Saivam

Review by Ashutosh Mohan

If done right, a story is the best way to drive home an idea;
otherwise, it might trivializeeven cheapen. Saivam, directed by AL
Vijay, is a decent attempt to try and convince people over to
vegetarianism, but as a film it lacks well, meat.

Kathiresan (Nassar) is a prosperous farmer in a village. Of his three
children, two are settled in Chennai and Dubai. A son, sons wife, and
their daughter Tamizh (Sara Arjun) live with him. Standard
grandfather-grandaughter chemistry is worked out between
Kathiresan and Tamizh who is deeply fond of a cock (Pappa) that is
kept in their backyard. Kathiresan invites everyone in the family over
to a temple festival. Relatives arrive from notvillage. After all the
camaraderie and cute bonding, the big family decides to visit the
village temple. This, according to me, has to be symbolic. A film that
was until now good fun, is going to turn into a tribute to the late
Rama Narayanan, maker of a multitude of divine flicks. As a last ditch
attempt at divine intervention, the cast is taken to a temple to pray.
As it usually happens in temples, Tamizhs frock catches fire.
Kathiresan panics and drops a platter bearing gods offerings, a
natural reactionbut, for god this explanation is not good enough,
announces a priest coming out of the sanctum sanctorum. Surely
there must be a vow they had made to god that they havent fulfilled
yet, he hazards. Once they fulfil their vow, everything should be
superfineno more fires or anything. The family remembers that
three years back they had indeed vowed (Voila!) to sacrifice Pappa as
thanks when they escaped an accidentand forgotten.
Everyone in the family starts looking back at the last three years like
Dumbledore with a Pensieve. They aver that, of course of
course!, all their problems (not able to get pregnant, not able to get
a tender, not able to manage a boss et al.) must have been due to
this deiva kuththam. They resolve to sacrifice Pappa ASAP. The
daughter from Dubai even calls her husband over the phone and
tells him that good days are coming, just wait until the sacrifice.
Tamizh is naturally shocked. The rest of the movie is about whether
she can save Pappa or not.

The problem with Saivam is not simply its harking back to deiva
kuththam-type tropes; it is assuming that everyone will invest in
unselfconscious characters trying to fulfill a vow made to their local
deity by killing a fowl which can act quite well. This has been a
general problem with AL Vijays films: he gets on with the story and
assumes that the audience will believe everything his characters do
as if it were real life. But since, most people who go to films know
that it's not real, they need characters that are well-rounded; they
aren't going to believe in stuff just because you assure them that
that is what really happened. For example, suddenly in a matter of
two minutes, everyone in the family decides not to sacrifice Pappa
simply because Tamizh asks them. Sure, she asks them in one of the
cutest ways possible, but we feel cheated; we, who have invested in
these characters for one and a half hours just for them to decide to
casually drop the whole matter and move on.

What about that elusive tender, that impossible pregnancy, that
tyrant boss? Post-climax, all problems solve themselves magically.
Even the impossible pregnancy: a visit to village and non-killing of
fowl solved problems which years of medical attention couldnt.
Eventually, the films central conflictwhether to sacrifice Pappa or
nothad nothing to do with whether the characters got what they
wanted; the film and it's characters moved in different directions.
AL Vijay has the distinction of being the first filmmaker to adopt
mega-serial type cinematographic techniques: whenever an event
occured, everyones facial reactions were meticulously recorded and
beamed out to cinema halls with no editing whatsoever. Before end
credits, he mentions: Back when I was a kid, this story was how I
became a vegetarian, according to my mother. That makes sense. If
he had actually remembered the incident firsthand, the film surely
would not have the consistency of a castle he constructed using
plastic playing cards... during a journey in an auto rickshaw... with a
missing wheel... during a storm... with Pappa driving the auto.