He’s racing against time, he’s trying to devise clever plans, but at all times, Silambarasan plays the underdog in this film as he knows-and so do we-that SJ Suryah’s Dhanushkodi is cleverer and craftier. STR stays away from the punchlines and the finger-wagging (vestiges of which we saw even in his last film, Easwaran), and is content to be the soft-spoken do-gooder, Khaaliq. From being a passive passenger who patiently waits to disembark from a flight, he turns into a manic runner who can’t even wait for the plane to stop.īoth actors, STR and Dhanushkodi, sell their characters really well. This is why as the film progresses, the urgency becomes more and more accentuated, to the point that by the end, Khaaliq is counting each second. And really, this quality of urgency is perhaps at the centre of Khaaliq’s quest. Dhanushkodi’s victories are punctuated by a sinister track, while Khaaliq’s actions are underscored by two tracks ( Voice of Unity and Maanaadu Theme), both of which burst with a sense of urgency. You can identify these character differences even in Yuvan’s themes, dominated by flute influences. I enjoyed the simplicity of this character description. His heroism is not a product of super-human ability or acute intelligence or enviable physicality he’s a hero simply because he won’t quit trying to do good.
Look closely at these individuals and you’ll see that while Dhanushkodi’s villainy stems from his uncommon lack of empathy and conscience, Khaaliq, in comparison, is a commoner. Both are forced to relive the same day over and over again, but where Khaaliq has agency and thrives in rebirth, Dhanushkodi doesn’t, and this drives him crazy (SJ Suryah portrays this frustration in his enjoyably exaggerated ways). Maanaadu’s central event may be the political assassination, but its central exploration, in effortless ways, is of the two men, Khaaliq and Dhanushkodi. It prioritises fun over fatality, entertainment over execution, and I do not mean this as criticism at all. This film though-at whose centre there’s a political assassination-is steadfast in its refusal to sink too deep or dwell too long in existential complexities. I might have been interested to learn how he deals with the repetitive pain of killing himself, or perhaps just the sheer difficulty of doing it to himself-but I suppose that might have resulted in a different type of film. Where a protagonist’s heroism gets accentuated by his survival against the odds, we get one whose heroism is defined by his willingness, and why, even his enthusiasm, to die.
For instance, where we are used to a villain fuming over the survival of a hero, we get one, Dhanushkodi (SJ Suryah), vexed by the death of the hero. It results in some wonderful subversion of commercial cinema tropes. Khaaliq, a Muslim by birth, is said to have been born in a Hindu temple, and it’s intriguing that this Muslim should be the victim-or beneficiary, depending on your point of view-of the Hindu idea of reincarnation.
After a while, the death of Khaaliq himself becomes a dark joke, and it’s fascinating to experience a story in which the protagonist, a bonafide star, gets killed over and over again. The characters are the same, and yet, the cause-effect interplay creates new delicious situations, and associated problems, each time. And yet, Venkat Prabhu manages to tie all these iterations and their events into a clever mystery that must be solved by Khaaliq, one step at a time. Every time Khaaliq dies and gets reborn, the story explores a new idea. Venkat Prabhu reposes his faith squarely in the joys emergent from the time-loop idea and brings out an ace each time. And yet, Maanaadu has two stars-TR Silambarasan and SJ Suryah-and no duets, love stories, punch dialogues, or why, even fight sequences that threaten your suspension of disbelief. Every time a Tamil film adopts a seemingly Western idea, I fear that we might fail to capitalise on the inherent advantages of the idea, potentially diluting the entertainment in search of ‘commercial compromises’. And boy, does it have fun with this time-loop idea.
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