To emit

Shiva as Pasupathi/Ganguly Kandhan

Prakash Raj as Sivagurunathan

Isha Talwar as Janani

Kovai Sarala as Senthamarai

A millionaire is about to commit suicide by jumping into the lake when an unfortunate drifter rushes by to rescue him. The millionaire is drunk as a fish and will be eaten by fish if he is not saved, but our brave heart risks his own life and pulls this man out of the water alive. The rescue attempt lasts about five minutes, as each time the millionaire is rescued, he falls back into the lake, barely able to stay upright and balance in his drunken state. When he is finally rescued for good, the millionaire shows his gratitude by befriending the homeless man and taking him to a fancy restaurant, where they spend a gala moment eating spaghetti and courting lovely women. When the millionaire comes to his senses the next morning after a drunken night, he finds the bum sitting comfortably in his car and, not recognizing him, drives him away. And so begins their unique friendship where the homeless man becomes the millionaire’s best friend when the latter is drunk and is a complete worthless stranger when he is not under the influence.

By now, most moviegoers would have recognized that this is the plot of one of Charlie Chaplin’s best films, ‘City Lights’. While I was waiting for the bus that would take me to my aunt’s house, where I will stay temporarily until my summer internship is over, my mind briefly drifted to this movie, which I had probably seen about a year ago. Now, how did my little brain come to this movie all of a sudden, especially when I had been consciously thinking about how I would blog for a Tamil movie that I had just come out of?

The movie I had just dropped out is called ‘Thillu Mullu’ and I have no idea what the title means. All I know is that the movie is hopeless. So what does this movie have to do with a wonderful classic like ‘City Lights’, loved by almost everyone who has seen it? I’ll start with what happened between the time I rushed out of the theater and the second I got to the bus stop, which was about seven minutes from the theater.

Initially, my mind couldn’t come up with anything clever, good or bad, to write this movie. So I started to think about what led me to see this particular movie. It was easy to find an answer to this question: I managed to catch a couple of scenes from this film while doing a survey in a Chennai multiplex a few days earlier as part of my university internship. My job was (and still is, until this weekend) to collect customer data on their level of satisfaction with the facilities provided at the multiplex. I chose to conduct this survey either when patrons entered the theater room or during the intermission, when I would enter the theater and ‘harass’ the poor unfortunate patrons who preferred to remain seated inside with a barrage of questions. In between, I would be waiting fidgety in the lobby, pacing up and down the hall, glancing at my face from time to time in the men’s room, and chatting with the security guards who would smile every time they see me as if I am. a foreigner who has come as a guest to his theater.

In the afternoon I became very anxious, not being able to listen to my inner voice, which I usually listen very well and which I consider my most special friend and guide. When I can’t stand the boredom, I go into a screening and watch snippets of movies that are playing, but I never stay more than five minutes. One day, I entered the hall which was performing ‘Thillu Mullu’, and stood like an usher, near the entrance.

There was hardly any public present and only the first rows were occupied. I could hear a joint chorus of laughter from them as I walked in, so I stood up to take a look. The ongoing scene had a boss who catches his employee, the movie’s hero, skipping his work to attend a cricket game. The boss confronts him the next day at the office, recording his noisy behavior at the stadium on his mobile phone as evidence. The hero, who has been giving a self-righteous impression to his boss, saves his skin by saying that his boss had not seen him that day, but his twin brother, who is a cricket lover and a karate master. His ‘more gullible than you’ boss believes his implausible excuse and apologizes for suspecting his character; In the next scene, the hero jokes with his friends that if Guinness World Records had the title ‘Dumbest Person on the Planet’, his boss would come first and his boss’s assistant, who also believes the hero’s lie, second. .

In a later scene, the boss decides to meet the hero’s mother; to watch the cricket match, the hero had originally made the excuse that her mother had hurt herself on the stairs and had to take her to the hospital. In fact, the boy’s mother is already dead, so he has to find a fake mother in three hours. He and his sister beg his smuggler friend to act as mother; they dress her up as a sadhvi (the hero’s head is a Shree Krishna bhakt) and also convince her to pierce her tongue with a small trishul (trident) shaped object so that she cannot speak. A hilarious scene then plays, beginning with the boss meeting his mother and falling at her feet; when he tells her that he will visit her again after her trip to Delhi, she begs him not to, otherwise she will have to get her tongue pierced for the act again, but he cannot understand what he is gesturing ( but we do).

I laughed outright even when I knew they were exaggerating the entire time; I even laughed at the nonsensical sequence where the hero, acting as the fictional karate teacher/brother, beats up the guy sent by his boss as a spy after the cricket match incident. I soon left the theater and booked this movie for future viewing. Now I have seen it and you have already heard my verdict: it is useless. It’s not a movie, but just a set of joke sequences cut together, with jokes being thrown one after another and most of them failing to reach the intended audience (us, obviously). There is hardly any effort from the director, writer, or actors to immerse themselves in the story or its characters, and the post-synchronous dubbing is so poor that much of the character dialogue is heard many seconds after the actors have spoken it. .

So what made the few parts so special when I first saw them, when most of them seem atrocious now? The answer to this is that when I walked into the theater room this time, after spending the day at the office jovially chatting with my elders (I didn’t take the survey today), my mind was in its usual state and I could hear my inner voice. thinking, judging and criticizing each moment with clarity. Whereas on that day, it wasn’t that I had kept my brain on the side (it’s not scientifically possible to keep the brain on the side and still respond to anything) but that my mind was in a state where even the biggest joke fool could have me in a fit of laughter. And I think that’s why most of the people in India prefer cheap loud comedies and contrived performances, because their mind is too tired to ‘think’ while watching a movie; lousy working hours with no exciting work to do, plus a long drive home that is often hampered by traffic jams, just put your mind in a zone where even a small, insignificant stimulus will elicit a big reaction.

Imagine this: a guy who’s been cooped up inside his house for years finds a way out one day, and the first place he finds himself is a shitty motel; This guy doesn’t need any luxuries right now, because he’s at such a low point that even a run-down motel will give him a breather and some freedom. When I first saw Thilu Mullu, I was in desperate need of any form of entertainment, so I laughed. Now that I have retained my senses and my ‘inner voice’, I become extremely critical about it. In a way, I’m like the millionaire in City Lights, finding value in even the smallest and most common things when my mind is at its lowest, but rejecting the same when I come to my senses, I know my worth and what it’s worth. . My time.

Thillu Mullu certainly isn’t worth a second of my time now that I’m ‘sober’. But he certainly gave me a few laughs that day.