My first experience of a Tamil movie

It has been almost a year and a half that I have been in Bangalore and shared a room with two guys from Tamil Nadu. It has has been a very enriching experience in my life with the two techies. One of my room mates always insisted on me watching a Tamil movie for long since I was a student of media. Sometime back he told me he will take me for a movie not because it has Rajinikanth or Kamal Haasan in its cast but because it is by a critically acclaimed director Bala.

Now working in the entertainment section of a news portal I had got quite an insight into the Tamil film industry. There two things people down south are very good at. Firstly science and engineering and secondly they are all great movie buffs. Movie is a part of culture down south especially in Tamil Nadu. To cite an example Tamil industry has made two movies exceeding 100 Crore budget where as Bollywood is yet to clock that figure. Here Aishwarya gets paid Rs 6 crores for a movie and Katrina can charge Rs 2 crores for an item number.

So finally I was on my way to INOX to watch my first Tamil movie Naan Kadavul with my room mates. I had struck a deal with them that they will translate the movie to me although I knew it will be very difficult to do so. When the intro title started rolling in Tamil I was feeling quite out of place. I asked myself what am I doing here? But the opening shot of Kashi with a Hindi song in its background made me feel comfortable.

To my utter surprise about 40% of the dialogues were in Hindi as the movie was set initially out of Kashi where the protagonist was speaking most of his dialogues in our national language. What was funny was that many people sitting in the theatre were finding it hard to understand the dialogues in Hindi. I felt I was not the only one in the theatre who was having an issue with the language!

The movie had a superb screenplay and the story was unfolding at a good pace. The cinematography was just awesome especially some of the shots which were taken in the banks of Ganges in Kashi. In true cinematic sense the script was telling the story more with shots than with dialogue Isn't that what good cinema is all about? The movie ended with quite an unexpected and realistic manner unlike most of the Indian movies.

Overall it was great personal experience for me not because I watched a Tamil movie but because I tried my level best to understand the movie just through its visuals.