Let me just put this out there. The problem with reviewing PS-1 is twofold. You feel like you are reviewing one-half of a film. The climax is not an end as much as a promise, and how do you review a promise? The other problem is that it is extremely difficult to not be clouded by the cultural context of the film. It is blinding.
A story like Ponniyin Selvan is so mythical, its emotive reach so deeply cultural that you are seduced by its world, its implications, and your imagination. But a world, bursting with action, is not the same as a world bursting with emotions. It is important to separate the mythical greatness of the story, the noise around it, from the story itself and see it for what it is. PS 1 plays out as though burdened by its myth. People watching it are watching it play out parallel to their images from the book, its descriptions.
For someone, like me, who hasn’t read the novels, the events of the film feel suspended, without any of the propulsive energy that carried over from the novels. With Thalapathi (1991) and Raavanan, Mani Ratnam was having fun with the epics, confident in his reinterpretation. With Guru (2007) and Iruvar (1997), his twisting of Tamizh Nadu politics or charting of the odd, meteoric spike of fortune (that marked unmistakable similarities with Dhirubhai Ambani’s story) was burnished and bloodied. However, when Ratnam holds Kalki’s text with so much reverence, something resembling a limitation emerges.
Adapted by Ratnam, Elango Kumaravel and B. Jeyamohan, PS-1 is crowded with a density of events, perspectives, conspiracies, and counter-conspiracies. Every frame is overflowing with possibilities. There is so much going on and an impatience to move on — every scene has within it embedded the next scene. No character is allowed the latitude to develop feelings and a personality. They seem cast in stone. These regal, hurt, tranquil people just are, they never become. So, for example we see Aditha Karikalan is changed by love, made bitter by its loss. But we don’t get to see the change, we only see him rage loudly over it. Is that enough to feel?
This heaving, forward-looking motion can get exhausting, because as much as a scene must lead to the next, it must also stand on its own. Even the music is filmed with this rushed energy, which was why, perhaps, the music videos were not released to promote the film. Because there was none of that awe and stillness that we have come to associate with Ratnam’s musical gaze.
That calm instead, is located in the beauty of Nandini, played by Aiswharya Rai Bachchan, the chief antagonist of this film, a former lover of Aditha Karikalan, whose love soured into vengefulness. She is filmed with such lush lighting, such soft music, even the gold borders on her saris seem as though lit from within, their jewelry bursting sheets of gold light at us, at their faces. Every time she appears on screen, the film, as though allowing you to breathe, paused for beauty. This is the Ratnam that I grew to love, a director whose cinema showed that beauty, that style, that silhouettes, if shot with a compelling and innovative eye, if staged with inventiveness, can be enough. It is why films like Raavanan, Kaatru Veliyidai, and Kadal (2013) have the following they do despite being commercial failures at the time of their release.
The problem is that Nandini seems to be the only one inflected with complexity, and the film allows her eyes to express this complexity. Even after a scene is over, the dialogues delivered, the camera lingers on her face. She twitches her eyebrows, she widens her eyes, she looks you up and down. You are never inside her mind, but are grateful for hints of it. The emotional tumult of her story is hinted at here, but again. How do you review a hint?
It also makes it impossible to think of her the way we could about a Ratnam heroine. So much of her cinematic reach is shrouded in mystery, so much of her gaze is vacant and multi-hued, there is only this perfumed ether that we can latch onto. For a director who has spent time trying to explain the intention of his protagonists, why they do what they do, why they feel what they feel (Divya in Mouna Ragam and Tara in OK Kanmani being against marriage, for example) this two-part format dulls the appetite.