Maharaja (2024)

Spoilers

Martin Scorsese said Marvel films are not “cinema” … He may have meant whatever he meant, but it definitely raises the question…. What constitutes cinema? At the minimum level, we expect a skilful usage of image and sound to give an experience, emotional or psychological…. Like Velasquez’s Old Woman Making an Egg, like the way Rajesh Kumar wrote the terrific punch dialogue for the baddie, it is not only what is inside and outside the frame, but also when they are inside and outside that determines a good film…. So, you might think that Maharaja was a brilliant showcase for the medium of film…  I don’t know… But he raises questions in me which I don’t know if I would have had had Maharaja not been a film or as Scorsese would say, cinema….

The plot involves Maharaja, played by a great Vijay Sethupathi, who reports a complaint about a missing “Lakshmi” …... It would be incorrect of me to divulge any more details because Maharaja is, a very plot focused film….  Its usually preferrable for an audience to have a character focussed film because it in a certain way gives the illusion that we are in control of our lives…. Maybe we are in the moments that we get to decide if we want to obey our parents or defy them to write something etc…. But are we really in control? That’s questionable…. A plot focussed film like Maanagaram, Maharaja seems to be like a constant dose of injection needed to remind us that we are ultimately puppets…

What if I told you that the inciting incident of the whole story of Maharaja was the absence of a battery? Or maybe the misplacement of a necklace…... Someone could point out that it is neither of the 2 and is probably the action of a character… It could be very well true that any one of these things could be the inciting incident… And that’s the most fascinating thing. Just like another fascinating characteristic of a robber…. He is nonchalant about the rape of a woman in the house he robbed, but it turns out in the very next scene that he himself has a child… A Female child….

It feels almost as if, the film is reaching out and slapping us, to cure us of our optimistic tendencies… It says, no this person is not only devoid of any moral but is also a very cruel.Or the way the scene of him going to house is given to us….

The scene of the robbery ends and it cuts to his wife opening the door for him with him playing cute with his daughter…. It seems so shocking but also so nonchalant, to him. But the way this scene is present (in chronology of the screenplay), after the showcase of another police inspector who is extremely money minded, we get to a twist featuring him which is a reassurance of our own belief in humanity…. A lady in front of me even shouted “Yes that’s what you should do” when the inspector justifies his position due to him having a daughter….  

And another interesting factor is the way the rearrangement of scenes makes us go from liking to almost hating a character… He being a man of age shocks us even more so by virtue of how he casually mentions the action of rape….

But another interesting parallel that I thought would have some importance is that just like Maharaja, another character has an issue with one of the “evil” guys due to his love for an inanimate object…. The way this is shown, we might think it might be related to the film as a parallel, but it doesn’t… Or just like the way the above scene starts of jovially and suddenly violence erupts, just as in the first time Maharaja goes to complain about Lakshmi…. The violence in the film felt very real and I thought Nithilan was going somewhere with this angle, but either he didn’t intend anything or I didn’t see the thing that was needed…

There is an interesting use way the film jumps timelines, but as I had said previously, this too seems to be part of the “pseudo-2024” film gang…. What is even more frustrating is that the film never even mentions a timeline but jumps a good deal of years… This really felt like an impulsive/indecisive who couldn’t spoil the brilliant story with the very primitive and useless evolution of the world… It seems then fitting that somehow the film, despite jumping years doesn’t seem different except for the look of the characters, as if they had paused the world around them and had jumped ahead….

Also, due to the extreme focus on the plot, it of course doesn’t make us feel a certain “ethartham”… oh yes, that it feels a bit too over-tightened  as a script with everything properly connecting a bit too much… But it could very well be the nonlinearity of the script that makes us feel this.

But another glaring issue is the use of sexual assault as a “tool” (and not an experience of a character) to engineer this plot and hence this film, incriminating Nithilan in the fate that a character undergoes…. My mother who doesn’t even watch films much, accurately predicted the purpose of a shot of a foot…. It seems that filmmakers still are teaching us “ABCD” instead of teaching us how to make sentences…. It isn’t helped by the fact that we constantly have shots which are so distinct  and different that we realise they are going to lead somewhere… This happens not only visually but also in dialogues….

But there are pleasures in the film too…. The way a beautiful trucking shot connects Maharaja to an inspector who is beating a criminal, the way Anurag Kashyap climbs upstairs…

Nithilan hasn’t done a Mani Ratnam but you definitely can say that he has pulled a Rajesh Kumar here (with all of his faults too)……