The Sunday Late Night Movie

Doordarshan, on Sunday nights after 11 pm, shows regional language films - and it has the habit of picking some of the better ones. The great thing about this set of films is that they are all amongst the best regional films, and there are no advertisements. Unfortunately, if you miss the name of the movie at the beginning of the movie, you might never know what you're watching! Two years ago, I watched one of the best Indian movies ever, The Terrorist, about a suicide bomber in the days leading up to her bombing - a haunting, touching movie unequaled in its profundity, beauty, and its extremely personal nature. I found out its name only when I read Roger Ebert's review online quite by accident. Last month, I watched in awe Kanooru Heggadathi, Kuvempu's Kannada literary classic directed by Girish Karnad - a typical Indian arthouse film. Again, I realised what movie ti was only because it was set in Kanooru and was about a heggadathi (a mistress, if I understood the term in its entirety). Last weekend, it showed a Malayalam film about a college guy in Cochin in the 70s - again, an excellent film whose name I am yet to discover. This post is about Autograph, the Tamil movie that played last night. I would have never known it was Autograph if Amma hadn't told me when i started watching it.

Autograph is about this guy, Senthil, who goes back to his village and the town where he went to college distributing invites to his wedding. It celebrates nostalgia and unabashed sentimentality - the sort I will feel for Manipal twenty years from now. But Autograph is more than that - it chronicles his relationship with three women - one in each phase of his life. From the girl in his class in the tenth standard with whom he cycled home each evening, to the college girlfriend who was forcibly married off to someone else and the girl who put his life back on track after this loss. It traces these relationships with such insight that would make any viewer think about parallels with his/her own life. Its message is simple, and like most simple things, profound. The movie tells you that things and people move on, and there is no loss that one cannot cope with.

His childhood sweetheart, the simple Kamala tells him when they're leaving school in the tenth that her father will not allow her to come to school again, and so they will not meet each other as often. But, Senthil himself moves to Alapuzha in Kerala where he goes to college. This is the setting for the most moving story - that of his college girlfriend, and the shock and guilt that he experiences when he meets her again after ten years.

What Cheran, the director and lead actor does well is how he picks his women actors - none of them, including the deglamourised Sneha loks out of place in their setting. Often, in college-school movies, we've seen the lead actress standing out - her make-up more pronounced than the other sahelis who surround her, or her Punjabiness standing out amongst her Tamil friends in Tamil movies, or the fact that she wears more revealing clothes than all the other women in the film, or simply that she is much prettier than everyone surrounding her. Here, the women look real - just like the girl you and I had a crush on in school or college and not some supremely pretty former Miss World who inexplicably studies in your college and falls in love with you.

Where Cheran scores again is in showing the audiences that relationships between people get more complex as they grow older. I shall not reveal more at this stage. Go watch the movie, while I try and get my hands on other movies directed by Cheran, and wait for next Sunday when a new regional film is shown on DD!