Reworking the clichés

Nagesh Kukunoor’s Bollywood Calling, a satire on the Hindi cinema clichés – brothers get lost, one becomes dacoit and the other a software engineer – was a reminder of all those Mere paas Maa hai movies of the 70s. Then is it possible to take all the clichés and make a watchable movie? Ranjit Nair says that’s what director Myskin has done in the Tamil movie Anjaathey

What I liked here was that the director had a clear vision. He takes almost every single cliche in the book – the two-friends saga, son redeeming himself in father’s eyes, friendship, sacrifice of the friend, cops versus villains – and re-works them, until they take on a decidedly different form. Most of the time, the hero is merely incidental to the proceedings, and is forced to the sidelines while all these catastrophic events take place around him.