The Story of the Other | ft. Super Deluxe, Oththa Seruppu, Nadodigal | Video Essay Script

Hi, my name is Kishor and this is MOVING IMAGES. Why do we have these introduction scenes? You know what I am talking about, a small storyline that has nothing to do with the main plot, just so we get a nice introduction shot of the hero or the villain. Usually involving a fight and an intro song for the hero, or a ruthless scene for the villain. These scenes are so generic and don’t actually establish who these characters are because the characters are generic too, the hero is a good guy and the villain is a bad guy. So much so that I can swap them out from different movies and it would still fit. I am not against having a simple good vs bad story but you don’t have to waste the audience’s time by showing us all this. We know who these characters are while walking into the theatre.

A good example for efficient writing would be Winner. We know that the hero of the film is Kaipulla and the villain is Kattadurai, the director makes the right choice of skipping these establishing scenes when they are not needed and jumping straight into the conflict between them. The rest of the film is how Kaipulla unites two lovers against Kattadurai’s intervention. A good example of hero uniting lovers (and this time for real) is Nadodigal. We have seen the heroes of this story in countless other movies. These are the friends of the hero in the many other conventional love stories, who help unite the hero and heroine. Since we know these characters and their motivation, when we see them accept to help their friend unite with his lover, even going far as to risk their lives, we understand it without much explanation. Director Samuthrakani was able to use our knowledge of these side characters and make them the main characters by simply showing their perspective. This was a great way of giving a fresh take on an old idea by using our knowledge of films and foregoing motivation establishment.

An even more recent example would be Oththa Seruppu. The story of the film itself is something we are familiar with. A man who goes on a killing spree to avenge the people who destroyed his family. But director Parthipen is able to make this film into a one-man act just by using the audience’s knowledge. Let me explain. When Masi narrates and enacts how he killed each of his victims, we are able to imagine the scene clearly how he intends us to see it. All we need is just the sound and bit of narration and we play a movie in our heads ourselves. And I bet if we asked people to describe how they imagined the scenes Masi narrates, there will be a strong similarity. We the audience have had a collective experience through films. We may lead different lives, but the films we tend to watch are mostly the same.

Speaking of watching the same films, let’s talk about a film almost everyone watched and wanted to do an analysis of, “Super Deluxe”. The film’s plot is a hyperlink woven on four subplots with characters spilling across subplots blah blah blah. Look, the film is really good, even great at times. The acting is aaga, the set design is super pa nee, and the plot twists are also vaaipe illa. Apart from the hyperlink, aliens and the adult dialogues, what if I told you that this film too is similar to ones we’ve seen many times. So much so that there is a whole series of them produced by the same production company and directed by the same director. Well to explain that lets look at the writing for Super Deluxe. The film has four parallel storylines. Although the stories would work separately and they are for the most part, whenever one story needs something to push the plot forward, a generic character isn’t used, instead one of the main characters from another parallel story doubles up as a side character here. This is taking a similar concept we saw in Nadodigal where side characters become main characters but from within the same film. The filmmakers could’ve chosen to have a random beggar in the subway give Arputham his revelation, or a random guy throw a huge trash on Berlin. But by using characters from the parallel story you understand why the stuff that happens actually happens. This is establishing without establishing. This is not the generic storyline that gets abandoned like the examples we saw in the beginning, but extremely efficient writing, where every storyline matters and overlap to form a single narrative.

But what about my claim that the film itself isn’t new. Well, let’s go a step further and see how the filmmakers of Super Deluxe made their film unique by skipping a major establishing scene. Going off the writers of Super Deluxe themselves likening the movie to Samsaram Athu Minsaaram due to the abundance of talking heads in the film, I am claiming that Super Deluxe is similar to the films produced by Thiruvalluvar Kalikoodam and directed by this guy, V. Shekar. These are your agmark KTV films, with three families and their marital issues. Let’s add a little establishing shot to Super Deluxe and you’ll see what I mean. In the beginning of the film, let’s establish that Leela, Jyothi, and Vaembu are sisters. Now it’s easy to see how each sister has their own marital issues. The stories all take place within the same family and so it makes sense for the characters to influence the other stories. Just a regular old KTV film you watch in the afternoon. But the writers know that you watch them too, so they use that and skip the establishing scenes, giving you a unique experience. Until next time, this is Kishor signing off saying…