“True terror,” Kurt Vonnegut said, “is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” Or making movies. Sukumar’s Pushpa 2: The Rule could well be the end of cinema as we know it. It is an episodic theatrical movie like an OTT series. Netflix and Amazon should watch out.
Normally, a movie has a basic three-act structure: a plot hook within, say, the first 15 minutes that destabilises the protagonist, the rising odds confronting the hero/heroine for the next 50 minutes or so, and the resolution.
But the Pushpa franchise sees itself more as OTT in theaters than a movie. Just as Pushpa 2: The Rule ends in an episodic cliff-hanger, Pushpa 3 is announced. We get up from the seats happy, deaf, and ready for more—of the same.
As with Pushpa 1, the eponymous hero essayed with neurotic intensity by Allu Arjun, Pushpa 2 clearly continues to consume tribal steroids mixed in all his regular mutton-curry meals. Sukumar sees to it that almost every scene has a conflict. It almost always begins with the low caste/black sheep protagonist wanting something, is humiliated, and then getting it.
This formula is how the movie grows—mostly sideways. For example, the state CM Narasimha Reddy, who is in power partly because of Pushpa’s charity, refuses to be photographed with the sandalwood smuggler, fearing a political backlash. But Pushpa’s wife Srivalli (Rashmika Mandanna) has been promised the gift of the photograph. Naturally, the virtuous, family-oriented Indian audience is more aligned with Pushpa’s honour at home than the CM’s political fortunes.
So when Pushpa decides to oust the unclickable Reddy and bring in his photo-friendly candidate in his place by ‘July 24’, the theatre breaks into catcalls and applause. The family-loving, god-fearing, thieving, and marauding underdog is upsetting the applecart of the family-loving, god-fearing, thieving, marauding CM. A substantial part of the action is predicated on avenging this insult. This would be another episode in an OTT series.
The fundamental over-the-top nature of Pushpa’s world is perhaps the underlying condition of Indian reality. Sukumar is a master at setting up the ‘want’ between characters in this hyper world. The trick keeps the action moving.
But it is also useful to sustain the unusual entropy in the movie’s world. If Pushpa enters a scene, acceleration of disorder is guaranteed. And only he, with the input of his mythical energy derived from nameless blue tribal gods and goddesses, can bring a certain existential validation to the universe of Chittur, a kind of Gotham without the glitz.
The absurdity at the heart of all things Pushpa is established right in the first scene, in which we see a nonchalant Pushpa, discovered by the goons running the Yokohama port in Japan inside a container of contraband red sandalwood, strung high over the sea from a crane, coming to his senses (or its opposite) and killing or maiming pretty much all of them and then, presumably, swimming back to Andhra Pradesh. Indians are cheap enough to see in this Jap-bashing a vicarious stab of patriotic glee. We are bullies by default.
The audience went crazy all through the Yokohama scene, so totally redundant to the plot because a 'low caste' (a mitigating factor in our current social value system) superhero was justified in slaying a bunch of perplexed Japanese who only wanted Pushpa to explain what he was doing in a lungi in their area.
Low caste or black sheep, brand Pushpa works as it is essentially a Hindu mythological movie with tribal subtexts. Consider, for example, the ‘super scene’ in which a temporarily transgender Pushpa is blessed with divine energies and walks unharmed on coals. Or in a scene soon after, where he finds himself bound by hands and feet and begins to fly in the air, defeating an army of villains by his teeth. India’s very own dental demon.
A normal movie template, as I said, consists of a central conflict with one or two subplots. In Pushpa 2: The Rule, there are many. But the central one, taking off from the first installment of Pushpa, is the one between Pushpa and the police officer Bhanwar Singh Shekhawat (Fahadh Faasil), an apparently brilliant IPS psychopath from Rajasthan, perhaps subliminally establishing the South-North divide in the current cultural discourse.
The conflict between these two deranged people (one a victim, the other the oppressor) is developed for much of the 3 and 1/2 hour fare. Just as we settle down to its inevitable pyromaniac resolution, the last 40 minutes come up with another conflict: Buggi Reddy.
Buggy kidnaps Pushpa’s niece, Kaveri. And so Pushpa, despite the humiliation and abuse he has received from Kaveri’s father, takes out his gun and rides a helicopter to his armageddon. He emerges victorious by the skin of his teeth.
By now the central conflict has been forgotten after a very long build-up to it. Is anyone confused? Yes, but most seem enraptured, too. Sukumar has brought them to a world where there is little difference between order and chaos. So, when the last scene shows a hand pressing a button (Shekhawat, who else?), and in the distance, Pushpa’s family and fellow smugglers are shown being blown up, we know the central conflict will live to fight another day in another episode: Pushpa 3. Only instead of on Netflix, you watch it in a theatre.
(Views are personal)
CP Surendran
Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is 'One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B'