Thamizh Talkies: Stories of spurned love

Life (and love) is complicated. When cinema captures this complication, great love stories emerge. I consider Ae Dil Hai Mushkil to be a good film on unrequited love from Hindi cinema. Released on this month six years ago, Ranbir Kapoor’s Ayan became the brand ambassador of heartbreak. Alizeh (Anushka Sharma at her intense best) and Saba (Aishwarya Rai at her finest) had character arcs independent of the man. When Alizeh describes what it feels like to have a heart broken as opposed to getting dumped, the film hits a home run. Alizeh is like a heavy mortar and pestle on Ayan’s chest and shows him how (physically) painful heartbreak can be. Ayan replays this in a later scene with a flowerpot minutes before her wedding to another man and carries a broken heart thereafter. Karan Johar took this idea of a loser in love to its crescendo. A Tamil film that captured similar depth and had a singular focus on love is Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa, where Gautham Menon broke many cinematic idioms and made a film centred on long conversations and mercurial moments that defined a woman. Jessie (no one but Trisha could have played this blow-hot-blow-cold role) and Karthik (a vulnerable Simbu) and his intense unrequited love made this film the longest running hit of Menon’s career. 

More recently, Thiruchitrambalam spoke of the vagaries of what unrequited love can be for a regular guy-next-door, but it also had a stronger family story to address. Cut to the trailer of Ra. Karthik’s upcoming film, Nitham Oru Vaanam, starring Ashok Selvan (who has a good eye for feel-good stories) Aparna Balamurali, Ritu Verma and Shivathmika, and you can see that there’s the promise of an intense multiple-track love-story and I hope the film lives up to it. 

In the past, love stories were primarily sold with the promise of great songs and Ilaiyaraaja’s musical wand made cash registers ring. For example, we associate a film like Thendral Vandhu Yennai Thodum with all its beautiful songs, but a good film is one which stays in your mind for what it makes you feel overall, and the music or other aspects are value-adds. As a starting point, Ae Dil… has good writing (getting ‘friend-zoned’ happens first) on love and possesses many layers. In general, Hindi films have long crossed the lines of moral (policing) when it comes to depiction of romance. 

For a long time, the pinnacle Tamil film of a man’s tryst with love was Cheran’s Autograph. Ever since, I’ve wondered how audiences (society) will view a similar story but with a woman as the protagonist instead. What if VTV 2 begins with the voice-over of Jessie? Will we accept a woman who finds love more than once?

In 1986, there was a film that showed us such a woman. She hid her heartbreak (though circumstantial) underneath a chirpy exterior and is goaded (by circumstance again) into marriage with a decent, caring man who understands her need for space on their wedding night. The woman has a mind of her own and the first ‘gift’ she asks her husband is ‘divorce’. Mouna Raagam by Mani Ratnam remains that stand-alone film which spoke of a woman’s broken heart without much ado. (Raja Rani that got released in 2013 was a watered-down version).

Divya’s story (Revathy gave a cult performance) was only about her heart finding love again. Mani Ratnam’s courage to make a woman the hero of a heartbreak narrative in which she tells her husband that her heart doesn’t belong to her, makes Mouna Raagam the GOAT film on this topic for me. The film set trends on candid, brief dialogue-delivery, and shows how cinematography can depict two people living separately under one roof, how soulful music can convey the character’s feelings. Thirty six years later, we are still waiting to see a woman’s tryst in finding love more than once, be it requited or unrequited, in Tamil cinema. When can we see once again a blockbuster present-day equivalent to Mani Ratnam’s breakout film from 1986?