The press reporter has never been as important on the big screen as he is in Vanjagar Ulagam . Vishagan (Vishagan) plays a scribe who’s on the lookout for crime stories and seems to spend more time inside police stations than at home or office. What’s wrong with that, you might ask. Well, he gets deeply involved with one case that he even irks the cops who’re supposed to be solving it. “ Un tholla thaanga mudiyala (You’re becoming a bother) ,” a cop tells him during one of his many visits to the station. You might be tempted to think that Vishagan is the focus of the narrative; not the protagonist, not the case and not the murder.
Vanjagar Ulagam misses the trick by giving this scribe so much screen space that it doesn’t detail its other main characters. The protagonist is Shanmugham (Ciby), who works as a network engineer in the newspaper office Vishagan is employed. The film kickstarts with Shanmugham, who’s setting a van ablaze in the first shot. He’s clearly drunk and barely manages to make his way back home. The next day, the cops are on his heels.
- Genre: Thriller
- Cast: Guru Somasundaram, Ciby, Vishagan
- Storyline: A murder of a woman throws open a can of worms
They’re there to investigate the murder of Mythili (Chandini Tamilarasan) who was Shanmugham’s neighbour. And slowly, we’re taken into their stories and another involving two dreaded gangsters (Sampath, played by Guru Somasundaram, and Durairaj), and how the two are linked to each other.
The film mentions several characters without exploring their arcs properly. The songs act as giant speed breakers – the romance track has two numbers puzzlingly shot in slow motion. The acting saves it somewhat, with Guru Somasundaram showing some spark especially in the second half.
Manoj Beedha’s Vanjagar Ulagam is clearly an experiment in terms of making. The cinematography has extensive Western influences (think dark, moody lighting) and the music is offbeat (a Carnatic dubstep plays in the background when a police encounter is taking place) but lengthy dialogue-driven sequences kill the film. The press reporter keeps talking. The cops too keep conversing. Even the gangsters seem to prefer chit-chat over guns. And we’re left staring at the big screen, in silence, for what seems to be a 160-minute eternity.
