some over-enthusiasm to spot clues and artistic touches that he believes the director has left for us to pick up. Every time when he (a) tries to join different movies under a single theme or narrative or (b) over-interpret the use of color and costume choices Mani pushes back. There is a point where Mani says “if you see it that way I’ll take it”..I also thought the ‘nallavana kettavana’ narrative that Rangan tries to arc across all Mani movies was slightly over stretched. This kind of ruined the last 3–4 chapters for me. In these chapters Rangan began to narrow down on the metaphor more than the real movie. I was very glad to hear Mani’s perspective on Raavanan. Which as I had hoped was very different from Rangan’s and many other’s interpretations of the movie. Rangan for some reason liked this movie, which I thought was a really bad movie and kept pressing on metaphors to the point where Mani had to stop him from doing so. Having said that Rangan did manage to squeeze out a confession from Mani that Aishwarya Rai wearing the white salwar was indeed a metaphor for purity ( I didnt think of that as any more than a good color for that kind of train shot). So he got one back from Mani there.
Overall, I enjoyed the book and would certainly recommend that people read it. It allows you to re-enjoy the moviesvia the eyes of a the film maker.
