CHENNAI : I was late to the party, but it deserves an announcement and a week’s worth of column. I saw the SJ Surya-Priya Bhavani Shankar-Karunakaran starrer Monster. It left me surprised not scared like the title suggests. It brought to my mind Sheenagh Pugh’s poem ‘Sometimes’ and left me wondering if this could be one of the so-hard-to-find-sometimes in Tamil cinema. I’m going to make it all about Anjanam Azhagiya Pillai, the leading man of the movie played by Surya. As a child, Anjanam is taught the texts of Vallalar and the value of every creature living on the planet.
A scene early on has the young Anjanam using a leaf to lift an ant from a cup of water and I was biting my nail as if it were a thriller and predicting bullying in school, or some story that would harden the child. But thankfully, we don’t have that, and instead we cut to an adult male human with the same values and devotion for Vallalar, and a sensitivity that has stuck.
This seems like a good phase of Surya’s career arc that has gone from wielding the mic to Monster — the first few phases included films that made parents squirm in their seats (yes, Kushi), and movies whose music was only as far to it as we could get (New) and then the very many baddie roles. And then there is Anjanam, which made me think, ‘Sometimes, somewhere, there’s a fine actor in there”. But back to Anjanam, and oh, how lovely it is to watch a grown and tender man on screen (seems like we have a disproportionate-representation-of-nice-men-on-screen problem).
Anjanam has a mother who doesn’t play messenger to his love and that he doesn’t disrespect. He sees no point in speaking ill of someone, or in revenge. When they are stood up by the woman they wait to ‘see’, the mother is just beginning to get emotional (not in the female super villain how-dare-you way), when he kindly leads her out, there is disappointment but no drama, and no family feud is set off.
In fact, it is the same woman Mekala (Priya Bhavani Shankar) with whom a romance soon blossoms. They know exactly who each other is and this romance is aware, accepting, mature, upfront, understanding and organic. In the lead-up to the marriage, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law don’t have a tiff, and the couple unpack more about themselves without backstory surprises.
Anjanam doesn’t look like he works as a physical trainer, he doesn’t not intend to hold a dozen men down in a fight; actually, I don’t think he intends to include violence in his life plans at all. He’s a man with a government job, (and there is no corruption track), he is responsible (certainly with water), staying in a rented place by himself till he buys his house (cooks as well), and the accumulation of property isn’t even the happy ending, only the beginning of the story! Anjanam can take no for an answer, and has learnt to be happy with what he gets, and like most inhabiters of the planet today, buys a far too expensive sofa on EMI to balance family and finances — no schemes to rob the store, no — just honet over the table transactions.
This man is afraid to keep the diamond that doesn't belong to him — aah, to have anyone but a self-righteous cop do that!Anjanam has colleagues that he speaks to, a boss that he does not hate or swear at, a job that he turns up to, a position in which he is respected.
He has a friend in co-worker Ravi, and we don’t know if he has many more, he probably does, and the point of the story wasn’t to establish how popular he was. This one friend is no drinking partner, (Oh, this is a movie with a helluva lot of poison but alcohol isn’t one of them), and yes be shocked, Ravi played by Karunakaran is no off-loader nor does he give lousy love advice.
I definitely don’t like rats, but I can’t place whether I like this rat now, or like it because of what the rat means to Anjanam’s life or I like it because I like him. When I call a cute rat ‘it’ I wish ‘it’ had been given a name! I loved watching a non-macho hero, it was great to see that so many stereotypes we have of the hero, characters, romance, the plot were all broken. And when I say that Monster the movie has no monstrous, toxic masculinity, I do feel like ‘Sometimes, things don’t go, after all, from bad to worse…’