Mahaan review: You can be named ‘Rose’ but you don’t have to smell as sweet

A still from Karthik Subbaraj's Tamil film 'Mahaan', streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Amazon Prime Video is showcasing some really interesting content. So congratulations to them for figuring out what will work for an audience that is fed up with the standard romance fare where the hero fights goons to rescue his girl.

Three young friends play cards while the grown-ups around them are protesting the ills of toddy being sold to the villagers. One of the lads gets slapped by his grandfather who admonishes him, ‘You are named after the great Mahatma Gandhi, and you’re gambling?’ The lad tries to explain tearfully that he was only watching his friends play, but both his father and grandfather give him a lesson on family values.

Gandhi Mahaan is his name and fittingly, he grows up to be a commerce teacher married to a staunch Gandhian girl. They have a young son who is named Dada, after Dadabhai Naoroji (a freedom fighter who was not only the founding father of INC, but was a mentor to Gandhiji, and famous for his stance against Britain draining India’s wealth under British rule).

Gandhi Mahaan has to sneak into the movies because his wife thinks movies are a corrupting influence. His child has been taught to cover his eyes when going past a movie poster. He dreams of being Clint Eastwood in a Fistful Of Dollars…

Just like that Gandhi Mahaan turns 40. His Gandhian wife makes him visit the temple, and give Rs 5 to the beggars. His birthday present? Gandhi spectacles. While he sits morosely at the temple pond, a beggar offers him a life lesson that will stick with everyone. ‘You are going to end up just living the life prescribed for you, not the choice that it should be.’

Vikram, the happy commerce teacher who gets yet another white shirt on his birthday seems to be able to do nothing. Until his wife takes his son off to a Ladies picnic overnight. He takes the ‘YOLO’ warning from the beggar to heart and attempts to smoke and taste the forbidden local liquor.

Of course he gets found out and his wife throws a fit. So do his father-in-law and brother-in-law. He loses a wife and kid and home, but he gains his childhood friend Sathywan (Bobby Simha) and his son Rocky (Sanath) who happen to own the bar Gandhi Mahaan has visited.

He tries to locate his wife’s whereabouts and when he realises that his only support system is Sathya and his son Rocky, he accepts them as family and joins the business! Gandhi the liquor baron sounds wrong, but when your own family abandons you for one transgression, what can anyone do?

The film then actually takes off and we see the partnership grow. It’s not the drunken songs but the closeness with which these men operate that’s awesome. But money breeds enemies, and they discover an ambitious politician who can become a big rock in the middle of their booze business.

Politics is played when they either are for prohibition and can be bribed to go the opposite way, and also when licences are cancelled at will and need to be bribed to renew them. Gandhi and Sathya (what cool names to have when you’re in the not so Gandhian business!) realise that this politician is Gnanam, their old card playing friend from long ago! Muthukumar makes a seriously creepy politician and again, aptly named!

But all is not well in the liquor paradise. An unknown lad shows up at a village deity fair, and kills Gandhi Mahaan’s associate. This is when the story progresses rapidly. There are bodies falling faster than you can say Mexican Stand-off.

The moral questions now take centre stage and you begin to wonder where the story is going to lead you. You sit up and pay attention. What a second half! And the logic Gandhi Mahaan uses to explain his actions to his wife will make you pause and think: how easily majority opinion is forced on others.

Watch this film! as they say in the movie, ‘Your son looks like you, Chiyaan Vikram!’