The storyline of the underdog boxer making it big has been told so many times, one should have been bored. But Pa Ranjith’s Sarpatta Parambarai manages to hook the audience mostly because the director invests a lot in the secondary characters rather than make them mere two-dimensional props for the protagonists. Whether Dancing Rose (Shabeer Kallarakkal) or Daddy (John Vijay), they stand out with vivid personalities that make us want to see more of them.
If this is the film’s first triumph, the second is Pasupathy as boxing coach Rangan. He delivers a nuanced and quiet performance that stands head and shoulders not just above the others but above the film itself. In fact, if the film had shown the kind of restraint Pasupathy brought in, it would have gained immensely. And one doesn’t mean restraint in the ebullience or loudness of its various characters or in the noisy and very public lives they live, but in its over-long, indulgent and populist screenplay, which takes away a certain sting the film could have otherwise delivered.
Which brings me to Ranjith’s third triumph — his fearless and unabashed politics. There are so many voices that insist, more so today, that politics must be kept out of cinema or art or writing, yet Ranjith has never shied away from hoisting his banners and beliefs out there for the world to see. And he does so in this film, too.
Set in the 70s, in Chennai’s Black Town quarter, a tough-as-nails area populated by port workers and labourers, the film establishes that it is the period of the Emergency. The DMK is in power in Tamil Nadu, like now. And the Chief Minister is M Karunanidhi, whose son Stalin is Chief Minister now. Rangan vadiyar is a DMK party member, and very early on, his boxer emerges into the ring wearing a robe with the rising sun emblazoned on it. Even as the main boxing action and clan rivalries play out, the background chatter — from bystanders, fans, newspaper mastheads — emits a steady stream of political news. Delhi, the film states, is becoming autocratic and Tamil Nadu is pushing back.
In fact, history shows that Karunanidhi held out for seven whole months, refusing to implement Emergency laws and rulings. Finally, on January 31, 1976, his government was dismissed, President’s Rule imposed, and his party functionaries jailed. But for those seven months, Tamil Nadu was a sanctuary where many opposition politicians from the North fleeing the police took refuge. Writings, speeches, and pamphlets were printed in the state for distribution elsewhere as strict censorship had resulted in most newspapers not daring to print anything critical of the government.
In the film, Rangan makes a speech where he praises his leader for holding out against the repressive Centre and ends by demanding the Prime Minister’s resignation. Given the hashtags reigning on social media now, it is impossible to miss the parallels being drawn. It is interesting, however, to see Ranjith shift focus from Dalit to Dravidian politics in this film. It is not that he abandons the Dalit movement — the references to slavery and oppression, Kabilan being asked to fight for “our people”, the ghetto-like milieu invoked are patent — but he seems almost to step back from the close-up and take a longer shot that includes the Dalit struggle and the Dravidian.
But alas, while Ranjith’s intentions are impeccable, he falters in execution. Till the end, the two parallels — the larger story of Tamil politics and the more intimate story of the boxer — don’t really meet. They play on different tracks, imparting a strangely detached and impassive air to what could have been a fiery historical backdrop seeping into every pore and sinew of the players.
The radio commentaries, the rickshaw driver’s asides, the newspaper headlines all become, therefore, merely ornamental, a historically correct setting, rather than provide the motivation for or drive the actions of the characters. And except for Rangan’s sojourn in jail, the characters remain seemingly untouched by the larger politics. To set the film in such a fraught era and to not then make it intensely about that era seems a bit of a bummer, but if Ranjith’s intention was to simply make a straight boxing film, then Sarpatta indeed ticks all the boxes.
Where the writer tries to make sense of society with seven hundred words and a bit of snark
