The
past weekend’s Thai Pongal festival – marking the point at which the
sun begins its six-month journey northwards through the firmament – has
yielded a full crop of Tamil releases. For some while, it looked like
the comedy Rajini Murugan might never appear from behind the clouds. The
second collaboration between writer-director Ponram and standup Sivakarthikeyan was subject to production delays and worse luck besides: its initial release date coincided with December’s Chennai floods, a moment when those cinemas not underwater were serving as makeshift shelters.
Yet the film that emerges proves so spirited that one concludes no
deity could hold it back. Certainly, the packed matinee crowd I saw it
with appeared delighted it had arrived.
The choice of Madurai, Tamil Nadu’s third largest city, as a setting
opens up fresh locations for a film-maker to explore, and new
conventions to mock: as the opening voiceover establishes, this temple
city nevertheless retains a reputation for harbouring all manner of
rogues and thieves. While our narrator takes pains to debunk this
notoriety, the film immediately undercuts him upon introducing Siva’s
title character, a born loafer who spends his days pinching pennies from
the administrators of the city’s endless festivals so as to avoid doing
any real work. Very quickly, we sense we’re watching both a love letter
to Madurai, and a spot of site-specific mischief-making.
