Baththa Movie Review:
They say life has a way of humbling you. What they don’t say is that, often, life has a sense of humour about it. That is exactly what Baththa expands upon, through a wholesome story that has a surprisingly effective mix of a family drama, a children’s adventure, a father’s ‘hero’s journey’, a short mystery, a short survival thriller, and a gangster’s coming-of-age.
Director: Balaji Tharaneetharan
Cast: Vijay Sethupathi, Sai Prithvi Raj, Lijomol Jose, Sahasra Shree
Baththa has one of the greatest storylines in recent Tamil cinema memory: a timid school boy accidentally locks a dreaded local gangster inside a school washroom for a week. With such a premise, there were endless possibilities for humour, and the film does offer plenty of laughs. That alone would have made Baththa a satisfactory family entertainer. But the film does more; it stands out with its incredible restraint and hawkish grip on its tone. Yes, it is funny that a gangster gets locked inside a washroom by a school kid, but there are real stakes. We can feel the pain and longing in Baththa’s wife (Lijomol Jose) and daughter (Sahasra Shree); we empathise with Baththa’s (Vijay Sethupathi) own desperation to meet his loved ones again, and Sabari (Sai Prithvi Raj), the school boy’s paralysing fear in having stepped on to a landmine-like situation that seems to get exponentially nuclear with every minute.
Balaji Tharaneetharan handles Baththa’s characterisation with great sensitivity. The director is careful not to be swayed by the inherent comedic tone of the film. Just because he finds himself in an absurd situation, Baththa isn’t a harmless gangster. He is ruthless enough to shrug off a pleading woman while he is breaking her husband’s arm; he loves his wife but is clearly brutish enough to slap her around. Baththa’s journey of self-discovery feels like an actual taxing journey because you see the several issues he needs to work through before he gets there. It almost mirrors Baththa’s countless failed attempts to escape from the washroom and the several psychological barriers Sabari has to cross before he ultimately finds the courage to face his biggest fear: Baththa.
Everything that makes Vijay Sethupathi unique as a performer is on glorious display in Baththa, like an art display with its own room and spotlight. There are no cinematic accentuations; no attempts to prove that he understands a scene more than the script itself, which lends itself to a calmer, confident, and restrained approach to Baththa. Sai Prithvi Raj, who plays the school kid Sabari, goes toe-to-toe with heavyweight performers like Vijay Sethupathi and Lijomol Jose. The emotional crescendo of the film leans heavily on its capability to portray a child’s innocence without being patronising. Even though Balaji does a splendid job at that, an equal share of that credit goes to Sai Prithvi Raj as well.
Baththa has the distinct charm of offering whatever you want out of it. It could be a fun commercial family entertainer if you choose to look at it that way, or it could read as a parable on an arrogant man’s ego death. The film is also a deep psychological dissection of how much of the human experience, the choices we make, are dictated by the far simpler unconscious imprints left by our childhood. It is an antithesis to the overused writing trope of a protagonist’s rugged personality being the result of a tragic past. Balaji shows you that you don’t always have to kill the hero’s parents to justify his rough edges. He shows you that people, and whatever goes on to make them who they are, are simultaneously far simpler and much deeper than that. At its heart, Baththa is a wholesome conversation between two kids, it just so happens that one kid, Sabari, arrives later in time, to tell the other kid, Baththa, that he doesn’t have to let his childhood wounds define him, and he does so with a hug, and we feel the warmth of the hug through the screen.
