Director: Bejoy Nambiar
Writers: Neil Julian Balthazar, Mithila Hegde, Bejoy Nambiar
Cast: Arjun Das, Kalidas Jayaram, TJ Bhanu, Sanchana Natarajan
Duration: 153 minutes
Available in: Theatres
Por, as the film’s title suggests, is about the many battles that students from a hip Pondicherry college face — between an activist (TJ Bhanu) and her fight for Bahujan solidarity and campus equality, between a woman standing up for her dignity and an abusive past. A Dalit woman running for elections and her manipulative ex-girlfriend. And sometimes between two mostly pig-headed men (Arjun Das and Kalidas Jayaram), finding out who is really the stronger “man”, as if that’s ever solved problems. Unfortunately for us and the film, this is the particular tussle that Por is maniacally obsessed with.
For about an hour into the film, we’re continuously introduced to an assembly line of characters — from the scrawny senior who conjures up strength with facial expressions to a junior who is looking for a Mani Ratnam romance in college. All the while, we’re struggling to grasp the point of the film, through long monologues about a girl grieving her brother, bad trips induced by funny sandwiches and just random footage of men driving around in ATVs in “cool-boy” aesthetics. We eventually learn that the film is actually about Prabhu (Arjun Das), who is stuck in a fever dream that is college, five years past the deadline, and Yuva (Kalidas), a hormone cocktail who has some very twisted bones to pick with the former. A very disturbing ragging incident unleashes a monster inside one of them. Now we sort of get what Bejoy must have been going for, and in another movie, Por might have been a liberating college drama about youngbloods taking arms for their voices to be heard. While the film’s technical aesthetics might have you believe that it’s that sort of film, its writing doesn’t.
To start with, none of the characters look like they have stakes in this frenzied world. Yuva is enraged about his schooltime hazing and goes on a rampage. But he doesn’t blink twice before teasing a woman who has entered the boy’s hostel. In another instance, he tells someone that he’ll always be there for them, even if it’s for selfish reasons, but acts like he’s forgotten his word with indifference, and nobody seems to care. Now, if the hypocrisy of the fickle-minded male ego is what the director wanted to convey, it’s clearly not efficient in Por. Instead, we get indulgent scenes with beautiful, but empty craft. We get powerful shots like that of a canopy of umbrellas heralding an important moment outside a house, a tortured hand strategically placed near a symbol of rising hand fists, a group of people looking down at a cheering crowd from a roof, the camera gliding reminiscent of Iruvar’s iconic scene. Por has it all, but none of this accounts for anything.
This is not to say that college fights or for that matter conflicts that can otherwise look trivial to many, can be dismissed. It’s sometimes the most inconsequential of things that has the ability to crawl deep into the back of our minds. But here, even if the staging of its camera and visual tension suggest rage, the conflicts in the film appear nothing more than unnecessary and glorified temper tantrums. Kalidas and Arjun bring to this film an infectious charisma — something that the film doesn’t make use of. It’s frustrating because the film does have interesting individual pieces. The exhaustion of fighting the invisible good fight gets a tender depiction when Vennila, a student from a lowered caste rejects the offer to fight despite being hurt.
We also see this spark in Rishika (Sanchana), who struggles to navigate a bitter past, and talks about irrational but relatable fears one drowns in after going through a period of pure joy. But these emotions are relegated to being backbenchers and we instead get to watch pointless sagas of men and their useless rabbit holes of rage, without really getting into their heads. At one point in the film, a character enters an auditorium, making a grand comeback to finally put an end to a battle with an Ilaiyaraaja song blasting in the background. A scene this cool on paper, just cannot be this unexciting. That’s Por in a line.