It's Merry Christmas vs Captain Miller

Merry Christmas: The Year’s Most Definitive Romance Is Already Here

This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows.

Dir: Sriram Raghavan

Cast: Katrina Kaif, Vijay Sethupathi

Playing in: Theatres

IT is Christmas eve and a man is sitting at the bar alone. He has no one at home and nowhere to be. Near the washroom, he meets a hassled stranger. “Tell the woman on that table that I have left,” the latter says and flees. The informer, now burdened to lie to someone he has never met, trudges along. A woman is presumably sitting with her daughter. Next to them is a big teddy bear. All three point their gaze when the message is delivered. The air is thick with disappointment and polite smiles are exchanged. The nameless woman leaves the restaurant but the man’s eyes keep trailing her. This is Christmas (eve) and what have you done?

Sriram Raghavan, one of the most fascinating directors in Hindi cinema, is in the second decade of his career. Five feature films later, he is a genre unto himself. You don’t watch his films as much as his films watch your eyes darting across the screen in fear of missing a clue. There is death, there is a killer, there are cops, and there is retribution. The style is distinct. There are Easter eggs scattered across the frame and payoffs for trivia-attuned cinephiles. There is dishonesty aplenty and a thriving moral core. And all of these make a Sriram Raghavan film.

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Merry Christmas, his first work in five years and adapted from a French novel, is an extension of his oeuvre and a disruption in his filmography. It is the most Sriram Raghavan film he has made and the most unlike Sriram Raghavan film only he could have made. The outing is a reiteration of his craft, a stunning example of his finesse as a filmmaker, and fresh evidence of his pursuit as a storyteller. This is the story he probably always wanted to tell and this is the story he was probably always telling. Except we were looking elsewhere. Twenty years since familiarising us with his tailored gore, the filmmaker plunges his hands inside his trove of tales, threatening us with more mayhem. But what comes out is a beating heart. Raghavan holds it gently in his palm and gives it a name: Merry Christmas.

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Arun Matheswaran's Captain Miller Is In A Rush to Get To The Finish Line

Dhanush tries valiantly in a film where only his role is substantial enough to give a credible performance, writes Aditya Shrikrishna.

Dir: Arun M

Cast: Dhanush

Playing in: Theatres

THE Tamil Eelam and Sri Lanka cast a long shadow in Arun Matheswaran’s works. He’s made only three films, but his debut Rocky had characters with roots in Tamil Eelam, and Dhanushkodi was a prominent location. The coastal ghost town is mentioned and briefly visited in his new film Captain Miller, starring Dhanush in the titular role. Miller — a quickly disillusioned Indian soldier under the British in pre-Independence India, who turns part-time dacoit, part-time mercenary — at one point gives it all up and decides to go to Ceylon. There isn’t a larger point to this.

Of course, Captain Miller was a real person — Vallipuram Vasanthan, and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE’s first Black Tiger. Is that simply an alternate history and an alternate movie, albeit in a different period? There is even a mention of the Indian freedom movement needing “tigers”. The casteism and systemic oppression of the puppet Tamil feudal family combined with colonialism means that the situation in Miller aka Analeesan’s (Easan) village is just as grim and bleak. The prologue (as is the norm in his films, Arun divides the film into chapters with curious titles) talks about the myth of the local deity Koranaaru (and Ravanan is briefly invoked as well).

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