It’s a thought that came to mind when a Gujarati friend called, asking for suggestions for some of Malayalam actor Nivin Pauly’s older films, after having watched this year’s Oru Vadakkan Selfie . Surprised, I got talking to him about his new-found love for South Indian cinema. Our conversations, which had been defined by our common love for Anurag Kashyap films and David Dhawan comedies, now veered to cinema closer to home: Fahad Fazil’s restraint in Bangalore Days , the perfectly choreographed pre-interval action scene in Karthi’s Madras . For the mainstream Hindi moviegoer, whose exposure to southern cinema has traditionally been limited to movies by Mani Ratnam and Shankar, the hyper-commercialism of Rajinikanth or the art-house films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Girish Kasaravalli, 2015 ushered in the fresh new wave of contemporary South cinema.
My Gujarati friend hadn’t watched Shankar’s I or Mani Ratnam’s O Kadhal Kanmani this year. Instead, he had somehow managed to catch RangiTaranga — a taut Kannada thriller he couldn’t stop raving about. In the months following this conversation, I’d found a Bengali who was a diehard fan of Malayali actor Dulquer Salmaan, a Punjabi who eagerly awaits the release of every Prithviraj film, and a Marathi classmate who’s as excited about Vetrimaaran’s Visaranai as I am.
If 2014 was the year of initiation for many North Indians into South cinema, 2015 seems to have been the year of consolidation, built on the base of films such as Drishyam , Bangalore Days , 1: Nenokkadine , Jigarthanda , Lucia , Madras and Eega . Add to that the steady inflow of quality films like this year’s Kaaka Muttai , Premam , RangiTaranga , Srimanthudu and Ennu Ninte Moideen and we’re seeing actors and directors creating strong fan bases even in places where their language is not spoken.
It’s evident from the stupendous success of Baahubali that South films are no longer looked at as alien material in the North, and the mystery behind why Kattappa killed Baahubali is as relevant in New Delhi as it is in Hyderabad. And to think that most of this new lot started the year not knowing who Prabhas or Rajamouli were.
The trend seems to have been built by an audience watching these films in theatres as opposed to downloading them off torrents or buying pirated DVDs. Improvements in the quality of subtitling and dubbing have managed to draw the kind of crowd earlier reserved only for English or Hindi films.
What’s more encouraging is how the films that have crossed over to the North are those strongly rooted in their culture. Be it the highly accented North Madras setting in Kaaka Muttai or the rural Malabar way of life depicted in Ennu Ninte Moideen , the audiences have reinforced the universality of going local.
Even lines within the four South Indian markets seem to have blurred. Premam just completed 200 days in a theatre in Chennai. Baahubali ’s dubbed version remains one of the widest releases for any film in Kerala and Shankar’s I released in just as many theatres in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as it did in Tamil Nadu.
2015 also showed us the futility of remakes as proven by the limited success of films such as Gabbar Is Back , Drishyam and Tevar . The twirling of Nivin Pauly’s moustache is just as charming in Patiala as they are in the agraharams of Palakkad; so why bother with a remake anymore? Evidently, films have united more than they have divided.
vishal.menon@thehindu.co.in
