'Award winning Tamil short film' - Based on multiple true stories₹

                             

An idea for a short film struck Saravana Subramani after he walked out from a bar. No, after a night show at Sathyam theater. No, after a DVD watch of a foreign film by Flickard Flinklater. He is a bored techie with a broken love life and currently dealing with a quarter life crisis. He reads lots of film reviews online in Tamilpadamglitz.com and an active participant of Sajith vs. Sijay fan rants in twitter. Thanks to his roommate’s 500 GB Seagate HDD, he delved into the films of Darantino, Zcorsese, Hong Kar Woi and of course, Guy Mirchi. One fine day, he realized he can direct a film now.

He called his friend Camerapal, proud owner of the Facebook page Santo Fotography with 172 likes and 220 HD pictures that includes flowing tap water, metro train crossing Tambaram, the broken bridge near Puzhal, Royal Enfield headlight, Mahabalipuram rocks etc.. Camerapal owns an ₹22700 Canon autofocus DSLR, which already qualified him to be the cinematographer of this untitled short film project. They discussed this project over a beer and prepared to make an award winning, romantic, cult comedy, Tamil short film.

He called his childhood buddy, the charmer, Arjun Arvind who is still friends with him in WhatsApp & messenger. Arjun, a big fan of Sheath Sledger & Sajith, is highly passionate about acting and stardom. Right from his 8th standard annual day dance event, Arjun knew that he always wanted to be a star, a performer, a method actor and all at once. His rugged beard traits and the ability to do the chest press with 125 kg load showed his commitment and passion for his acting craft. Arjun instantly agreed to do the lead.

Subramani was always afraid to make the first move with his yesteryear, super hot, first year, college crush Aishwarya Nandhini Iyer.  He took a bold move and dropped a text to Aishwarya and asked if she is interested in starring as the female lead in his award winning short film. Aishwarya was already busy with her GRE classes but spared some time to do the role, without her father’s knowledge, after our Camerapal made an offer for shooting her 27 profile pictures in a beach backdrop

Subramani’s friend from 'Sunday Rockerz' cricket team Aaron Paul is good in piano and had taken lessons in his Sacred Hearts school. He was appointed as the composer and his junior Vimal Anand, who had made a couple of Macromedia flash video presentation for college symposium has been appointed as the editor.

Subramani told about this short film project to his friends from work and convinced them to help him. They planned to do this short film with a shoestring budget of 3 lakh rupees. The colleagues chipped in a couple of thousand bucks each with a hope of getting cast in the film as extras.

Subramani had to sell his Royal Enfield and settle for a TVS Star. He also convinced his parents for burning his father's savings a little bit. Camerapal managed to rent an EOS 5D camera for a steal deal price of ₹12000 a day. They rented an ECR beach house for 7 days and shot the film mostly in the same spot and the street used in the tamil horror, slasher film Thinnaiyathaandi Tharuvaaya. They shot the film mostly on the weekend for 4 months. They edited it in 3 weeks, followed by a ten days dubbing session. They spent 4 days in a post production lab and finally cut a 27 min short film in a 41.7GB output size.

Thanks to the power cut and Internet speeds of Chennai, Subramani took a flight to Bangalore to upload the film on YouTube, from his uncle’s apartment at Whitefields. He shared the YouTube link of the film in an email, facebook, twitter, google talk, google maps, Quora, Pornhub, reddit and what not.

‘Kaadhal Koffee', the fantasy love story short film directed by Saravana Subramani, milked ₹9.2 lakhs in total to be made. It broke the internet with 1012 views on YouTube, counting 301 likes,  278 dislikes and 42 shares. Praises flowed from everywhere with lot of polarized comments like ‘Machan kalakkita... sir, super love story.. mams gethu pannita da you are the next Gotham Basudev Meghan.. boring film not worth the time.. timepass short film all the best do well.., the heroine is sexy plz share her phone number.. free Airtel recharge 4G click here.. camera angles good  but stupid romance story... what is ur next film bro.. click here to download hot sunny leone pictures' etc...

Subramani sent it to 25-30 short film festivals spending one more lakh. With a million INR mark, the Tamil short won the prestigious ‘Best romantic short film of the month’ award, finally, ending up as a real award winning short film, in an online poll event conducted by visual communication department of Zapollo arts college.

