Soorarai Pottru: The syntax of Tamil cinema isn’t something that Bollywood should be trying to emulate

The filmmakers’ only goal here, it seems, is to race through the life stories of their protagonists as if with a checklist in hand, worried that somebody’s stern ghost will appear in their dreams and demand to know why a certain incident wasn’t included. How else would you explain the existence of Sam Bahadur, a movie with all the dramatic heft of a hastily written Wikipedia article, or a sermon performed for the 400th time. But Meghna Gulzar’s anti-biopic wasn’t the first film to adopt this boring style; nor was Shabaash Mithu, or the more recent Srikanth. Each of these movies appears to be mimicking a storytelling style syntax popularised in the South, by films like Soorarai Pottru.

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Suriya in a still from Soorarai Pottru.

Directed by Sudha Kongara, the movie told the remarkable true story of the man who created India’s first low-cost carrier, Air Deccan. Kongara is remaking the film in Hindi as Sarfira, starring Akshay Kumar in the role originally played by Suriya. Hindi cinema has a history of looking southward for inspiration, often inviting the same filmmakers to remake their regional-language originals for audiences in the north. But in recent years, there has also been a concerted attempt to mimic South Indian filmmaking style. And this approach isn’t merely being applied to action cinema, but also to biopics.

Soorarai Pottru is the rare film that combines the most offensive elements of mainstream South Indian movies — token feminism, hero-worship of rowdy characters, and a tonal indiscipline that sticks its nose at the very idea of cinema itself. The movie favours emotional manipulation over examining the real issues embedded in its script; ideas of social inequality, wealth distribution, and the commodification of services previously reserved for the elite. Instead of devoting even a basic amount of time to even one of these thoughts, the movie spends virtually every second of its two-and-a-half hour run-time drooling over Suriya.

To aid it in this single-minded mission, the movie appoints one man and woman. The best friend exists only to sing praises of the protagonist, Maaran, while the wife hovers around him for no discernible reason, only to be slapped around and exploited. In fact, the film opens with the hero laying eyes on her for the first time, shrugging his shoulders, and declaring that she ‘will do’ as his spouse. In an early indication of the film’s faux feminism, she storms out of the meeting, loudly letting everybody know that her opinion counts as well. This would be admirable, were Soorarai Pottru not pulling our leg. This character, Bommi, is clearly just fooling around, as evidenced by the devotion in her eyes even as she walks away from Maaran.

Over the next few years, she builds a successful bakery business, which transforms into something of an empire even before Maaran has moved beyond step one of his grand plan to launch a low-cost airline. Would it not have been interesting to watch her growth as well, instead of keeping her around like some glorified cheerleader for a protagonist whose own motivations remain unclear until the interval? It takes Soorarai Pottru over an hour just to tell us why Maaran feels to deeply about making air travel accessible to everybody. A flashback shows us that he was unable to be by his dying father’s side, because he couldn’t afford a flight ticket home at the last moment. He begged the other passengers at the airport for money, but nobody helped, even when he produced his Air Force uniform to prove that he’s an officer.

Suriya in a still from Soorarai Pottru.

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Soorarai Pottru is dotted with manipulative moments like this. In one scene, Maaran spends his life savings to buy a first class ticket aboard the fictional Jaz Airlines, because he knows that its owner, a snooty man named Paresh, will also be on board. On the flight, Maaran shoots his shot and pitches his idea to Paresh, who scoffs at his schemes and tells him that he would never let riffraff aboard one of his planes. But another man happens to overhear this conversation. Conveniently for Maaran, this guy happens to be a venture capitalist, who says that he would be happy invest in his idea. It takes around 30 minutes for you to recover from this unforgivably contrived scene, which is just as well, because that’s when the ‘venture capitalist’ reveals to Maaran (and us) that he was working for Paresh all along.

The desire to invent stories around real people arises out of a deep sense of insecurity about their actual achievements. Remember the film Major? Forget honouring the late Sandeep Unnikrishnan by immortalising him on screen, the movie actually disrespected his memory by inserting him in made-up scenarios, as if his actual sacrifice on 26/11 wasn’t enough. Soorarai Pootru does something similar; in addition to the double-agent venture capitalist, Maaran also pitches his idea to none other than APJ Abdul Kalam. He does this by barging into the President’s chambers at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, perhaps confusing Kalam for a panelist on Shark Tank.

Nobody, let alone an industry struggling to find its voice, should be looking to this sort of storytelling for inspiration. There’s a distinct lack of authenticity to films like Soorarai Pottru, which you can usually smell from a mile away. But there’s a lesson to be learnt here: if moneymaking products are what you’re going to produce, then that is the standard by which you will be judged.