The Guru Chronicles

(this ‘material’ initially appeared on NG but I have modified my initial piece somewhat here..)

Rathnam Sets the Stage, Abhishek Walks with Giants…

Rathnam in what must now be considered his trilogy of power comprised of Nayakan, Iruvar, and Guru creates a ‘Central Man’ (in each instance) by way of whom the ‘experience’ of India is refracted. Each film recounts an individual’s history in linear fashion and at the same time ‘essays’ a larger national history. The chronology of the former is fused with the thematic mappings of the latter and by an almost logical sequence a stage is reached in the respective film where the central protagonist becomes less a man and more a focal point for collective national desires. In effect a ‘Central Man’. He is a symbol for his age, he is the ‘exemplary’ Indian in terms of reflecting his nation’s historical longings and contradictions, he is ultimately ‘representative’ in the truest sense. Each film in the trilogy details a journey from ‘individuality’ to ‘iconicity’, from everyman to overman, from virgin ambition to stained attainment. There are always two passages in these films. The more literal one involves the ‘hero’ getting to his desired goals, the second more profound one involves the realization on the part of the protagonist that he ‘is’ his nation. The tension between these two movements interests the director greatly and proportionately he seems to have less time for messy aftermaths. Rathnam’s trilogy revolves around notions of plenitude..

It is also crucial to remember here that Rathnam’s protagonists are always popular and populist figures. They are supreme achievers not least because they are supreme ‘democrats’. They always have their vote banks intact. They would always win elections (indeed Anandham in Iruvar literally does!). Even the extent to which these characters consider themselves beyond the ‘legal’ or the ’societal’ is always tempered by this very fact. Nayakan explicitly makes the point that whether the ‘Central Man’ is good or bad is just about ‘unknowable’. This certainly cannot be decided by way of any of the traditional social registers or institutional frameworks. This is ultimately Rathnam’s greatest insight into the power that emanates from ‘iconicity’ and ‘transcendence’. But this notion also involves Rathnam’s blind spot. Because it is hard to see how both halves of his ‘Central Man’ (or both halves of his films!) form the Platonic whole that is in turn the ultimate conceit of his films. In other words there is a ‘Central Man’ whose life before and after the event can be understood but the ‘passage to the act’ forever remains mysterious as indeed it must. The films though try to understand this very dynamic and fail in turn even if the failures are glorious ones or are failures in the order of ‘cinematic art’ and not simply ‘cinematic entertainment’.

But Guru is a bit strange. There is a moment here where the crowd actually turns against the overman. Where the protagonists of Nayakan and Iruvar were sometimes spurned on an individual level Gurukant Desai is rejected in a collective sense. His methods are questioned, he is deconstructed and he has no adequate response. Why? What enables the crowd in Guru to abuse their hero where the crowds in Nayakan and Iruvar would have never dared (though there are some hints of this in Iruvar though of a very different order)? Because Guru does ‘commerce’ with his ‘people’! His social bonds are always defined by the ‘transactional’ (including his marriage). This makes him very much unlike Velu Naicker or Anandham. Guru has quite literally ‘earned’ his transcendence. This however also makes him much more vulnerable as the ‘operating costs’ of history keep changing. Guru is always ahead of the game and his is even a charmed life in Rathnam’s imagining but he is vulnerable nonetheless because he has to keep generating his transcendence like ‘money’. The latter enables the former. Therefore when Guru is in danger as a ‘businessman’ he is also in danger as an icon. ‘Money’ equalises ‘men’, even iconic ones. It frees up people from older divisions of all stripes but it also chains them to the ‘replication’ structures of the market. Guru is quite right, he does the former very effectively; he also has to do the latter, i.e. he has to be a supreme player in his ‘inherited’ economy of violence. The one follows from the other. Guru is just a perfect capitalist.

The climax seems a bit easy after what has preceded but perhaps it is fitting. We are a bit like Guru ourselves, living capitalism’s moment, not quite able to divine what the end here will be, not even able to discern the ‘dark’ that surrounds these market hallows in every society on the planet where the ‘capitalist’ is a category. From the US to India these are often sites where ‘criminality’ in all its guises from the corporate to the political is a ‘natural’ feature of life and where those disengaged from the ‘dream’ and ‘mythology’ of the market and very much ‘within boundaries’ is as much a reality as that of the ‘global citizen’ of these ’shining’ economies. Guru is upbeat and the film seems to end on this note. But the ‘tragedy’ of ‘capitalism’ has not yet been written (or not yet been been incorporated into the ‘official’ narrative). The optimistic ending possibly betrays Rathnam’s own political leanings but at the same time might also be the director winking at us. Things always work out with the market! Money is the great leveler. Guru has just read this better than anyone else.

