You know it’s happening in a hill station, but you don’t know where. You know it happened a while ago, but you don’t know exactly when. At times, sporadic flashbacks to the formative days of Rene and Iniyan’s love story are like memories, with no details about the time and place. With Natchathiram Nagargirathu, Ranjith has gone all out.

The daring experimental tone of Natchathiram Nagargiradhu is personally not surprising because there were glimpses of such eccentricity in Kaala’s ambiguous climax. Seldom Ranjith’s craft as a filmmaker is discussed as much as his politics and ideologies. Not just the content, Ranjith has experimented with the form as well.ĭushara and Kalidas Jayaram in Natchathiram Nagargiradhu

However, Ranjith pushes the limits here, doing away with many conventional methods of storytelling that mainstream Tamil cinema is used to. It’s a tested technique – a local and modern example would be Kamal Haasan’s Uttama Villain. As the theatre group explores the caste and gender politics of love for the play, we access the same by watching the drama that unfolds between them. Natchathiram Nagargiradhu is the journey of a multicultural theatre group in Pondicherry, which sets out to make a play about contemporary love. Contextualization of Ilaiyaraaja with regards to caste politics of Tamil Nadu is the kind of audacity that seeps through this film, which is also the most unabashed and indulgent work of Pa Ranjith. At one point, the debate turns ugly, when Iniyan hints that Rene’s appreciation of Ilaiyaraaja is motivated by her caste bias. He finally loses his cool when Rene starts singing Ilaiyaraaja songs, which leads to a heated argument. While the man wants to sleep, the woman chatters about love, marriage, etc annoying him. The film opens with the couple Rene and Iniyan lazing around in bed. Natchathiram Nagargiradhu is by far his most audacious work.

Vaal natchathiram movie