Writing about 'Thalaivii', which dropped on Netflix earlier this week, is a real challenge for the critic — but only if it entails explaining why the public wants to see it, given that it can tell us nothing about its subject’s actual life and career. But before looking at that a few things need to be said about the representation of political leaders in popular cinema since 'Thalaivi' is about J Jayalalithaa.
Popular Indian cinema needs to deal with politics and social life since it is addressing a large public that shares the political space, but cannot do it explicitly. It needs to translate socio-political experience into a language acceptable to cinema, instead of the blunt representations of the newspaper.
While looking at cinema after Independence, I saw a film called 'Anokhi Ada' (1948). In that film, a young woman and her younger brother, both orphans, are looked after by an Anglicized man named ‘Laat Saheb’, who wears a rose in his buttonhole and loves children.
Laat Saheb is estranged from his rich father but makes up with him later. Both he and a stern man called ‘Professor’ want to marry the girl and look after her; the plot was interesting enough to merit interpretation, I thought. If ‘Laat Saheb’, rose in his buttonhole, love of children and all, was an allegory of Jawaharlal Nehru, the stern professor could be an allegory of Sardar Patel. The brother and sister would then be the Indian public, just ‘orphaned’ at the time — due to the death of the father of the nation.
Between 1947 and 1949 there was a tussle in the political space between Patel and Nehru, until Patel’s death in 1950 saw Nehru triumphant. In the film they are both vying for the acceptance of the ‘Indian public’, represented by the two orphans.
Indira Gandhi was perhaps similarly represented in allegorical fashion in 'Aradhana' (1969) as a lonely woman — with a dead husband in her distant past — who goes through trials and tribulations in society to finally emerge triumphant. There was perhaps a need for a mythological narrative around Mrs Gandhi in 1969 since she had survived against all odds to become victorious.
She was later even represented by her party as a lonely woman suffering tribulations — to explain the Emergency. Politics and social history are represented in popular film as instances of myth and popular culture everywhere has this tendency. Why else would Spider-Man and Superman wear the colours of the American flag (blue and red)?
Given the excitement one experiences in reading popular cinema’s covert social role politically, exercises like Gulzar’s 'Aandhi' (1975), in which the leader’s appearance is mimicked are banal and timid. Gulzar, at least, gave his heroine another name but 'Thalaivii' calls its protagonist Jaya — although it makes her mentor MJR instead of MGR. The problem for such biopics is that even the smallest whiff of scandal precipitates legal action or violent protest.
Given the amounts of money spent on such productions, no risks can be taken. But in the circumstances, why make such films at all. Everyone has opinions about leaders like Jayalalithaa or Mrs Gandhi, so why would the public want to watch a film in which no opinion is aired, something that must necessarily be bland and tepid? Surely, no one can believe that the ‘nutritious midday meal scheme’ came about because Jayalalithaa saw actual children suffering?
Politics in India is a very complicated business but everyone in the public has a more sophisticated understanding of it than the film. 'Thalaivii' is showing us politicians who conduct themselves like epic characters with no underlying conflicts, people driven by straightforward urges like the need to do good or love for each other. I would once have thought that such representations affirm beliefs about what should be rather than what are, but 'Thalaivi' is lacking in energy and conviction and even that seems unlikely.
Perhaps there is a clue in the efforts to make the characters in the film resemble real-life figures. In this department at least Arvind Swamy makes a credible MGR. MGR was old and ailing during his last days but, barring that, Swamy looks passable as the leader. The attraction, I believe, is the illusory sense we get that we are being admitted into exalted circles that we are normally kept out of, a kind of vicarious pleasure. We go to 'Thalaivii' not to learn anything about the actual Jayalalithaa but to inhabit a space that we can briefly believe was hers.
I felt a strange kind of enjoyment watching Arvind Swamy as MGR and Raj Arjun as RM Veerappan that had nothing to do with the political understanding offered. If one were to visit a historical space in which something momentous once happened, one imagines the events and feels part of them, at least briefly. Watching 'Thalaivii', one similarly finds oneself participating in the action regardless of the film’s banality.
(The writer is a well-known film critic).