The story is about a man who decides to give up violence, and this takes him on a journey where he discovers that he is the saviour of an oppressed people. There are several brilliant moments, but the film doesn’t touch the heart. The rest of the review may contain spoilers.
In Retro, Karthik Subbaraj takes the Chosen One template to one of the OG Chosen One templates: the story of Lord Krishna. The protagonist Paari (Suriya) is born on Krishna’s birthday. Like Krishna, Paari grows up with another mother, this film’s equivalent of Yashodha. The reason for Paari being taken away from his birth parents is a prophecy, which makes this film’s Kamsa (Nasser) kill all male children. The woman in Paari’s life (Pooja Hegde) is named Rukmini, and the way they meet as grown-ups is almost as if the gods planned this meeting. (In another film, we’d call this pure coincidence.) And like Krishna came to this world hearing the cries of the oppressed, Paari’s destiny is tied with the exploited Tamil population of an island around India. It is the Andamans here, but knowing the director, it’s probably a stand-in for Sri Lanka.
Other directors like Mani Ratnam have played around with epics, but those films were modern-day retellings with a what-if element that questioned the inherent morality of good and evil. But Karthik Subbaraj’s film looks and feels like he took a week-long drug binge and shaped those hallucinations into a screenplay. I mean this as a compliment. Using the base story of Krishna, Retro takes a giant leap into the unknown, in the sense that we can never tell what’s coming next. A doctor who advocates laughter therapy (Jayaram) is brought to a place where people are afraid to smile. A speech that Paari gives before his wedding is intercut with a fight sequence shot in silhouette, and the faces from there are shown with wounds here. A man whose arm has been cut off gets a golden arm, and the metal makes another appearance in “goldfish”, which is code for something everyone is searching for.
As a pure technical achievement, Retro is a cinephile’s wet dream. Even by Karthik’s top-notch filmmaking standards, a sequence shot in a single take is a breathtaking use of the space in a marriage hall. And this is not just showing off. It is a sustained bit of storytelling that moves from song and dance to drama to violence. But this marriage – and the mini-romance that precedes it – is also where the film reveals its shortcomings. It remains emotionally distant. The story is set up with Paari promising Rukmini that he will give up the violence he has been taught in order to channelise his angst. But unlike Mahaan, where the Simran character was a Gandhi follower, we know nothing about Rukmini, other than the fact that she is a veterinarian who is often seen with cuddly animals. If a man says he will give up the only thing that shapes him, we need a better reason than… well, Pooja Hegde is pretty.
In a way, I guess Karthik is asking us the same questions that SU Arun Kumar asked in Veera Dheera Sooran: Why do we audiences have to know everything about the past? Isn’t it enough that we assume that this is how it is, and catch on to the ‘now’ of the story? But when the very basis of Paari’s decision (and the film’s start point) is the love between Paari and Rukmini, I guess some of us want more than just generic interactions between these two people. In fact, we get more juicy scenes with Joju George, who is wonderful as Paari’s reluctant father. And that’s because Retro is far more specific in the gangster portions, which are fun for a while. And Suriya, as always, is terrific in the inward-looking stretches, like the ones that involve his smile. There’s an acting-showcase moment in front of a mirror, and I can’t imagine many other actors pulling this off with such emotional truth.
But once Suriya (and the film) land on the island, Retro turns into an action spectacle, with Paari turning into a one-man army. The pop-culture winks (like the use of the ‘Daddy daddy’ song from Mouna Geethangal, or Rajinikanth’s look from Johny) don’t help to cover the fact that we are in a very basic hero-versus-villain story. There are reminders of Spartacus and Mad Max and Django Unchained. There are amazing thoughts like in the scene with bazookas (seriously, only Karthik could have thought this up). But the second half is let down by a villain who runs a cult that bets on murderous gladiator-like sports. These parts are interesting in concept, but they move the movie into an absurdist zone – and I don’t know if that was the intention. Also, now that Karthik is in the messagey phase of his career, the plight of the oppressed might have come through better with less stylisation, and had these portions been less abstract, more straightforward.
In the end, I was torn between admiring the film as a technical achievement and being unable to connect with it emotionally. As always, Santhosh Narayanan saves his best for Karthik, and the scores for the action blocks are especially fantastic. Instead of the usual sounds of danger, Santhosh pushes us into entirely different moods. The overlapping score binds together scenes as much as the screenplay and Shafique Mohamed Ali’s editing, and at least the flow of the film is as smooth as silk – aided by Shreyaas Krishna’s beautiful cinematography. Any cameraman’s work becomes twice as creative when there’s a director who knows what he wants from a scene’s look, and that is certainly the case here. You feel the joy of pure cinema. But I did not feel for the characters, and when a mother-son moment does not resonate or when the Chosen One’s mission feels generic, you know something is off.
When Paari discovers who he is, we should feel the way we did when Neo discovered his destiny. (The Matrix is one of the all-time-great Chosen One movies.) But here, it feels like another instance of a hero flexing his muscles. I loved the idea of everyone’s “dharma” being different. The Buddha may have believed in non-violence, but Krishna needs to wage war to wipe out the forces of evil. But several of these thoughts keep floating around and don’t come together as a whole. Also, the problem with Tamil cinema is that we have seen many quasi-Chosen One movies, where the hero turns out to be the saviour of the oppressed. Retro is not in that zone at all, but some of the predictability from years of watching those movies certainly creeps in. Writing about Jigarthanda DoubleX, which I loved, I said Karthik has rarely been so emotional in his cinema. With Retro, the emotion gets lost amidst the action.
