When we first meet Mannar Mannan (Guru Somasundaram), the protagonist of Joker , he’s squatting behind his home, reading the newspaper and relieving himself. The crudeness of the image is intentional – everything about it is. We’re meant to see that there’s no proper toilet, and slowly, we will see how important this toilet is in the scheme of his life. As for the newspaper, it points to his obsessive interest in his surroundings (he lives in Dharmapuri) and the country beyond it. He’s not happy about the state of the nation. The shopkeeper down the street uses his television set to watch cricket (Mannan, naturally, prefers the news). People drink harmful carbonated beverages. The water is contaminated with fluoride…
The crux is this: Mannan thinks he’s the President… of India . He stages protests against everything he feels is wrong, and his methods are unique. To protest against the slow working of the corporation, for instance, he releases tortoises in the building. And his sidekicks (Gayathri Krishna, who captures all this on her phone and loads the clips on social media, and Mu Ramasamy, made to look like the writer Jayakanthan) egg him on. At least, they indulge him.
In short, the opening scenes quickly usher us into the kind of film where “letters to the editor” masquerade as dialogue, good intentions masquerade as cinema. (I am sure the director Raju Murugan won’t mind this criticism. He even squeezes in a line about free speech.) Joker , for a while (and for something being sold as a satire), is too straight, too earnest, too consumed by the “importance” of the issues it raises. The film is so crammed with a sense of civic duty that it forgets to breathe.
But something magical happens about a half-hour in. The film becomes a film , a piece of cinema . It stops being a screed, it starts telling a story – a lovely story. We slip into a flashback and learn how Mannan got to be this way. It’s not that Raju Murugan stops talking about things. It’s just that these issues are dramatised, folded into the events that unfold around Mannan and Mallika (the graceful Ramya Pandian).
The fact that local cable stations air the latest films at night is an issue. But it’s slipped casually into the scene where Mannan tells Mallika he owns a TV set. The Mannan-Mallika story is so riveting that these lapses are easy to brush aside. Unlike the love story in the overwrought Cuckoo , this one works. Raju Murugan, this time, doesn’t strain for the epic. He’s far better at charting out intimate moments. (Music director Sean Roldan contributes magnificently.)
I left the film wishing Raju Murugan would make a straight-out love story, with unglamorous stars, in these exquisitely unglamorous settings. Because few others seem to be making them. And because after the flashback, the messages return with a vengeance. (A speech by the Mu Ramasamy character, explaining the Significance Of The Title, is a particular low point.)
But Guru Somasundaram makes it all worthwhile. He makes us empathise deeply with a difficult character who’s part truth-spewing wise fool, part man with a mental condition. Watch him when he’s held back by cops during the President’s visit. You expect explosions of righteous rage. Instead, we get how pathetic, how powerless he is. Watch him search for the right word while addressing Supreme Court judges in English. “I reject your [pause] judgement.” A good actor can dust the cobwebs off clichés. A great one can (almost) make you buy a message movie.
