The man loves his threads. Picking each individual strand, weaving them in and out of a interlocking pattern, not really worrying about whether they form a nice tapestry or not from start to finish, Aatreya counts on his threads knotting into an interminable jam at some point. And then the exercise becomes one of resolving the jam carefully so that when the finale arrives and the knot comes loose, the path of each individual thread is resolved to a satisfying finish. This is just at the writing level. And then, there's his editing on top of it progressing in exactly the same way as his writing - cross-cutting, split-screening and interweaving. Linearity doesn't find a place here, it is all about interjection and interruption and out of that chaos, he creates his own cosmos. On top of it, he follows the golden rule that there should be no throwaways in movies, if not for any aesthetic principles, just for economic reasons alone. If a character or even a set property takes up however brief a screen time, then it has to find a resonance or possess a recall value at some other place to close the loop. In a way, his screenplays read more like screen novels, demanding the viewer/reader to pay attention to get the full value of the satisfactory payoff somewhere along the way. Sounds familiar, This screenplay style, editing choices, playing around with the time and abject disregard to linearity? The man seems to be ardently following the footsteps of the Hollywood heavyweight, a one Mr. Nolan, whose distinctive style of the interweave makes even dull proceedings (as Senate confirmation hearings) rise to the level of a heart-pounding thriller and the constant cross-cutting keeps one guessing as to which point all these different frequencies start humming into a harmony. Aatreya's budding oeuvre indicates where one sees linear, he sees splices, where one sees structure, he sees fractals, where one questions "why", he replies, "why not".
For all his sleight of hand, "saripOdaa Sanivaaram" is not without its share of indulgence. One of the pitfalls of this object-oriented approach, treating each strand as its own individual entity with its own identity, is it insists upon a proper closure to each loop with the same level of guile and gusto with which it is opened, failing which the dreaded question "what's even the point" stares right in the face. "saripOdaa..." suffers from that one extra strand laced right at the beginning that seems an odd fit in the overall tapestry, and to simply satisfy the 'extranerous principle' (where what is paid for has to show up on the screen), the thread interjects at all the inopportune moments (barring the really well done action episode where the true identity of the hero is revealed to the heroine for the first time, reminding one of a similar episode in "Pokiri"), bringing no immediacy nor adding anything to the anticipatory build up that the rest of the threads seem to be proceeding towards. Barring this oddity, the rest of the writing brims with wit, verve and charm. The humor baked right into the villainy leaves one in splits with its mere casualness (bringing the house down with a little water bottle is no mean feat) and the romance sprinkled in just the right doses retains its freshness right till the end. Besides the stellar (and at times, overwrought) writing, the true scene stealer on screen is S.J.Surya. His wide expressive eyes that squint, scowl, thunder, and threaten, ably supported by his rubbery face that reacts and contorts to every emotion in every which way possible, together with his deep baritonal diction, creates one of the finest menacing villains on screen in a long time. While the rest of the technical teams absolve themselves nicely, the background score and the sound mixing leave a lot to be desired. Just why has it have to have, every other scene, a thunderous score is better left to the wisdom of the music director, and the mixing, drowns out the words completely in an overpowering score, particularly in the background songs, unlike Aatraeya's earlier features.
"saripOdaa Sanivaaram", it asks, "saripOtundi" comes back the reply. It should have asked better and aimed higher.
checkout http://kanchib.blogspot.com for Srinivas's Blog.
