Seethakathi review: Intriguing experiment with middling results

Updated Date: 12/20/2018

Category: Movies News

The first forty minutes or so of Seethakathi are unlike anything we ve seen in Tamil cinema in recent times. It brings back the glorious Tamil theatre scene of the past. It starts off with 1948, where you have a mythology-based play being staged. You soon cut to another year, and there s another drama. Watch out for the wonderful framing of the drama in progress under a tree, with a full moon in the background, almost peeping reticently at the acting.

At the centre of all this is  Ayya  Aadhimoolam (Vijay Sethupathi) who has seen packed halls and instant applause. He s grown up on stage, donning a variety of characters, and the first few sequences establishes the timeline (and his career growth) with purpose. Because soon, it ll be the age of television and cellphones and his art form will become less relevant than before. What happens to a stage actor who s sweated it out before crowds when he starts seeing lesser people occupying the chairs in front of him?

The answer to that question is Seethakathi s main conceit. It is an idea that sounds terrific and terrible at the same time – something that makes you wonder how director Balaji Tharaneetharan pitched it in the first place. To help us get over the initial conundrum over his basic idea, Balaji sprinkles a liberal amount of comedy – and to good effect. We get an exasperated director (Bagavathy Perumal as director Sundar) trying his luck shooting a sequence with Saravanan (Raj Kumar). In most Tamil films, the comedy works because of dialogue delivery...but here, it works due to the reaction of a character to a situation. This is a trope the filmmaker used liberally in his earlier Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kaanom (NKPK), and he goes all out yet again in this.

Seethakathi is structured in a unique style; it starts off slowly and picks up only after a while. It takes some time getting used to the pace, and for an impatient audience, this might come across as a downer. Much like NKPK, Seethakathi too has lengthy sequences that need a bit of warming up to get used to.

The acting is bound to draw applause; Vijay Sethupathi takes us back to the days of theatre with his superb performance as Ayya in the initial sequences. But I couldn t help but wonder if his casting was a bit of a miscalculation – an actor whose USP is dialogue delivery and counters seems stripped off it here. Mouli is apt as Parasuram, but somehow gets to only sport a wide-eyed expression most of the time.

Composer Govind Vasantha (fresh from his splendid work in 96) chips in with some offbeat music that goes with the theme of the film, while the cinematography by Saraskanth TK deserves a lot of credit for his visuals. Some of the framing is both beautiful and thoughtful; a funeral procession is captured in the backdrop of someone meddling on his phone. A stage play has minimal lighting but the camera pans lovingly from top to bottom, with the subject being silhouetted between two pillars. Seethakathi has refreshing work from most departments but the pacing and melodrama are big dampeners.