Much has been said, written and gossiped about Mani Ratnam’s GURU.
The last Mani Ratnam offering, Yuva and Ayidha Ezhuthu (Tamil) was in 2004. So Mani Ratnam fans can’t wait to see what their guru is up to after a gap of almost 3 years.
With Abishek Bachan in title role and Aishwarya Rai playing the female lead, not to mention Mani’s world class technical crew, and last but not the least, the one and only Mani-ARR combo, its only understandable that GURU is one of the most anticipated movies of the season. But will it live up to the expectations?
About 20 years ago, Mani Ratnam tasted both box-office success and critical acclaim with his Mouna Ragam. If MR was sweet and simple, Nayakan was his magnum opus. Notwithstanding the allegedly heavy inspirations from Godfather, it was, it is and it will always be one of the landmark movies of Tamil Cinema.
After that Mani has moved on and had done several films (well about 12 or so). He has carved a place for himself as one of the best directors in Tamil cinema, if not India. His ability to tell a story with visuals and minimal dialogues is unparalleled in an industry which was notorious for using stage drama techniques. At the same time he had never let ‘Brammandam’ dictate the form, texture and structure of his movies (like Shankar).
The glittering career of Mani Ratnam can be split into two phases for the sake of this post. From his debut to Roja and from Thiruda Thiruda to this day.
From the year 1986 to 1992, Mani Ratnam was at his creative best in my opinion. One film’s success added to the expectations of the next and he delivered and exceeded all expectations like only he could. In cricketing parlance, I would say Mani Ratnam achieved the equivalent of a chanceless magical triple century during this time.
The second innings (1993-till date) started with Thiruda Thiruda. In this phase, Mani Ratnam had been good but only in patches. If the first innings was almost bradmanesque, in the second innings we could see a lot of street smartness one would associate with Sehwag and Javed Miandad. Effective, patches of brilliance, but not entirely soul stirring stuff.
His 1997 offering, Iruvar had his fans almost split into two camps. Some still maintain it is one of his best films. Some could not stand it at all. I’m somewhere between the two camps. I think it had the stamp of Mani Ratnam in visuals. I was kinda of ambivalent about it for sometime. But now, I actually feel it did not have the emotional content to hold the audience together for 3 hours. There were too many loose ends to the plot(if any). Characters were coming and going just because the director wanted.
in 1998, Mani Ratnam came up with Dil Se, his first direct hindi offering. Again, while the music of Dil Se will be one of ARR’s all time great efforts, the movie as a whole was a kind of mixed bag. Again, too many loose ends in the screenplay. Dil Se did well in UK but was a commercial disaster in India.
In 2000 he came up with Alaipayudhey, a film set more in the Mouna Ragam mould and as one would expect it, was a hit. If anything, that success of should have conveyed him his real strength, the ability to depict human relationships in a subtle way, but that was not to be. He again dabbled with Sri Lankan Tamils issue in Kannathil Muthamittal. In the end he neither did justice to that issue nor handled the child adoption issue fully well in my opinion.
Somewhere in the mid-nineties, he has developed an affinity for topical themes. Maybe that helps from a marketing point of view, but as a fan, I would say this craving for topical themes has only gone against him.
It’s almost like you take a topic/theme, engineer some scenes, add some nice songs and visuals and voila! you have a hit. I wish movie making was that easy. Such formulas may work once or twice but not always.
‘Kannathil Muthamittal (2002)’ was very good in patches. But I found the crux of the theme, that a girl going to Sri Lanka in search of her mother and the adopted parents accompanying her, not convincing enough. I guess the theme did not really connect well with the audience too. That explains the average success of Kannathil.
His 2004 offering, Yuva /Ayidha Ezhuthu again proved the point about content. Here we had Mani Ratnam, telling the backdrop of three guys till about ¾ of the film and before we realized we had a climax and it was all over. The packaging - the music, cinematography were all good; but the structure and narrative was only average in my opinion. Different (thanks to Amorres Perres) but not good enough.
Preliminary reports suggest that GURU is indeed based on the life and times of Dhirubhai Ambani, but from an average movie fan’s perspective, what matters is if this film will hold the viewers’ attention for 3 hours, like Nayagan did so splendidly or turn out to be like Iruvar (a damp squib on that front).
Perhaps the way GURU shapes out will also tell us if Mani Ratnam really felt gripped about the story and characters first or thought about an idea and is trying his best to engineer a plot around that. That is why mainstream cinema is neither completely business nor art.
Note:
The DVDs and CDs of GURU’s songs is supposed to be available from tomorrow, so this is one of my topical posts 
