Meiyazhagan review: Karthi & Arvind Swamy show a humane masculinity in Prem Kumar’s heartwarming tearjerker

Karthi and Arvind Swamy from a still in Meiyazhagan.

Not all tearjerkers are sappy. Some are great joy rides. How many of us recall that one little thing that somebody gave us in childhood which changed our lives? How many of us are fearful of opening the Pandora’s box of a hurtful, childhood memory that robbed us of who we once were?

Meiyazhagan, in a way, is an extension of the director C Prem Kumar’s debut film 96, starring Trisha Krishnan and Vijay Sethupathy, although, besides the year 1996, that film was about unexpressed romantic love and meeting your once love and muse at a school reunion, the scope of the current film is broader and deeper, it slowly stews an unsavoury subject into a delicious meal — an elephant in the room, of hurt built over years, towards one’s own relatives (in the film’s universe but can be extended to a friend or a family member in our lives) because of their actions towards you, leaving you dispossessed, of your home/ land/ hometown / roots/ a way of life and most of all of memories you could have made. But how long can we lock up our memories, buried emotions and our traumas? If we keep hurting, when do we start healing? That is exactly why all of us, at some point in life, need a character like Meiyazhagan to help us find ourselves anew.

The film, which is like the warmth of a blanket on a bone-numbing windy, cold night, begins in the past, in the year 1996 in Thanjavur, where a young Arul Mozhi, played by Saran Shakthi (KGF 2, King of Kotha, Angammal), is distraught at being compelled to bid adieu to his hometown, his friends and cousins, the temple elephant and the only way of life known to him, because his father has lost the ancestral house to his siblings in a family feud. The older Arul, essayed distinctively, with a lot of thhairaav, by Arvind Swamy, the actor rest of India hasn’t stopped loving since the ’90s (Roja, Bombay), is now in Madras (Chennai) and begrudgingly returns to his native village for a dear cousin’s wedding, fearful of how he’d face the suppressed wounds that may raise their ugly heads. Both the Aruls, young and old, bring a certain serenity to their roles. A kind of pause that defies a hasty progression of time which eschews sustenance of past relationships in our modern, nuclear lives and rekindling of locked-away memories. The reason why his parents don’t go back, for Bhuvana’s wedding, but Arul must, for his little cousin and he grew up together, inseparable. Arul’s journey back home will be revelatory not just for the character but for the viewers.

At this wedding in his native place, Arul meets this man, whose name he knows not even as this young man knows all about him. The film then become Arul’s quest to try to remember who this man is, how is he related to him, and how does he know everything about him, and in that quest, he finds his old self, the boy who’d let the tears flow when he was hurting. The film then is to watch this morose, reticent, melancholic, wilting flower bloom back to life. The gardener who nurses him back to life, who enters the melancholic senior man’s life like a gust of wind, is played by that inimitable Karthi. To watch this kind of bromance — seeing men being themselves around their favourite men, no pretence, no ego, just pure gratitude — on our screens, in an increasingly negative, intolerant, hostile, avenging world that is forgetting what brotherhood, not bro code, once meant, is refreshing and life-affirming.

The Vandiyadevan of Ponniyin Selvan becomes Meiyazhagan. The tangential Chola history subtext and unconcious hat-tip to Ponniyin Selvan is unmistakable in this film. The name Arul Mozhi (Rajaraja I) and a troubled kingship / lost kingdom of sorts, of course, but also how family feuds over ancestral house is a modern version of princely families linked by blood fighting over kingdoms / kingships, and what Arulmozhi does for his cousin-uncle Madurantaka, who is said to have wronged his family, our Arul (Swamy) who leaves his kingdom (native hometown Thanjavur) where his distant cousin is the beating heart now and this cousin worships Arul, and teaches him, by living it, the meaning of gratitude and forgiveness, to not let our enemies or those who do us wrong to get the better of us.

Karthi is increasingly becoming that alchemist who turns a film into gold, infecting us audience with his character’s naivete and charm, leaving us defenceless. Here, Karthi atones for the toxic man he played in Kaatru Veliyidai, 2017. The fact that he can play all kinds of characters so convincingly speaks of his mettle. In Meiyazhagan, his effervescent, incandescent and intrusive younger man smothers the senior man — much to his chagrin — with a flooding of love, one that Arul is trying to wrap his head around but is unable to locate this man or his name in his memory. Meiyazhagan worships the cycle that Arul gave him unknowingly in his impoverished childhood. If for Arul, his beloved cycle was a part of himself he’d left behind in his hometown; to Meiyazhagan — whose name is revealed only at the fag end — it becomes a metonym for reverence and belonging. And a cycling back to memory, to an older time and older self. Arul and Meiyazhagan, like the film, cycles back to the one another.

Arul and Meiyazhagan are like night and day, a little Jai and Veeru, so antithetical that you wouldn’t imagine them becoming friends in real life, but they always make for the greatest pairs on screen. One is an urban man, detached from his roots, the other, a village bumpkin, is so rooted that he’s the nature no form of development can erode and efface. The film is a conversation between two adult men who wear their vulnerabilities on their sleeves, who sing, they cry, they drink a little, and talk about childhood memories (holiday homecoming and going to the local cinema) — and not once do they bitch about women. The film shows, how when telling stories about men, one doesn’t need to use women as mere props, even in small, supporting roles they can be fleshed out and bring out crucial aspects about the men in focus.

The film also touches upon some other themes, such as close-knit extended families as a community within itself, and subtly hints at the idea of intra-caste marriages (between cousins), in rural Tamil culture (and southern culture), to maintain the “purity of blood”.

Every so often, events could have turn dramatic but they don’t because here the conflict is not external. Here is the untying of old knots and closely guarded childhood grudges, in one’s heart. Both Arul and Meiyazhagan show us a mirror to versions of our selves we don’t reveal to the world. These characters are us or someone we know in our lives. The humanist film, riding high on a great soundtrack composed by Govind Vasantha, that dropped on Netflix this weekend, might have been trimmed a little from the theatrical one, certain lags tightened perhaps, but Prem Kumar crafts such wholesome characters with so much depth, puts them in relatable situations and makes his stories tug at your heartstrings so much so that the characters live on with you long after the film is over. It is a film about little nothings in our lives, which add up to something to be treasured. But we never do such additions, do we? In aiming for the big things in life, we neglect the little joys. In keeping our eyes on the future, we let go of the past that moulded us. A one-time watch is not enough. You’d want to keep revisiting this film like an old scrapbook from your childhood.