In the opening credits of Vignesh Shivan’s enjoyable Thaanaa Serndha Kootam (TSK) , Neeraj Pandey (the writer-director of Special 26 ) is credited for "core" story with "adaptation" written in parenthesis. It’s significant to note this because calling TSK a ‘remake’ might seem belittling . The film is very much an adaptation, even in the ‘biological’ sense of the term. This organism has changed to better suit a new environment…the environment of Tamil commercial cinema and I mean that in the best possible sense. Even for people who’ve seen the original, TSK feels like a fresh film.
Set in pre-liberalisation India, in the late 80’s, unemployment is a far larger issue than it is today (picture the queue Kamal Haasan has to stand in Pesum Padam ). Dream jobs were those that offered security and safety and not necessarily those with fat pay cheques. If Corporations were the enemy of the contemporary Sivakarthikeyan-starrer Vellaikaran, here the enemies are the government officials. As a policeman explains during a job interview, if there are 44,000 applications for 1800 jobs, how do you expect the selection process to be transparent?
It’s in this time and age that Iniyan (Suriya) aspires to become a CBI officer. His father has been working in the CBI office as a clerk and dreams of reporting to his son one day. For people like Iniyan and his friend (Kalaiarsaran in a cameo), government jobs are the only way out. But of course, the system stands in the way of this dream and the frustration is that of any Angry Young Man of India’s socialist era.
- Genre: Comedy
- Director: Vignesh Shivan
- Cast: Suriya Sivakumar, Keerthy Suresh, Ramya Krishnan
- Music: Anirudh Ravichander
Never treated like hardcore drama, there’s a sure-footed ease with which Vignesh Shivan has treated the film. He’s great at transporting us to the 80’s, to a Madras where there still exists the Wellington Theatre on Mount Road. He puts words like ‘Gold Spot’, ‘Citra’ and ‘Dyanora’ back into our lexicon. Even the acting, especially that of Keerthi Suresh’s, has a way of taking us to the performances made unforgettable by Urvashi in the 80’s.
Ramya Krishnan excels in a role that subverts the image she has cultivated thanks to her two previous characters. It’s also a pleasure to see Suriya, playing yet another ‘sincere’ character that has lighter, fun shades too.
Of course the film has its share of problems and there are many loose ends (like how we never know what happens to Keerthi Suresh). But the second we start analysing the film for the accuracy of a ‘heist’ film, the director manages to surprise by double-guessing the audience (like the scene where he twists the typical pre-interval flashback) or with one of its wonderfully-choreographed hit songs. Vignesh Shivan never lets predicability sneak up on us. For a film that handles topics as serious as corruption, black money, unemployment and suicides, TSK remains a feel good, light-hearted film, tailor-made for the festival weekend.
