Kaaka Muttai | The Art of Ironical Storytelling | Video Essay Script | Moving Images
Hi, I’m Kishor and this is MOVING IMAGES. The 2015 film, Kaaka Muttai, though endearing and entertaining to many, struck as something more to me. The scene that you just saw was an example of situational irony, where the character’s name is an ironical take on his actual condition. Director Manikandan, employs irony as a tool for telling his story. In his other film “Kuttrame Thandanai”, a man who couldn’t see properly, ironically was the sole eye-witness to a murder. His debut film, Kaaka Muttai was no exception, starting with the title of the film itself. The two boys who drink Kaaka Muttai or crow’s eggs due to poverty, yearn to taste pizza, only to be shunned away from entering the pizza shop. They finally get a hero’s welcome into the shop and are offered pizza for free, only to not like its taste. How is that for irony? But let’s backtrack a little bit.
Director Manikandan, managed to show situational irony in the interaction between the two kaaka muttais, our destitute protagonists and Lokesh, a rich kid. The literal divide is seen in the form of a fence which they cannot cross. The rich kid stands above them on an elevation making the boys to look up to him. He has expensive toys and a luxurious life, but his life is contained within the fence and controlled by his parents, while for our two heroes the entire city is their home and they have the freedom the rich kid could never have. I would like to analyze the one scene that exemplifies the situational irony. The scene starts off with Lokesh coming to meet the kaaka muttais and sitting on the elevation and condescendingly offering them a half-eaten pizza. The kid who has everything does not have the respect for a fellow human. Periya Kaaka Muttai refuses to take the half-eaten pizza and just walks away showing that while they are poor, they still have self-respect. He is the bigger person here and it is shown visually with him in a close-up on the foreground, as Lokesh shrinks in the background.
The situational irony extends even to the means they pursue to earn the money to buy the pizza. It is a twist on the old Tamil adage “Kaasai kari aakuvathu”, which means to burn money like coal, or in other words waste money on unwanted expenditures. Here our boys turn coal to money.
But the icing on the cake for me was how the Director handled a MacGuffin. MacGuffin, a term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, is a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues. The specific nature of a MacGuffin is typically unimportant to the overall plot. Here, the pizza acts as the MacGuffin for the most part. But leave it to Director Manikandan to give even a classic MacGuffin an ironical twist. Towards the third act of the movie, the two protagonists who pursued the MacGuffin become MacGuffins themselves, while people searched for them. The focus shifts away from them and to the search for them. Maybe that is why we never learn the true names of the two main characters as we never learn the true nature of a MacGuffin. Like the movie critic Bharadwaj Rangan said in his review, “Kaaka Muttai is so entertaining — it’s either a crowd-pleasing art film or an arty crowd-pleaser; maybe both”. Never would I have ever imagined a simple story such as this to have deep layers to it, and maybe that is an irony too. Until next time, this is Kishor signing off saying….