Iruvar remains Rathnam’s greatest effort, the film that most combines the ‘pop-auteur’ in him with the commercial story-teller. Equally the scale of its ambition makes this perhaps a flawed work in certain respects. In hindsight it seems beautifully logical that his trilogy began with the life of a gangster and ended with the life of a corporate tycoon. Guru is a bit of a criminal and Velu Naicker is a bit of capitalist! Iruvar is the transitional film and it sheds even greater light on how political transcendence really comes about even as its doubles bridge the gap between the corporeal and the spiritual, being and becoming. These might have been Marx’s terms for the double duty that ‘money’ does! Guru has much in common with Nayakan in a structural sense but it has at least as much in common with Iruvar. And despite the upbeat ending it is arguably Rathnam’s darkest film in the trilogy.

On an aesthetic level the film remains conscious of commercial parameters but the director does this by finding a form appropriate to his definitely more ‘accessible’ story rather than simply ‘cutting down’ on his art in any way. To put it another way Iruvar is his greatest film in this regard though Iruvar’s aesthetics could not have been Guru’s or for that matter Nayakan’s. Each film has its own visual grammar. Within Guru this grammar itself changes a great deal from the first to the second half. The music itself is more well integrated into the soundtrack than just about any Rathnam film one can think of. It is in a sense least conspicuous and at the same time serves the narrative very effectively.

One can hardly add much to what has been said on the lead protagonist in Guru but Abhishek Bachchan comes up with one of Indian cinema’s touchstone performances and his pairing with Aishwarya Rai brings about possibly the most effective portrayal of a marital couple in Hindi film history. Abhishek though passes the supreme test which is that it is impossible to imagine anyone else doing this role. His act here might be compared with the great iconic ones in Indian cinema irrespective of who one ultimately prefers. And Guru features quite simply the most charismatic supporting cast in Rathnam, perhaps the one most clearly etched out in certain respects. But then no other Rathnam film has the very fine Madhavan featured in the supporting cast or the reliably efficient Mithun!

Rathnam has ultimately made an important film. Within the trilogy it is in many ways his best analysis of the entre set of themes that has occupied him from Nayakan through this film. It is problematic on many political counts but the chief one being the notion (common to all the films) that the hero as long as he has the ‘masses’ behind him need not conform to anything institutional. This is never less than implicit in all these films. No single film among the three makes any of the others redundant. This is the great strength of the trilogy.

More on Guru

1)The second time around I cam away with a much greater appreciation of the musical numbers. Not that I didn’t like them on my first viewing but Rathnam’s ‘design’ became a bit more clear this time around. The key word here is ‘integration’ as I’ve suggested before. The songs work very much within the narrative and are seamlessly woven into the texture of the film more effectively than any Rathnam film in a rather long time. And of course the plot is advanced during a few of these. This is again one of Rahman’s great background scores with the musical cues working perfectly whether it’s the actual bits from the soundtrack or variations on motifs used in the songs or newer strains. With the last the most striking one is the Muslim ‘azaan’, abstracted if you will in a musical sense, that is featured when Guru is leaving Turkey. Mayya is a marvel of lighting and set design and features possibly the most remarkable such dance in recent memory. Ek lo ek muft besides having the fun element to it is shot in a rather impressive Petra-like locale where (and I vaguely remember reading about this) the temple is carved out of a rock. Barso re again offers striking visuals complementing with great camera movement at times. And while there is nothing revolutionary about the way the imaginary sequences of the Tere Bina song are intercut with actual footage from the ‘real’ time of the film, it is still done very skilfully. Some interesting thematic elements here — as Mayya ends Guru is leaving on a boat, as Barso re ends a train is pulling in, and as Tere Bina ends Abhishek is pulling up in his car.

2)Abhishek’s is the most charismatic male performance in any Rathnam film without exception. And Rathnam has made this film to incorporate every facet of that charisma. In other words this film differs from Nayakan and Iruvar. Kamal and Mohanlal also totally dominate their films by virtue of being the lead protagonists and also by achieving such full realised performances but they are in the final analysis doing enormous portrayals “within” their movies. But Abhishek (much like his father in Deewar and many of his other great films) exists as a “parallel text”. Rathnam is fully conscious of this and in fact fashions the film around this ‘effect’ as I’ve just suggested. But this in turn introduces a bit of a problem in the film. Amitabh Bachchan could be that sort of intense charismatic presence in Deewar because that film mined the mythic in so many ways. But Guru ultimately aims at realism. Abhishek is meant to be iconic but there is difference between the iconic and the mythic. Guru as a movie strikes a greater balance between text and lead performance in the first half because Abhishek is not really larger than life here too much before the interval (though I believe my general point still holds). But the second half has the icon in full force and it becomes Guru’s film so much that the narrative with all its richness perhaps suffers at points. At the same time the second half of the film is ‘leaner’ than the first and even more intensely focussed on the Gurukant mystique. To be fair there’s a reason why Rathnam has titled the film ‘Guru’. This is a proper noun unlike ‘Nayakan’ or ‘Guru’. This is meant to be even more specific than those two titles. And in this sense it’s not surprising that Abhishek has overall received even better reviews across the board than the film. This is the Rathnam film where it is perhaps hardest to draw a distinction between the lead character and everything else in the film.

