Kuthiraivaal is a film written by G Rajesh and directed by Manoj Jahson and Shyam Sunder, and produced by Pa Ranjith and Vignesh Sundaresan under the banners Neelam Productions and Yaazhi Films respectively. The film has Kalaiyarasan and Anjali Patil playing the lead roles while Chetan, Anandsami, Lakshmi Paati, and others play crucial supporting characters. The music is composed by Pradeep Kumar and Martin Visser, and the cinematography is by Karthik Muthukumar.
Saravanan (played by Kalaiyarasan) is a banker who dreams of a horse without a tail, and when he wakes up, he has a horse tail attached to him. How did the tail grow? What is it trying to tell him? He seeks answers from a soothsayer, a maths teacher and an astrologer, with each one giving their interpretation to the horse tail. The rest of the film deals with Saravanan's journey to understand the meaning of the tail.
Kuthiraivaal begins exactly how Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis begins. A man wakes up and becomes an insect in Kafka's story, whereas here, Kalaiyarasan grows a tail as he wakes up. There is a certain similarity between both these protagonists. Both have mundane 9-5 jobs, and are fed up with it. They find everything around them boring. And this new addition/transformation puts a lot of things into perspective for them.
This start is gripping because of the nature of the premise which is absurd. The absurdity keeps growing as Saravanan keeps meeting different people. He meets an old lady who explains/interprets other people's dreams, and she interprets this tail to be a part of his dream. A Maths Professor (Chetan) tells him that the tail is a symbol of his sexual needs. An astrologer tells him that it indicates oncoming impotency. With so many possibilities, the way the story ends is what is beautiful about Kuthiraivaal. It's one of those films that makes you exclaim loudly how beautiful the writing is.
However, the complexity in the writing is also what serves as its pitfall. The abstractness is too high, and at times we even forget what we saw a few minutes ago. It takes a lot of time to get used to this screenplay pattern, and there is a high chance of getting disconnected with the narrative. In addition to it, you have a lot of jargon thrown around like a chain reaction, the engagement takes a hit at the end.
Despite these engagement issues, what keeps the film going is Pradeep Kumar and Martin Visser's music, along with the sound effects. A testament to this would be the scene where Saravanan meets the astrologer. The sound of Om and the sound of Vivaldi's Four Seasons keep playing in his head at the same time. It creates a feeling of chaos, and this same feeling is created by the production design as well. The cinematography by Karthik Muthukumar has colours that create a psychedelic feel in you, and the tilted frames add on to the madness of the film that Kuthiraivaal is. In short it is tough to describe what he has exactly done without spoiling the film, but it is nothing short of amazing.
It is tough to portray a character as complex and layered as Saravanan, but Kalaiyarasan does a fantastic job here. Whenever Saravanan has a thought, his tail starts to twitch, and Kalaiyarasan is supposed to act as if there's electricity shooting up his body. Those movements are a tight-rope walk. A slight miss in timing would result in them being comical, and at the same time, overdoing it would make him predictable. The rest of the cast including Anjali Patil play the perfect foil to him, and come up with restrained, beautiful performances.
Overall, Kuthiraivaal is a terrific experimental film... a kind of film one hasn't seen in Tamil Cinema. The way it explores the magical realism genre deserves a lot of applause. The performances by all the actors led by Kalaiyarasan stand out and are natural. Technically too, the film is top-notch, and can make your jaw drop - courtesy - the culmination of Rajesh's writing, Pradeep and Visser's music, Karthik's visuals and Antony Ruben's sounds. But is this film everyone's cup of tea? That is a question that remains unanswered. Probably giving the film a watch would tell you the answer.