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It’s almost become fashionable to celebrate films that were reviled upon release. Thirty-five years after its release, Gunaa now seems more like a half-remembered dream, a peek into an unstable mind projected in real time for our viewing pleasure. Devouring Gunaa now almost seems like an act of revolt against a system of movie-making and viewership that forgot to indulge in the madness of an artist perpetually thriving at the heights of his cinematic over-eagerness and visionary impulses–Kamal Haasan. Santhana Bharathi, the director of the film, almost feels like a more-than-competent journeyman from a different era who was air-dropped into the ’90s to translate two of Kamal Haasan’s wildest fever dreams into cinematic vessels of deranged mainstream moviemaking in the form of Gunaa and Mahanathi, later.
Gunaa is not an easy film to love, nor one that grants us a comfortable distance to assess its quirkiness quantitatively. The muddled, hyper-ventilating operatic update of the myth of beauty and the beast, filtered through the lens of a story of a flippant, surreal protagonist, feels like a storytelling verve that few filmmakers will be willing to take today. The film begins with a seamlessly put-together ‘oner’ that follows several characters as they go about their daily routines in the busy confines of a brothel, only to arrive at a statue-like figure of a ‘different man’ standing in a peculiar pose, overseeing the entire stree.
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Something about him feels off immediately, and his impish eyes give one the feeling of a slightly overexcited child stuck in a man’s body. It’s as if the surrounding murkiness and moral decay haven’t seeped into this clueless singular force of nature standing atop all like the creator in full control of his own inner world. He gets beaten up by a crowd for mistaking a bride for some girl named ‘Abhirami’, and you know intuitively that a harsh reckoning awaits this man-child who is clearly lost in his own private world. Next, you cut to a scene of a childishly innocent Gunaa patiently listening to his doctor, who explains to him as if hand-waving at the audience, ‘Gunaa, you are just an ordinary man. Stop pointing upwards and touch the earth. That is your truth.”
A scene that could be dissected, studied and reiterated on several grounds, Gunaa’s meetup with his doctor is a masterclass in foreshadowing in a screenplay that lays down the emotional state of the hero, coupled with unsteady visual grammar of the inquisitive camera movements and head-spinning subtextual implications of the dialogues being exchanged. That one scene is the whole movie, encompassed in a micro scene, a set piece of intense emotional weight. A visibly agitated Gunaa, walking in circles within the cramped doctor’s office, mumbling to himself, is one of those disturbing images that burns itself into your collective cinematic memory bank. Kamal Haasan’s dizzying stamina and hyper-focused performance style capture a man breaking down in real time with the necessary grit and messiness, just enough for you to get caught up in his contrived rants as you still feel unsure as to what is happening.
Gunaa is an assortment of all these things —a child who despises his parents for his ‘untidy’ life and is constantly battling with his decaying surroundings, the son who hates his father for passing on his disgusting face and for beating up his mother to make her take up life as a sex worker. All these background details are filled in by Sab John’s heightened and intentionally melodramatic screenwriting that makes the emotional revelations almost feel spiritual in their little connections and looping repetitions. ‘Abhirami’ is the only way to redeem himself in Gunaa’s eyes. Marrying her and settling for an ordinary life with their kids on a mountain side is the only way Gunaa believes that he can be cleansed of his unworthy life. So Abhirami is the aching heart of Gunaa’s journey.
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Kamal Haasan’s performance as the hyper active, zoned out Gunaa is a study in empathy. Instead of using the vacant emotionality of Gunaa on paper an opportunity to play broad strokes versions of dumb or earning easy points playing a sympathetic loser who is a complete cipher to everyone around him, Kamal breaks down the complex inner workings of pain that transcends articulation. Gunaa marks several of Kamal’s famous trysts with extreme physical transformations, a passion that follows him to his career to this day. The handsome charm is hidden beneath dark makeup and weird hairdo. The key to Gunaa lies in balancing the over-the-top physical strength with the childlike glee and tender psychologic register of the character. Gunaa is a man not bogged down by his flights of mental fancies but powered by them.
The central performance holds the film together in places where the outlandishness of the scenario starts to show slightly, and Kamal Haasan is able to make us understand the inner workings of a wounded kid whose mind is fixed on one entity—Abhirami. The kidnapping of the heiress by mistake and the slowly emerging Stockholm syndrome episodes of the leading lady would have been uncomfortable aspects of a story told through the hero’s flailing mental health condition, if not for the empathy that emanates for Gunaa as a person. He is clear-headed as to what his actions entails — Abhirami’s love. The film transforms from a character piece into a chamber piece, where two distinct characters from varying social classes and backgrounds strike up a conversation about what it feels like to be loved.
The greatest achievement in Kamal Haasan’s turn in Gunaa is the fact that its a performance sans any judgement. The actor immerses himself in the loose, free-wheeling impulses of Gunaa as a character with its own internal logic to all his actions. So Haasan is confident enough to let the silences and quietude speak in moments. The calmness and serene energy is a choice made by the actor, preferring to gradually tone down the frantic distractions of his performance in the former half. Gunaa, as indicated earlier in the first meeting with the doctor, traverses through other people’s lives as a weightless piece of cotton rolling around in the wind. The gradual ascent from disgust and fear to clear eyed love from ‘Rohini’ towards Gunaa works largely due to the conviction that Kamal Haasan brings in his meditative transformation to the unhinged, yet selfless lover.
Even when the actress Roshini, playing ‘Rohini’ aka ‘Abhirami’ seems a little stiff and unsure in certain scenes, Kamal manages to maintain the intensity of scenes to play out. Kamal Haasan just about manages to make Gunaa endearing without making him grating as a psychologically tormented young man who has kidnapped a woman and is keeping her under custody for reasons outside his control. There is no sense of self to Gunaa other than his inexplicable love for Abhiraami. He is defined as the contrasting dichotomy to Abhirami. Gunaa represents the unintelligible mess, while Abhirami represents the shining light towards which Gunaa seeks asylum. The now iconic song ‘Kanmani Anbodu Kaadhalan’ made familiar to viewers through the famous needle drop in the Malayalam blockbuster ‘Manjummel Boys’ is the transcendent anthem of Gunaa’s ultimate succumbing to his madness and embracing the obsessive love.
It’s a sad ecstasy that gains currency when Abhirami starts reciprocating his love. As a prelude to the song, Gunaa proclaims from the mountaintops “This is not mere mortal love, this is beyond that,” a moment that mirrors the film’s constant engagement with the spiritual entanglement of this relationship and the lines between moral and immortal gets blurry. All the story elements — the kidnapping, the getaway, Guna keeping Abhirami under his care in a deserted valley, his connections at the brothel, the asylum, her exploitative manager determined to take over fortune, the committed investigation officer looking into the missing case, are all desperate strands that collide to bring Gunaa closer to his eternal vision of Abhirami. It’s a poetic vision of a romance doomed before it even got started.
Encompassed within the godly tunes of Illayaraja’s immortal soundtrack, Gunaa still stands tall among Tamil cinema’s attempt at capturing ethereal romances on screen without being bogged down by the dictates of commercial cinema. The themes are not spelt out and the writing and filmmaking is confident enough to let the intentionally obtuse and abstract ideas of love take center stage. Kamal Haasan magically steals every scene he is in and owns the sparks of madness coming from Gunaa as the character’s truth rather than a convenient choice to suit plot convenience and chew the scenery. The film, now more than ever feels like a testament to the punishing artistic will of Kamal Haasan, who was and remains unafraid to make choices a s performer than would feel overwrought in lesser hands.
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