Varshangalkku Shesham is a tribute to two teachers in Vineeth Sreenivasan’s life, Chand Pasha Bhai, his music teacher who exposed him to the world of ‘moplah’ music, and his classical music guru ‘Thalassery Balan’ master. Both these men aspired for greater heights in their musical careers but ended up having to confine themselves to a life teaching music. These two unsung artists get a thanks card at the beginning of the film and Vineeth has been clear to call out their influence on his rose-tinted love letter to cinema. But even if Vineeth had stayed away from particularly calling out his influences, it would only make sense for Varshangalkku Shesham to be a composite of some real life artists who bit off a bit more than they can chew, artistically speaking. The film reeks of this melancholic sense of ordinary people driven by hope.
The film follows two friends, who take up the difficult choice of taking the final leap of faith and following their artistic instincts in Vineeth Sreenivasan’s iteration of the paradise-adjacent streets of ‘old madras’s film town ‘Kodambakkam’, considered both a fertile ground for a lucky few, and a burial place for a few film dreams. If you have a passing understanding of this filmmaker’s work, you know this is not Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), another love letter to the medium told through the perspective of two buddies who are more than brothers.
There is no tirelessly flamboyant trivia like quality to the way pop film history is represented in the more melodramatic Varshnagalkku Shesham as opposed to the former, but you can see echoes of Tarantino’s childlike glee in this affectionate look back at the past. Nor is this film close to Iruvar (1997), Mani Ratnam’s ambitious take on two friends, united by cinema but separated by personal ideals. Vineeth is more interested in the little crevices of artistic self-doubt and nostalgia that itself is fodder enough for another ten feature films.
Vineeth Sreenivasan is content with a story-within-a-story framing device for his film, where two separate meetings between two friends in different timelines is treated with the narrative anticipation of romantic partners reuniting after many obsolete years. For him, the artistic insecurities of a free spirited musician Murali (Pranav Mohanlal) and the subdued cockiness of a more industry-friendly conformist filmmaker Venu (Dhyan Sreenivasan) is ideal material that gets at two aspects of his filmography, ’Wholesomeness’ and ‘Nostalgia’.
There is this tendency to look back at a forgotten time and a particular way of doing things, with a sort of beloved reverence in his body of work. Let's have a look at some of the few major artistic and creative references that are part of the text of Varshangalkku Shesham.
No Malayalee can walk away from Varshangalkku Shesham without feeling positively charged seeing two sons, taking over the reins from their legendary fathers, who also happen to share one of the most iconic screen partnerships. The tail-end shot featuring Pranav Mohanlal and Dhyan Sreenivasan together on frame, looking ahead and looking behind simultaneously on their personal journeys is a call back to still from Mohanlal and Sreenivasan classic Nadodikkattu (1987), which is a major text for the filmmaker. The film also references the Sathyan Anthikad comedy in another important scene where Venu (Dhyan) and Murali (Pranav Mohanlal) exchange a knowingly on-the-nose dialogue reference from the film.
Vineeth however, makes this particular exchange “Kurach Vellam Cherkam le?” from the original film told in an entirely different context, work as an economical device to set up the storytelling ability of Venu (Dhyan) and set up his early penchant for greatness in his friends eyes. There is a sense of purpose and levity in this passing reference that both endears and informs the fate of the two artists, who realise each other’s life altering talents by chance.
Varshangalkku Shesham, which means, “years later” is quite a vague title in the sense that you don’t understand how many years later. If you look closer, at no point in the film do you get an explicit reference to the particular period the film is set in. Starting with Venu’s teenage, the film includes slides of Venu and Murali’s different life experiences. But there is a trick. You can understand the period through the film’s meta references.
When Murali and Venu landed in Kodambakkam, it was the day election results were announced and the Kollywood star MGR became the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu for the first time. This was around May or June of 1977. The film also pays a hat tip to Superstar Rajinikanth, who was an up-and-coming actor then. And in the song that follows, ‘Jeevithagaadhakale’, you get a glimpse of a young man practising throwing the cigarette up in the air and catching it between his lips – which, as we call it now, is Superstar’s signature cigarette flip.
What if I tell you that in the next 20-odd minutes, the film brushes past three years of the duo’s life in Kodambakkam? Yes, by the time Venu becomes a director and the song ‘Nyabagam’ is out, it is the May or June of 1980. In a passing acknowledgement to the maestro, you see that Venu’s film Endrendrum Arasan and music composer Indhra Dhanush’s name written right next to the 1980s Tamil film Thai Pongal, which has music by Ilaiyaraaja.
