The sprawling single-shot opening stretch of Vetri Maaran’s Viduthalai is one that needs to be watched and re-watched. We’re pushed so uncomfortably close to a train wreck that the devastation is not just in front of us but it’s all around. Without a predictable geographic trail, camera movement is disorienting from the ground up to a bridge and into the few remaining compartments of the bombed train as bodies pile up and severed limbs jolt us into attention. It takes a whole 10 minutes for the camera to zoom back to learn the magnitude with the safe distance of watching another terrorist attack on another front page. The shock is intentional because there’s no way we can move ahead without feeling deep hatred for those who orchestrated this injustice.
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Kumaresan’s innocence gives Viduthalai a force that makes its terrain far more real and unnerving. Although he enters this world as an outsider, sporting the rose-tinted glasses of someone brought up on the glories of the police force, he goes through a baptism by fire as he’s able to witness reality from a vantage point. The theme of a vantage point recurs not just in the form of visuals, with drone shots showing us how tiny these people appear in the endless forests but Kumaresan too finds himself being asked to man the watch tower. At first, this duty is just one more punishment, like how he’s being asked to clean the toilets. But it takes until the final shoot-out for one to understand how Kumaresan has remained at a metaphorical vantage point throughout, in clear view of not just what’s in front, but also what’s hidden.
The breaking up of their story into two parts allows for the first film to be entirely functional as Kumaresan’s loss of innocence, from an obedient government servant to someone who is being forced to question the system he was devoted to. It also gives the film a certain softness because the story of individuals impacts us more than a conflict as broad as the State taking on a rebel group/revolutionaries. In fact, Kumaresan’s love story with Tamilarasi (Bhavani Sree) becomes a bridge between the two worlds showing us how love is still the strongest form of diplomacy.
Even if we get past individual relationships, the graphic nature of violence too does not create the bone-chilling empathy Vetri was able to create for his protagonists in Visaranai. On paper, the events are far more visceral in Viduthalai, including a stretch in which fingernails are clipped one after another and a longish episode in which a dozen women are stripped naked as a ploy to capture Perumal. Yet one wonders if the blow is lesser felt because Vetri chooses to intercut this with a huge action set-piece. And with the real details set to appear in the second film, we’re expected to hold on to this injustice at face value with the police remaining the bad guys for the most part, asking us to wait until later for the greyer details.
