A bloodied blade, hurled from out of frame and onto a barroom table, replaces the police baton, though the single-minded ferocity of this image—Vada Chennai’s first—should indicate that even if Vetrimaaran has traded tools, he’s not swapped subjects. The Tamil director’s last film, Visaranai (2015), interrogated the uses and misuses of power by locking itself up with three Tamil migrants working in Andhra Pradesh, all falsely accused by local cops, beaten ceaselessly, and beaten again, until they are finally released from billy club hell, only to find themselves deeper in the machine. Though the wronged men bear its welt marks, the power apparatus mostly grinds away offscreen, and if our heroes occasionally peer at it through iron bars or overhear it in snatches thanks to flimsy jail cell walls, they don’t understand it; they realize far too late that their blood greases the gears.
Vada Chennai begins with the bloodletters. After that cleaver hits the table and wipes away a timestamp locating us in 1983, Vetrimaaran pulls back to reveal four men caked in hemoglobin and lazing in an almost post-coital mood, while a flayed carcass hemorrhages in the corner and the camera whirls around with the wobbliness of an adrenal come-down. This is what a power grab feels like. Of course, we will come to learn that these gangsters, still breathing in the fumes, have already achieved their high, and Vada Chennai spends the rest of its runtime charting the oscillating movements of underworld power which, over the next two decades, inevitably bring them back down. This blueprint’s been used before (the English title that graced the stateside DCP, Once Upon a Time in Chennai, should indicate the kind of sweep the film is aiming for) but Vetrimaaran’s architectonic interest in the system itself, its construction and its game-like rules and shifts in position, distinguishes Vada Chennai from any number of similar films and, despite an alternate vantage point, serves to revive the investigation snuffed out in Visaranai.
It’s no surprise, then, that Vada Chennai makes the most headway when it’s behind bars. That’s where we meet the story’s requisite rookie, Anbu—played by the film’s superstar producer, Dhanush—who arrives in jail as a mysterious outsider and with no apparent allegiance to either of the prison’s rival factions, each commanded by one of the men who sat at that fateful table in 1983. They’ve long since turned on each other, naturally, and as Anbu scratches backs and shoots a few rounds of carrom to gain favor, he slowly reveals himself less an innocent in this world and more an infiltrator. Again, these are rattletrap narrative mechanics, but Vetrimaaran’s rigorous mobilization of space grants them a welcome jolt of electricity. Opposed cell blocks form the gangsters’ petty dominions, and the open courtyard between them ensures that the goings-on remain mutually perceptible to the warring parties: a concrete playground for knifelike eyelines, geometric compositions, and movement across levels of action. The set-piece that concludes part one helps push us out of the prison and into the streets, where the film finds less constructive material for erecting its power structures in architectural space, but not before—quite literally—imploding the framework around the inmates, enfolding them in a collapsed tent suddenly pierced by shafts of light (courtesy of the knife fight transpiring underneath) and, with one genuinely thrilling reveal, detonating the movie’s design in the process. Intermission.
A newly expanded map reaches far beyond the prison walls, unshackling the aesthetic constraints that helped shape Vetrimaaran’s earlier film; Visaranai’s unrelenting mise en scène—permeated with shadow and nocturnal color—and its clean-lined development of character have absconded. When Vada Chennai steps outside, the style starts to fray, strains a little under the weight of a swollen cast, now spread across an entire city block. And Vetrimaaran exhibits significantly less skill in detailing the al fresco romance between Dhanush and his hot-tempered paramour than he does when he’s moving Anbu and his underworld rivals around a compact game board; stratagems play to his chess master strengths. Most of the romantic banter—really, most of the dialogue—is conveyed through flat, key-lit two shots and cut together rather quickly (it’s probably worth noting that Visaranai opens with a dedication to that film’s late editor; I wonder what guidance his hand might have provided here) and the central relationship all but disappears in the back half, retroactively nullifying the time spent on it in the first. A late Shakespearean turn temporarily breaks the phalanx of carrom men to reveal a hidden queen at the story’s center, and her appearance does help rebalance the score for the film’s women. But the focus remains on the striker: in more ways than one, Vada Chennai’s heart is with Dhanush, and with Dhanush alone.
The actor’s doe eyes and his abiding boyishness (the man is 35 but reads convincingly—well, convincingly enough anyways—as a “funk”-haired teenager in a few key flashbacks) cry out for an arc à la Michael Corleone, where Anbu’s criminal life will purge him of his humanity and plant a vacant stare where those doe eyes should be—and stray, plaintive Nino Rota-isms on Santhosh Narayanan’s otherwise ferocious soundtrack amplify the echo. But Vada Chennai is up to something else entirely, and given Dhanush’s role in producing this year’s other gangster-as-civil-servant epic, the Rajinikanth vehicle Kaala, that shouldn’t come as a surprise (and surely doesn’t for a masala-steeped Tamil audience). Like his real life father-in-law, Dhanush rises to thalapathi status while simultaneously deepening his social consciousness, a moral development that Coppola’s many descendants rarely permit, but one that emerges quite naturally from Vetrimaaran’s chosen genre and milieu. Returning to his fishing village from prison, Anbu once again finds it under threat from unscrupulous developers and the criminal ruling class, the same cadre of interests that assumed political and economic control in the film’s bloody opening. As Anbu hacks his way up the ladder (with some degree of heroic reluctance) the film circles back to tell the story of the corpse that we glimpsed at the beginning—another good guy given to gangsterism as a means to protect his exploited community—and, in the process, reveals what the sliced up body hinted at from the start: all of these power plays have been played many, many times before. So even if the taking of power by Dhanush restores a certain righteous order (there’s no drunken camera swirl to accompany his grasp on the crown), the system’s infinite convolutions—to say nothing of the promise of two sequels—suggest that the game is not yet won, if final victory is possible at all. The gears grind on.