This is the sort of character reference that makes more sense and rounds off the familiarity of a particular character mold, only when the filmmaker opens up about his influences. Vineeth has been vocal about his inspiration for the peculiarly free flowing character design for Murali, played by Pranav Mohanlal. There is a particular archetype of actor Murali’s screen roles (coincidentally also contributing to the character’s name in the film) from the late 80’s and early 90’s that has come to define an idiosyncratic rebel in Malayalam cinema.
There is this recurring image of the kurta-clad, lean, chain-smoking rebel that passes through people’s lives as a feather blowing unscathed through air. You can have numerous references in Murali’s filmography, affected with his peculiar cadence and stiff body movements, moving about reciting obscure poems and getting lost in the grip of alcohol. Pranav Mohanlal gets to play the mysteriously opaque artist, whose bottled up talent is repeatedly turned down by a crippling sense of insecurity and self doubt. The actor’s striking physical similarities to Murali’s bygone characters, especially the drunkard father trying to reunite with his teenage daughter in Kamal’s Champakulam Thachan (1992), coincidentally also penned by Vineeth’s legendary father Sreenivasan lends more credibility to the character. On the surface, the parallels are minimal but the soul of Murali’s rebellious streak and irreverent ways channel nicely in Pranav’s free-wheeling artist who functions in his own accord.
The director cites Mohanlal’s iconic performance as ‘Nandagopan’ in Siby Malayil’s classic Kamaladalam (1992) as a conceptual base for Pranav’s Murali in Varshangalkku Shesham. Vineeth’s reference to the character might come as a more urgent callback, and deep down the murkiness in characterisation ties these performances together. They almost look identical in the way they dress in long, baggy Kurtas and their defiant sense of independent spirit that sometimes works against their relationships with people.
Vineeth was also peculiar to call out the necklace that Mohanlal wore in Kamaladalam being directly co-opted to be a similar property in the film, worn by Pranav Mohanlal that somehow remains the only thing that remains constant in his life, alongside his music. The entitled genius, with a looming sense of abandon, is a direct descendant of Mohanlal’s one of a kind performance in Kamaladalam that mixes the heights of indiscipline with a gloomy narcissism, that relates to the world only in relation to their own ever changing self importance.
We enter the second half of Varshangalkku Shesham with a direct riff on the popular song ‘Vaathil Melle Thurannoru’ from the film Neram (2013). The context in which Vineeth introduces this song is also important as we see the new generation taking over the reins from the old guard, in the scene where a new director decides to join hands with an old timer to make a long unmade script, into a new feature film. This song placement is important as it works to ease in the quick tonal variation of the second half that follows the events that occur in the present timelines, where an age old screenplay is going to be turned into a new feature film.
Neram, being an important film that spearheaded the new wave movement in Malayalam cinema finds itself lending adequate storytelling pretext for Vineeth to shift gears and change his approach to the latter half. There are also passing references to Premam (2015) by way of the ever popular leitmotif from the song ‘Aluva Puzhayude’ that features Nivin Pauly reminiscing for a moment on screen about his ‘Aluva’ based boy-next-door image and the film that changed his career trajectory.
A few minutes into Varshangalkku Shesham, you get a ghazal like riff on the songs of OP Nayyar and MS Baburaj with the Amrit Ramnath’s exquisitely rendered composition ‘Madhu Pakaroo’ which introduces the enigmatic, drunk, singing escapades of Murali (Pranav Mohanlal), who gets an old school song introduction. In the following scene, Vineeth Sreenivasan uses the hymn of ‘Oru Pushpam’, a traditional romantic song about longing and a lover's wait, to unite his two protagonists, who are bonded over by their love for one artist, MS Baburaj. The view of the two lost souls, hymning to the eternal Malayalam composition while on a boat in 1970’s Kerala takes us right to Vineeth's vision of an eternal past and hopeful future for his leads.
The song also finds a call back in the later half of the screenplay where Murali and Venu’s chances at redemption are upended just before things were going fine for both of them. Like how tamil films use the music of Ilaiyaraaja to contextualize certain themes and aspirations of their heroes, Varshangalkku Shesham uses MS Baburaj as a jumping off point for landing its big ideas of hopeful nostalgia and the need to dream big.
For a film as drenched in film history and inside industry anecdotes for its runtime, Varshangalkku Shesham also makes sly references to literature, especially the literature of french writer ‘Victor Hugo’. A Malayalam translated copy of a Victor Hugo classic, quite possibly ‘Les Misérables (though the film makes it a point not to mention the title anywhere) becomes the hinge of a romantic relationship and also the basis for Murali coming to terms with Venu’s abilities to tell stories. You get an incomplete translation sent aboard a train and a hopeful reader looking forward to the translated copy even after reading the original in hopes of maybe discovering something new.
With Inputs from Harshini SV.