Senselessness in 7aum Arivu

SPOILERS, though nothing too bad…

Embedded somewhere in A.R. Murugadoss’ 7aum Arviu is a film deeply interested in communicating the importance of preserving cultural history and memory, an all the more resonant gesture because this is the director’s followup to a movie entirely focused on the unshakable persistence of memory—2008′s Ghajini. Unfortunately getting to that noble gesture is a somewhat trying task, buried as it is underneath an often predictable and overlong narrative that in its most problematic moments ventures rather deeply into troubling, even downright offensive terrain.

A while back I’d written on Ghajini (a film I didn’t wholly like—in Tamil OR Hindi) with the note that Murugadoss had made two films there—a romance and an action movie, and that ultimately it was clear to me that he was really more interested (or engaged) in the latter. The filmmaking seemed more alive, more awake, and less derivative when it told the darker, bloodier, faster story, with the graver stakes on the table. Call it a case of short-term memory loss but he seems to have erred in pretty much the same way in 7aum Arivu, though this film’s problems are much deeper than the wide schisms that exist between the different parts of its masala whole.

7aum Arivu begins with a prologue that has rightly received universal praise by critics who have reviewed the film. These same writers are more or less equally correct in suggesting that this 20-minute setup sequence, taking place in the sixth century and cataloguing the legend of the Pallava prince Bodhidharman, destabilizes the narrative to the extent that the rest of the film simply pales in comparison. Even as the film never quite bored me, nothing in it (save for a superbly kinetic action sequence involving cars being thrown at our cornered protagonist like some epic, deadly game of dodgeball) has the lively energy or the novelty of that prologue. This entire sequence succeeds in its magical, even epic ambition (all the more impressive given how short it is) and has some majestic visuals care of Ravi K. Chandran (though I should add I saw this on a less-than-enviable screen). Surya, fine throughout the film and again proving what it means to be a young movie star, cuts an especially striking figure in this sequence both as the young prince and as the ass-kicking bearded Buddhist monk. The scene and the character are so memorable, so overwhelmingly forceful that, ironically though probably not intentionally, its memory is precisely what haunts the mediocrity that follows in its wake. In this sense Murugadoss’ problem is very similar to K.S. Ravikumar’s in Dasavatharam—where an arresting, superbly assembled historical prologue diminished what followed to a tremendous degree.

7aum Arivu isn’t quite as much of a chore to sit through as Ravikumar’s mess, but once Murugadoss jumps to the modern age and sets up the story of Bodhidharman’s present-day bloodline descendant, his geneticist love interest and a Chinese villain who, like Bodhidharman, practices the titular “ezham arivu”—mind-control—and seeks nothing short of overthrowing India, things get just kooky enough to find enjoyable were it not for the jingoism coloring every turn of plot. This, in addition to the absence of anything to rival the prologue is what did the film in for me. There’s an unsettling brand of nationalism presented here that relies entirely on degrading another country and history—in this case China’s—in order to build a case for cultural supremacy.

And that’s too bad. Because if Murugadoss had concentrated more on making his protagonist a more active presence, (Surya is terrific even in the modern avatar but the script gives him little-to-nothing to build on) or on trying to better the balance between hard sci-fi and the more fantastical flights of imagination, he may have had something like Enthiran on his hands. But as it stands he has an undercooked adventure fantasy that, despite never really losing its grip, is bogged down by the director’s bigotry and his preaching—a problem that reared its head briefly in Ghajini’s glaringly shoehorned subplot about child prostitution but that here is consistent and unwelcome, (especially in a cringe inducing moment where mentally challenged and cancer-stricken children are brought in to both make an obvious point while being milked for easy tears) until it finally beats us over the head in a final “epilogue” moment that has Surya’s character giving a TV interview and imploring his fellow countrymen to acknowledge their own history and accomplishments while the fourth wall comes crashing down and we cut to a shot of Murugadoss watching the monitor and smiling in agreement. You can’t make this stuff up, folks! Murugadoss rues the theft and loss of of a certain native history at the hands of foreigners while committing a similar crime by disparaging the Chinese in a film that couldn’t exist without any number of Chinese action movies! If he understood the sad irony there, one wonders if he’d still be smiling.