Director: M Muthaiah
Cast: Arya, Siddhi Idnani, Prabhu
You know you’re witnessing a Madurai formula film when the unimaginably bulky lead character, whose entire personality trait revolves around thrashing angry men, adjusts his dhoti mid-punch. You also know you’re watching the said formula film when the same man, when asked to look at pictures of prospective brides, instead nudges his mother to choose. “After all, the girl I’m going to marry will be spending more time with my mom than myself,” goes the dialogue. Arya’s Kathar Basha Endra Muthuramalingam is every bit the exhaustive formulaic romp (one wonders if such films must be rechristened the rural slasher movie, considering the amount of gratuitous violence involved) that we’ve grown up watching, with almost close to zero levels of freshness.
Historically, all battles have been fought either for the mannu (land) or the ponnu (woman), we’re told as the curtains are raised. Muthaiah’s Kathar Basha revolves around one such story in Tamil Nadu’s Ramanathapuram, where debauchery, land and women are unfortunately involved. The film begins with Tamil Selvi (Siddhi Idnani), a self-styled mother figure of three young girls, revolting against a pack of men in the village. The battle is not to save the village from patriarchy, but it is to save herself from being married off to one of the two influential men in her district that she shares bad blood with. At one point she is asked to pick a man by leaving things up to fate and picking a card! She gives them a dressing down and is exiled by the village, which we witness through a sweet GV Prakash song with fleeting glimpses stamped with “girl power” energy (just your typical woman driving a tractor on the field and single-handedly lifting a heavy sack kind of montages). And just when we think the story is going to revolve around the said woman in the voiceover, the story shifts and takes a familiar nosedive. This is also when you realise that Kathar Basha is not even the tiniest bit interested in doing even tokenism properly.
A lot is going on in Kathar Basha at every given moment. It is not enough that Muthaiah makes us navigate cumbersome family politics, infighting, and hurt egos, he also adds a mind-numbingly confusing family tree into this mix. Sample this: The two men Tamil has to choose between are her sister’s husband’s younger brother and her brother’s wife’s younger brother. If this wasn’t confusing enough, Tamil falls for a man who is related to her in yet another disoriented way. Kathar Basha (Arya) is named after yet another Kathar Basha (Prabhu), who comes with his own disconcerting troop of relatives. So, for much of the film, whether we see Arya in some ground-thumping action or not, we definitely see shots of revolting bare-bodied old men — in characteristic fashion —- chugging whiskeys and biting into pieces of meat, plotting the downfall of the hero.
Sharp dialogue and a tight screenplay are often the sturdy anchors of the genre. But in Kathar Basha, we have a hero with two names, so even a punch dialogue becomes painfully verbose. “En peru Basha. Kathar Basha. Kathar Basha engira Muthuramalingam,” Arya says at one point. Even with its pick of interesting character exposition thrown into the mix (Kathar is born to Hindu parents, but is adopted by Muslims, which makes way for plenty of opportunities to counter islamophobia), the film doesn’t go beyond the usual territory to try something new.
So, while we get a song signifying religious harmony and a depiction of a gentle Muslim chieftain that stays away from discriminatory pigeonholing, we also get sermons on questionable abortion takes and motherhood. Limits are pushed when a teen girl slaps her outrageous mother — with whom she shares a toxic relationship — and goes on to school her on how a mother should behave. Irony keeps dying slow deaths in this rural entertainer.