Tamil star Dhanush has worked with a bounty of the industry’s most daring artists: Vetrimaaran, Karthik Subbaraj, not to mention his brother Selvaraghavan, always as an elusive and potent presence. Dhanush’s suave menace in Vada Chennai (2018) or the vicious tragedy of his performance in Asuran (2019) are impossible to forget, intense and perpetually unsatisfied as they are, so a stab at a directorial career should whet any cinephile’s appetite. 2017’s Pa Paandi, starring Rajkiran as a retired stuntman, stood as a promising amalgamation of influence, almost the platonic ideal of a “solid debut,” unassuming and minor by design. It holds close to the teachings of past collaborators, and as much as its off-kilter melancholy is well-sustained throughout, an anxious anonymity pervades the film’s direction. There’s not much to offer but gentle praise, which is all well and good, but when considering the bombast of the director’s acting chops, a viewer expects more risks to be taken, that same uncompromising intensity that thrills in front of the camera felt in full force behind it.
Seven years later and out comes Raayan, a jagged, blood-soaked blade of a film, equal parts brutally blunt and sumptuously gothic; and above all, assuredly the work of an independent, confident artist, even as it frequently spirals out of his control. Dhanush stars as the titular hero, a soft-spoken, hard-hearted food truck owner who leads and protects his two brothers (Sundeep Kishan and Kalidas Jayaram) and little sister (Dushara Vijayan) after his mother and father disappear without a trace. His only priority is a safe and moderately successful life for his siblings, away from the ever-encroaching criminal element that stalks about Chennai like a nest of vipers. He wants a life where his two brothers go to college and his sister marries a mild-mannered executive; essentially, a life beyond Raayan, beyond his ramshackle rooftop apartment and constant temptation from the city’s two underworld bosses (S.J. Suryah and Saravanan). His impulses are strictly selfless, in fact self-denying; like a monk, he is cloistered into a life of ritual anonymity, of non-violence, and of an obsessive march down the straight path. There is nothing to suggest a future for him, only a vain effort to allow his kin an escape from poverty, an effort the younger brother Muthu continuously sabotages when he embroils the family in the local gang-war.
Up until the film’s interval, it’s played rather close to Pa Paandi’s careful mix of brooding melodrama and family comedy. Muthu’s hijinks remain mostly harmless, revolving around an on-off relationship with his acerbic girlfriend, while Dushara’s Durga attempts to open her older brother to the possibility of a better life. Their small stretch of Chennai bursts with activity — street vendors, gangsters, single mothers, town executives, and enterprising policemen all dash in and out of focus like lightning bugs darting around a mosquito lamp. All the ways to live a life — honestly, crookedly, violently, or just barely, but all exploding with the vivacity and unbreakable will of a Stendhal novel. Coated in dripping hazes of blue and red pulses of the night, slick, sweat-licked streets glow under moonlight and taxi cabs, Dhanush’s Chennai is a fiery realm of uncertain geography, melting and glistening under a near-constant rainfall.
The romance and bustle of the day hurtles the film toward the twilight. Once the ultra-violent interval sequence hits, an entirely different film emerges, closer to the fatalist veracity of Vetrimaaran’s films. The night erupts, and escape back to the light becomes an impossibility. Violence becomes an irresistible force, though never an easy one. Clawing, slicing, butchering, cracking, splitting, lacerating: a choreography of unskilled incisions. Raayan’s weapon-of-choice is a rusted old road spike, corrugated like an old nail, which acts like an uneven saber tearing crossways through flesh. The fight sequences have their usual origin in John Wick, but even further, an unstoppable drive toward a brutal end, a prisoner’s will, not for revenge but for an escape that grows less tangible with each day. Displaying a proletarian ethic that matches the title character’s abnegation, the set pieces portray a wildness, less concerned with epic, cheer-worthy sequences of mayhem than with finishing, just doing away with the whole thing, starting the next horrid task. Blood coils, swells and puddles like the rain, only to be quadrupled in volume as the frenzy grows. The sentimentality and slow melancholy of the film’s first section is drenched in a dizzying grindhouse mania.
However, this is still not a Vetrimaaran film, and cannot be confused as such. Dhanush has very little of his collaborator’s penchant for political investigation or the careful psychological work such efforts require. Instead, Raayan swings toward gothic tragedy. Siblings war against siblings for increasingly opaque reasons. Raayan himself turns to avenging angel on behalf of his sister, brutalized by her brothers’ descent into sin. Similarly, the fallen younger brothers emanate a mythological doom, begging forgiveness that will not come, in this world that is brutal but organized and fair. The bloodlust of capitalist gangsters and policemen alike coat the environment in an oozing blackness, as mad rituals of nigh-religious violence are performed in the light of massive bonfires, shadows swaggering through dim, foggy porticoes. Dhanush’s interest lies squarely in the epic and horrific, the classically dramatic and the fashionably gruesome. His Chennai is fantastical, though nonetheless rhythmic; like Zola’s hellish dreams of Paris, the city moves in depraved fits and starts, yet also predictably, like a terrible machine that must expel fire every night in order to keep running. The final set piece’s orgiastic conclusion, splattered in familial blood and lingering regret, is boisterous and smothered in excess, but undoubtedly the work of an eager, confident artist breaking from his teachers’ domain.
DIRECTOR: Dhanush; CAST: Dhanush, Dushara Vijayan, Sundeep Kishan, Kalidas Jayaram; DISTRIBUTOR: Prime Media; IN THEATERS: July 26; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 25 min.
