Watching the morning aarti at Assi Ghat, Varanasi, reminded me of two films: Hey Ram (2000) and Naan Kadavul (2009). It is a wonder how a location becomes a character in a film. Take Ooty Varai Uravu (1967) by late Sridhar, for example, which has the queen of hills in its title. Six years earlier, he had made the hilariously romantic Then Nilavu (1961), which was set in Kashmir. It took nearly 32 years for Kashmir to be rediscovered again when Mani Ratnam did Roja (1992).
To a large extent, Mumbai was also one such location, with Dharavi made famous by Mani Ratnam in Nayagan (1987).
His template became so successful that till date, any film with mafia undertones almost always gets based in Mumbai. And to underline his penchant for making locations more than just a backdrop, Mani Ratnam also made Bombay (1995). Earlier, he had shown us Mysore in sepia hues in Thalapathi (1991) but the place was not called so in the film. Or how about a Tamil film set in Delhi? K Balachander tried this in Varumaiyin Niram Sivappu (1980) but the amount of Tamil spoken far outweighed the Hindi in that film, and hence the location didn’t matter at all except in the climax, when the hero’s father comes to Delhi for a concert in the hope to find his long lost son who may drop-by to listen to him sing Bharathiyar songs. Shooting in a city outside Madras then was an expensive affair and thus in most Tamil films, a different city would be relegated to a mere name in some banner or a shop hoarding or at best, a static shot of its railway station.
Bharathirajaa brought a whole new appeal to villages. His villages didn’t even need a distinct name. The banyan tree, the panchayat scene, the parisal, the backwaters and the thatched huts along the mud roads with bullock carts and fields formed a ‘location package’ which felt like a breath of fresh air, like in 16 Vayathiniley (1977). This was a hallmark of most of his films thereafter. If Bharathirajaa’s films showed Theni, then Pollachi was a big shooting jaunt in the 90s (Chinna Gounder, Chinna Thambi, Nattamai, Cheran Pandian...) The district of Ramanthapuram was key to the story of Thevar Magan, while the Madurai heartland, after Paruthiveeran (2007), came to rule Tamil cinema.
The 80s saw songs filmed in the-then ‘foreign location’, Ooty (!), and now Kodaikanal is fast turning into that shooting hub.
But with the advent of small films, locations have turned ‘inward’. The one-way street corner, an apartment-hall, ECR, rooftop of a suburban house and sometimes, even the inside of a car becomes integral to the plot. But I yearn to see a location in a big city become a character again in a Tamil film. Do you?