A year later..

Saravana Subramani flew to Australia for a long term onsite project. He is currently engaged to his cousin.

Camerapal is still passionate about photography. He frequently shoots and uploads HD pics online. His recent project is ‘My unforgettable honeymoon in Maldives – 34 pictures’.

Arjun Arvind recently ran a 10k TZS Marathon. He dedicatedly shares diet related posts & movie quotes in WhatsApp. He still supports Haam Haadmi party Hejiriwal.

Aishwarya Nandhini Iyer moved to Dallas for her master’s degree and often checks into Chipotle for a Vegan Burrito. Now a budding feminist, she enjoys Gossip Girl and a big fan Game of Thrones.

The colleagues & friends who helped to chip in money for the film are still paying back their ICICI, HDFC, and Canara Bank personal loans.

Reflecting on this process and talking about it over Skype, Subramani once told me, ‘Maybe, I should’ve written the idea as a script first’.

Soodhu Kavvum - My thoughts

This is not a review. This is a passionate discussion post about the tamil movie ‘Soodhu Kavvum’ directed by Naalaya Iyakkunar fame NALAN KUMARSWAMY, starring ‘Nightingale of Tamil Indie films’, ‘Joseph Gordon-Levitt of Kollywood’, 'Darling of the Masses' VIJAY SETHUPATHI. Stop reading this right here, if you haven’t seen the film. Do step back once you've watched it.

There are plenty of articles out there in net which reviews Soodhu Kavvum and praise the cast, crew, story, script and music of the film. In this post I have tried discussing, dissecting it and expressed the instances, scenes and shots which I loved and the way I felt about it. *Story Spoiler alert*.

The genre of Soodhu Kavvum is mentioned as Dark humour & Crime comedy. But one cannot stick Soodhu Kavuum under a particular genre, I feel. It’s a mix and total troll on almost all genres and the best part is that it parodies, spoofs and makes fun on the grammar and template that was ever followed in Hollywood, Bollywood, kollywood and other foreign films. CS Amudhan’s yesteryear’s hit movie ‘Tamizh Padam’ predominantly spoofs only tamil fims but Soodhu Kavvum trolls every single cliché on all kinds of cinema. Each and every character, shot, ambience of the scene, music, crispy hilarious dialogues and cuts iterates the same.

There are hardly few directors who break the standard procedures and grammar followed during writing/ making a particular scene or shot. With my little knowledge and observation on films, I personally consider Quentin Tarantino is the master in it. One can notice the hilarious, breaking the genre attempt in almost all QT films. Take his recent ‘Django Unchained’ for example, he gives a hat and horse to a nigger and makes him a cow boy/ bounty hunter, making fun of the evil K-Klux-Klan with their own signature masks and portrays them as a bunch of lunatics. The White and Mexican owned Spaghetti western genre has been totally trolled in Django Unchained and that’s the way QT paid homage for his favorite Spaghetti western genre.

Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Reservoir Dogs’ was a big hit and it was mainly spoken for its authentic writing and making. The success of Reservoir Dogs is that it paid homage for heist and crime genre by portraying the aftermath of a failed heist rather than a sequential/ linear discussion about the plan, mode and success of the heist. But, QT would’ve seriously handled it with his own signature style of cold blood, violence and revenge. Even this legend has been marked with a template, for now.

If one form of paying homage &tribute to a classic by explicitly liking it and making an art form inspired from it, paying homage to the classics by breaking/ spoofing about is an all-together different style and tribute. It doesn't infer that one dislike/ condemn it. One familiarized, liked, loved and consumed it more and more that he starts to joke and mock about it. Nalan Kumaraswamy rightly fits the bill here.

Dark comedy or black comedy is a new genre to Tamil cinema. But Nalan, a new-face to the feature film industry, has broken the cliche, film-making grammar and totally revolutionized the tamil film industry with Soodhu Kavvum.

