Of the three movies my mother had suggested - Parashakti, Andha Naal and Thirumbi Paar, the last had remained on my to do list for awhile. Thirumbi Paar turned out to be a meandering, not very engaging film and the only reason I am blogging about it is because there is very little on it on the Web.
As with Manthiri Kumari, Karunanidhi takes an old tale and spins it into a modern tale castigating society at large, rather the political parties of the time. The agitprop is tiring in this outing and there are so many story strands that you can't be bothered unravelling them by the time you have hit the half way mark in the film. Briefly Parandhama (Sivaji Ganesan) is a thoroughly bad sort but his principal vice is seducing innocent ladies. Here's one caught hook, line and sinker - unfortunately the lady comes to a bad end but not before saying vengeance shall be mine!
But he is also overall bad guy and after awhile you can't keep up with his many nefarious activities which hilariously range from adopting a poet's identity to getting mixed up with union politics. He's a Jack of all criminal trades so to say. Here he is smoking a cigarette and being a bad boy.
Conversely his sister is a super saintly sort who has brought him up - perhaps some passing virus infected him with criminality? - and you would normally be bored by weeping sister except that she is played by an actress of lambent beauty and grace (Pandari Bai). This woman must be Tamil cinema's best kept secret - she is excellent in all three movies I mentioned and the only reason to give Thirumbi Paar passing marks.
On her way to meet her niece, she meets the poet Pandian - whose identity was stolen by her brother - on the train. By a series of circumstances Pandian, in spite of returning her love, ends up marrying her niece. Which makes Parandhama rather angry because he was quite looking forward to being the wolf to the niece's Red Riding Hood.
Meanwhile Parandhama is consumed by rage and it's quite confusing keeping up with how bad he is being. If he is not seducing ladies, he is giving speeches hoodwinking innocent workers, maybe arranging for the odd robbery and also generally hanging out at some printer's joint smoking cigarettes and producing junk news. There's some odd sub-plots, a few songs which muddle the movie further.
Things come to a bad, bad pass and in keeping with that old tale, the sister offers herself to the libertine brother. Whereupon he is brought to his senses and promises to reform but the sister cannot believe in this change of heart and kills him.
Not that you care. I believe Karunanidhi was a very successful screenwriter in which case the Tamil appetite for bombast must be very large. By this film I found myself growing tired of the verbal trickery, the dense dialogues and the politics of his films and longed for something much more elegant and sophisticated than the relentless barrage of words that seem to be his scripts. And it made me wonder whether Tamil cinema was ill served by being smothered in the rich sauce of Karunanidhi style language for decades. Some unintentional hilarity does exist in these films given the travails and fortunes of the Karunanidhi clan, like what if the man did look back at all he has wrought?!
_*_
I might take a blogging hiatus after this unless there is something I really want to blog about. I feel the need for something different, let's see how it goes....
