Pollathavan | The Realism in | Video Essay Script | Moving Images

Hi, my name is Kishor and this is MOVING IMAGES. Let’s do a little test. Tell me if these two scenes go together. If you found these jarring, then you can thank the verisimilitude the director has created. Verisimilitude is the appearance of being real. In movies, it is the simulated reality a director builds in which the story takes place. Now both pollathavan and padikathavan are commercial movies and they have the same elements such as action, comedy, drama, and romance. But why does one feel grounded, while the other feels over the top? Well, that is because director Vetrimaran gave us more than just a commercial film in Pollathavan.

The film is about a normal guy named Prabhu fighting gangsters led by Ravi who is out for his blood. We realize the reason for all this is a bike, Prabhu’s bike. Now a guy fighting gangsters with machetes just for a bike seems far-fetched, but Vetrimaran makes it look real and he does so by showing how much the bike means to Prabhu. Looking back at the film, the second act is only where the story actually happens. You can fast forward the entire first act and you still won’t miss anything story wise, but you would miss the motivations behind each action the protagonist Prabhu and the antagonist Ravi make. The first half is the setup the audience needs to connect to these characters. At the intermission point, Prabhu loses his beloved bike and Ravi tries to step out of his brother’s shadow. The entire first half is a flashback and the flashback continues in the second half as well till the last 15 minutes of the film. But the first half is told through the perspectives of the protagonist and antagonist while the second half is told through a third person’s perspective. There is a reason to this, the first half is not just first-person perspectives but they are memories.

The setup, kind of, reminded me of another film, Sathya. Both movies start with the main lead in a dire condition and goes into a flashback. Through some editing cues, Sathya too implies that the flashback is from the protagonist’s memory. You see a striker striking a carom board and then in a train before, you see Sathya sitting with his friends playing carom beside a railway track. The scene is meant to visualize Sathya piecing together bits of memories from his past at the operation table until he remembers how he ended up at the hospital with bullets in his body. The human mind has a strange way of recounting memories. We tend to skip forward in time and space within our memory with the thought being the only link. This is shown visually with a J-cut or L-cut where the audio precedes before a scene or lingers in the next scene respectively. Here, Sathya is faced with disappointment at not being able to get a job and he remembers his father asking him to find a job soon We hear it and the scene cuts to them having the conversation. The editing shows how a human mind works and how memories are remembered. The same technique is used in Pollathavan too as Prabhu recounts how his bike saved his respect and also his life.

However, there is a caveat to using this technique. The audience will only be able to see what the protagonist remembers and this might limit the story telling sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, there have been movies that have entirely depended on this technique like Memento but it is not an easy technique to follow though, and Sathya suffers from it by switching back and forth between first person and third person perspectives to take the story forward. Pollathavan, on the other hand, finds a nifty way to overcome this drawback. Director Vetrimaran chooses to use two perspectives instead of one to keep the story engaging and show us the other side as well and once he has established the motivations of the main characters, he chooses to go for a third person perspective.

The verisimilitude he maintains doesn’t stop just there. I’ve always had this problem with scenes showing us a character recounting a story through flashbacks and how very minor details which is hard for anyone to remember in real life is not only remembered but also play a major role in the story. Recently, I came across this in Vikram Vedha. It is hard to believe Vedha had time to tell Vikram every little detail such as a character being a leftie in the limited time he had to tell his story or even recount events in such detail when he was not even present when it happened. Unless they both have excellent photographic memory or that is just the verisimilitude of that film this won’t be possible in real life. Pollathavan brilliantly doesn’t do this error. Each and every scene in the flashback will have the character in the scene they are recounting. The one scene where the character is not present is the conversation between the gangster Selvam and his wife, which Ravi remembers, but this is also shown later as the scene progresses that Ravi was eavesdropping on his brother and that is how he knows it happened. VERISIMILITUDE.

And further, you might have noticed that Prabhu’s flashback is more detailed and vivid than Ravi’s. One might think since Prabhu is the hero in this story, he gets more screen time and you might be right. But, the verisimilitude holds here too. Prabhu’s story is more detailed because Prabhu likes to tell stories. We can see here that Prabhu’s favourite past time is telling stories about his pursuit of a girl to his friends in such detail. F*%$*&G VERMISILITUDE

Now after all this, you might ask me, “So Kishor, this is all fine, but why show the flashback as first-person perspective memories. Is it just a stylish gimmick?” To which I say, verisimilitude again, random YouTube user. The story of Pollathavan is based on reality, and in real life, there are no black or white characters. There are no altruistic heroes and there are no villains who are bad for the heck of it. People have principles and motivations. Sathya too followed this idea. Sure, we saw Sathya fighting against corruption and be a good Samaritan but dig deeper and you can see each of those actions were motivated by selfish needs. Sathya was frustrated being bullied by society and by his own step-mom and he takes it out on the goons. Sathya follows Dhandapani only after he receives some personal help and it was more of repaying a debt. Even the final straw that broke his back was not when Dhandapani betrays his trust but when his friend dies due to Dhandapani. In Pollathavan, the motivations are very personal for both characters. Prabhu wants his bike back and Ravi wants to be acknowledged as an able gangster. But that doesn’t answer why use memories. Well here is the kicker — we know that Prabhu is motivated to find his bike because he believes his bike made his life better. It helped him secure a job, gain respect with his father, and even get the girl he likes. But this is how Prabhu remembers it. The truth might not be the same. Maybe Prabhu would’ve secured a job without his bike if he tried and this holds good for all the other things too. Memories have a tendency to be skewed according to our perception. Prabhu’s memories might not be how actually the events transpired but rather how he perceived it. The same goes for Ravi. We see through his eyes that his brother Selvam is a gangster with principles and SIDE NOTE: a brilliantly written character. Yet, when Selvam hears that Ravi has thrown acid on a girl who spited him, he doesn’t reprimand him, instead he offers Ravi a smuggling job. This goes against what transpired just before the scene where Selvam is seen telling his wife about his principles and later constantly reminding Ravi to not go against people who don’t concern their work — “To keep personal issues out of business.” So, this is how Ravi remembers the events. He doesn’t remember his brother’s advice but only the first job he was offered.

The detail and the simulated reality Vetrimaran built for this film makes every character three-dimensional and makes us understand their every action through their own eyes. Pollathavan is a commercial film, but Vetrimaran shows us that a commercial film doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have any logic behind it. He gave us a selfish and flawed protagonist, not a hero whose only purpose in life is to save the helpless. He gave us an antagonist with a purpose, not a moustache twirling villain who was just bad for the heck of it. He gave us interesting supporting characters. I wish more filmmakers would learn from Pollathavan. For me, Pollathavan is a film by a first-time director who reaped an often ignored but important crop from a little seed another first-time director sowed in Sathya. Until next time, this is Kishor signing off saying…