Breaking down Soodhu Kavvum:

Vijay Sethupathi as ‘Das’ & his idiotic trio team –  Parody take on perfect teams undergoing heist or Crime in movies like 'Sword fish', 'Oceans Series', 'Italian Job', 'Bank job' etc... It will seem like Guy Ritchie’s ‘Snatch’ stylish movie, where the characters would be completely unaware of their actions, but here the idiotic bunch does all the mad, insane things genuinely and with perfect sense. This is the main reason it tinkles your laughter bone with perfect desi-humour.

Hallucinated heroine character- Big troll and ‘on-your face Indian cinema’ attempt. Pacing and placing heroine just for a glamour material, fantasy object, item song in most of the Indian films has been hilariously thrashed. Vijay Sethupathi hallucinates that he lives with an invisible girlfriend and listens to whatever she says or comment to him. I felt it as big spoof attempt on various Hollywood films like the giant Bunny rabbit character in 'Donnie Dorko', Danny’s invisible friend from Stanley Kubrick’s 'The Shining', Norman Bates character from Alfred Hitchock’s 'Psycho', the character of a mysterious man in black car who professor Nash sees in ‘A Beautiful Mind’. Just like the above mentioned characters, Vijay Sethupathi acts and performs whatever his invisible GF says, to some extent. When his invisible GF dies, Nalan has used a musical, the one that would appear in an emotional, sad scene amongst lovers in Billy Wilder’s films, early black & white Hollywood film scenes where the couple bid farewell to each other and walk away or die in their arms, such effect. There is even an angel song ‘Sa Ga’ in the movie where she pampers and consoles Vijay Sethupathi. Hiralious take on all the dream sequence masala songs.

The silent ‘Psycho Police’ – Good cop, Bad cop, Serious Cop, Rowdy police, Encounter police etc.. we’ve fed-up and done watching lot of stereotypical cop characters in Tamil/ Indian cinema. These characters yell, scream and utter mediocre punch dialogues and give us grim/ cold bad-ass looks at all situations. Nalan has broken this template by making the villain police character dead silent without speaking a single dialogue. The best cliché/ laughter part is when the bad-ass cop gets his face punched by one of the trio member with a pistol yelling the dialogue ‘Kaila gun vechruken, sirikira’. There was a thunderous laugh for this scene in theatre. The last but not least, the ultimate 'Iruttu arayil murattu kuthu' sequence looked like a parody take on torture sequences from 'Zero dark thirty' & 'Body of lies' climax spoof.

Vijay Sethupathi’s elder brother ‘Dr. Film Director’– Mocking so many thukkada, petty case, low-level directors roaming in Kodambakkam and Saligramam, dying to make a tamil feature film for cheap fame with just money, no idea and zero brain.

The music and BGM is a big plus and even they don’t lack their part on breaking the template. ‘Mama douser kayanduchu’- trolling the classic Jazz and Blues song genre, ‘Kasu Panam Thutu Money Money’ – Kalaichifying the 1950s tamil period films where the King/ Emperor enjoys seeing a serious dance form performance in his castle, ‘Ellam kadandhu pogumada’ –Parodying MGRs Inspiration songs like ‘Nenjam undu nermai undu odu raja’ etc..

Pizza eating politician MR Radha rather than tamil politician’s stereotypical portrayal with alcohol and Chicken piece diet, Spoofing Rajini’s ‘Priya’ movie blind-folded scene by perfectly finding the route in a funny note, trolling Hitchock’s cameo in his own film-instead of Nalan Kumaraswamy- ‘Pizza’ director Karthik Subbaraj appears driving a Jaguar car, funny and sarcastic news headlines and news scrolls at the bottom while newsreader announces some serious news, following  5 golden rules on ‘kEdnapping’, using a toy helicopter for a heist, Arumai Prakasam trying to jump from a building like ‘Mission Impossible’ Tom crusie… There is Sarcasm, Satire, Spoof, Dark comedy, Observational comedy, Surreal comedy, Parody, Dramedy and genuine humor that oozes out in gallons in each and every frame of Soodhu Kavvum.

Thou shall miss Soodhu Kavvum thy sinner.

Tamil cinema's stereotypical Douser kayanduchu. Kayatiyavar Nalan Kumarasamy & VJ Sethupathi.

We south India Cinephile's won’t just decode Nolan’s films. We decipher, dissect and devote our Nalan’s film too. All hail and welcome Nalan!