Director: Mani Ratnam; Writer: Mani Ratnam; Producer: G. Venkateshwaran; Cinematographer: P.C. Sriram; Cast: Karthik, Prabhu, Amala, Nirosha, G. Umapathi, Janakaraj, V.K. Ramaswamy, Jayachitra, Sumitra, Vijayakumar, Tara
Summary: Rathnam’s hit follow-up to Nayakan (1987) is
a music video-type fantasy with rapid cutting,
hazy images and flared lights. It also boasts
one of the most sexually explicit song
picturisations to date: the camera slithers
along, peeking at a woman autoerotically
engaged in an indoor swimming pool. The
plot involves two half-brothers, one a cop
(Prabhu) and the other a streetwise hood
(Karthik), the two mothers (Jayachitra,
Sumitra), and the shared father (Vijaykumar)
who runs separate family establishments for
them. The end, adapted from the Godfather
(1972) hospital sequence, has the two
brothers uniting to reinforce, literally, the law
of the father (who is a Judge). After the
unsatisfactory conflict between the brothers,
one realises, in the critic K. Hariharan’s words,
‘that the real hero of the film is actually
behind the camera [p]ulling out every
gimmick available in the ad-man’s repertoire’.
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