Madharaasi Review | Bonnie & Clyde In Madras

A powerful and Hindi-speaking syndicate strikes Tamil Nadu in A.R. Murugadoss’s new film, subtly titled Madharaasi. Virat (Vidyut Jammwal) and Chirag (Shabeer Kallarakkal)—literal bros-in-arms—arrive to disseminate guns to various parts of the state. Standing against them is the quaintly sexy NIA officer Prem (Biju Menon). The syndicate, for all practical purposes, desires chaos and their main agenda through the film remains guns with utmost loyalty.

Prem meets Raghu Ram (Sivakarthikeyan), who is diagnosed with Fregoli delusion—a condition that has him convinced that every person he sees suffering is a family member in distress, making him summon superhuman strength to save strangers who he believes are his parent/aunt/grandparent etc. When we first meet him though, he utters the famed Tamil phrase ‘love failure’ and jumps off a flyover, which lands him in a hospital with a few broken bones. A little later into the film, he is hanging from many wires from the same hospital building, in yet another botched attempt at suicide.

He wants to die because Malathi (Rukmini Vasanth), his lover, has left him after realising that his instinct to save people has ‘healed’ after he met her and became happy and fulfilled in love. The suicidal Raghu becomes a perfect candidate for a suicide mission and Prem employs him to infiltrate Virat and Chirag’s gang of arms dealers. Since all his previous attempts at suicide flopped beautifully, Raghu decides to accept the mission.

A short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez features a man intent on killing himself, falling off a building. The first couple of storeys he passes has him waiting to die and just when he is about to reach the landing—seconds away from a death he so longed for—he realises that he actually wants to live. There are several such moments in Madharaasi that echo this snake and ladder dance between life and death. When Malathi comes back, Raghu fights off many villains, struggling to live again. But uyir, meaning life, itself is a strange thing here in Madharaasi. At some point in the film, as the guns slowly begin penetrating the state, ordinary people get a hold of them and the English subtitles translate this poignantly to ‘random man gives a gun’.

Giving Malathi and Raghu neck to neck competition in love are Virat and Chirag. It is always heartening to watch villains demonstrating love. It’s not clear what prompts this bromance between Virat and Chirag, all we know is that Chirag loves Virat so much that he is crazy enough to lose his hand for him. But then maybe it’s a good thing that bad boys need no reason to scream “pleaseeeee don’t kill him” at a hero who is threatening to murder their best friend.

The Raghu-Malathi romance has some sweet moments. He shows her care by letting go of all medical restraints and continuing to remain happily delusional, saving people who suffer in front of him; she shows him care by gently holding his hand and taking him out for tea. The film is occasionally, bizarrely self-aware. Malathi hesitates after referring to Raghu as ‘loosu’ at some point but in various other scenes, several people call Raghu ‘mentlu’. But as long as these words have always been Tamil not English, the hesitation is perhaps best avoided?

Film critic Pauline Kael refers to Bonnie and Clyde’s killing in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), as ‘the rag-doll dance of death’ because those many bullets were pumped into their bodies, because of toy-gun like sounds, and because the scene itself is visually grotesque but largely puppet-show like. There are many ‘rag-doll dance of death’ type scenes in Madharaasi, but these mostly involve Virat and Raghu breaking out into random yogasanas in the middle of a heavy-duty, bloody fight.

The love songs in Madharaasi will have us wonder what the film would have been like if Prem, true to his name, would have left the guns alone and simply played cupid to the Raghu-Malathi love story. Even so, the best thing Madharaasi gives us is a Malayali star named Prem who plays the role of a Tamil officer.

Vijetha teaches Communicative English at St Joseph’s University, Bengaluru and writes at rumlolarum.com.