Thael (Disney+Hotstar)
2.5 stars
Directed by Hari Kumar
If anyone had taken my advice before doing a Tamil remake of the stunningly attractive and violent Korean film , Kim Ki-Duk’s Pieta I’d have laughed my head off.
I mean , come on! We revere the mother-figure. We can’t have the hero bashing up and lusting after a woman who claims to be his mother(which she is not, but at the time when he thrashing and lusting after her, he doesn’t know that she is not).
Pieta featured a seriously disturbed protagonist who maims his victims in lieu of unpaid debts. That’s what he does for a living. Everyone loathes him. He is okay with that.Pieta was blunt brutal bloody and bestial the way only Korean cinema can be.
The Tamil remake softens the blow. Prabhu Deva debt collector Durai too is unsparing in his brutality. But his violence is on the whole far less permanent in its repercussions , although we do see a maimed man staring accusingly at Durai.
The intensity and the volatility of the relationship that grows between Durai and a woman who barges into life home and kitchen claiming to be his mother is also considerably modified. The original had a stark undercurrent of sexuality in the mother-son equation. That is understandably done away with in Tamil, and yet there is a desperate anxiety in the relationship,of two lost souls colluding in desperation.
Easwari Rao plays the mother with a weltering impact.Although she looks a little too young to be Prabhudeva’s mother the two actors work well together , bringing to the mother-son equation an element of unorthodoxy while remaining within moral boundaries.Vignesh Vasu’s camera catches the colours of selfdestruction.From a splashy pink to show debauchery to an inky sunless black and grey for isolation .
Prabhu Deva is incredibly intense as Durai, a family-less man who has nothing to lose, and is hence fearless. A little twitch of the eyebrow, some flaring of the nostril convey so much that words often do not. This is a remarkably accomplished performance tainted and compromised by some typical indigenous interpolations. There is a dancebar girl chasing Durai down although he doesn’t even give her second glance after the weekly fuck.
And there is Yogi Babu, annoying the hell out of every frame that he figures in.
And then , the killer blow: the songs and dances, woefully out of place in this rigorously hotblooded drama that deconstructs the mother-son relationship while subverting the mythological link between the nurturer and the offspring.
In spite of the glaring blemishes Theal will shock you with its irreverent disregard for convention and tradition. It is a film that fearlessly walks a road never taken by Indian cinema taking the Ma out of the cinematic boundaries making her vengeful, carnal and ruthless.
By interpolating songs and a one-sided love-interest , Theal dilutes the impact of the original considerably. What redeems the film is Prabhu Dheva. He makes Durai a brutal product of a capitalist society that uses its wounded souls to make bloody wounds in those who are weak and vulnerable.