Qalandar
Re: “With the last the most striking one is the Muslim ‘azaan’, abstracted if you will in a musical sense, that is featured when Guru is leaving Turkey.”

I should add that the PORTION of the azaan that is playing is relevant: it is “As-Shadu-al-la-ilaah-a-ill-Allah” (“There is no God but The God”), and it brings to mind the New Testament injunction (I believe it is in Matthew) against choosing Mammon as master over the Lord) — but in any event this portion of the azaan is playing in the context of Abhishek in/leaving Turkey, a man for whom wealth is the only God…

The choice of the city is also interesting: why Istanbul? Might not its position, as historic “bridge to the West”, have something to do with it? In turning his back on it Abhishek “returns to India”; i.e. it is important to remember that Guru is a period piece, and hence I do not see Gurukant as a transnational or “global” indian, or a post-industrial sort of entrepreneur: he is very much “industrial strength”, and this is perfectly in keeping with the period and the state of affairs in Indian industry. Guru isn’t about trading with the world (indeed we know he has a tendency to export empty cartons!), he is about building manufacturing strength IN india…

Qalandar’s piece on Guru

Guru on a 3rd Viewing…
(a lot of this was part of a comprehensive discussion here)

In addition to what I’ve expressed on the film here and also here after a second viewing I am now adding some extended comments that came about as responses to Goodfella’s excellent review (one that I nonetheless disagree with on its central thesis) and were initially posted there. the third point here was actually made after I returned from my third show. I am numbering these because these were separate responses and of course the responses made my others here can be referenced in that thread:

1)Extremely well written review Goodfella even if I find yours the most surprising one on the film. I can agree entirely with your commentary on the film’s technical choices. But I am equally unable to follow you on the rest. I think in fact that as a pure study of ‘iconicity’ this film perhaps surpasses the previous two and there is a clear split between the character before and after the acquisition of such iconicity. In many ways it is shrewder on Rathnam’s part to prevent access to ‘Guru’ as he is before he becomes an icon (barring some hints) once he actually becomes transcendent. And the reason Rathnam could not do this with Nayakan or Iruvar is that Kamal and Mohanlal (to a Tamil Tamil audience) do not suggest that sort of obvious physical charisma.

As I mentioned earlier this film’s greatest strengths are perhaps its greatest weaknesses. It is a great essay on its lead character, at the same time the lead actor here is dominant to the point (I love Yuva but I find this performance to be of a different order) that he threatens to engulf the film. But Rathnam being cognizant of this makes the second half structurally very different from the first one. The pure director’s film is certainly the first half but Rathnam in many ways ‘corrects’ himself in Guru. Nayakan was always the story of a ‘man’, the study of the ‘iconic’ here is greatly tempered by the fact that the lead protagonist is ultimately a gangster and therefore by definition his transcendence is limited to some degree. This is why when he dies the montage of this man’s highpoints in life are very moving. The same cannot be done with Anandham in Iruvar. Here rathnam chooses to retain the ‘enigma’. Mohanlal is superbly up to the task but adopting this route also suggests that rathnam is not entirely able to think the ‘logic’ of the iconic to its completion. In this regard he still allows Anadham moments as the man he once was.

In both cases Rathnam is not really thinking the iconic from within the iconic. He is on the other side gazing onto the iconic and not quite being able to get a handle on what ‘enables’ this. In Guru on the other hand he totally gives himself over to the iconic precisely because he has a star-actor who can be so ‘overwhelming’ as a screen presence specially with his acting gifts. As such we see the workings of how ‘iconicity’ begins to come about. Of course this is also a weakness because this does not still account for different kinds of iconicity predicated on different kinds of physicality. But at the very least we are within the realm of the iconic as opposed to neutrally outside in an illusory way.

The third person references are actually very much to the point. Because the self-conscious theatricality and in addition the split that this sort of public dimension introduces into the self on a massive level is surely something that we are very familiar with based on what we know and see of celebrities. In other words the person in question relates to his public self or his iconic self as an ‘other’. The public persona totally shatters the fiction of the self far more than normal societal intercourse does. And a point is often eventually reached where all that survives of the person is just this relationality to this ‘other’. To put it in even more theoretical terms this becomes a narcissistic paradigm where a ’self’ that is always oriented towards an ‘other’ finds that very ‘other’ in the ’selfsame’. This is Narcissus staring at his reflection. And of course at this point it is neither possible to be at one pole of this split or another. Occuping the ‘between’ becomes most natural to the person in question.

Again I am not suggesting this makes a total success of Rathnam’s effort here but what this means is that the director has for the first time understood that he really needs to step over to the other side and embrace the iconic to think the iconic.

In terms of the performances I would again extend this argument. A uniformly good supporting cast but everyone seems to exist on a different plane from Gurukant Desai. When Guru advises Shyam Saxena to become a ‘Guru’ before attempting to deconstruct him this is how the moment should be read. Later on he also says that the more that is written about him the larger he becomes. Exactly. Because Mithun and Madhavan are trying to deconstruct the man, but they simply do not realise that he is not at all ’simply man’. This is by the way also what Tamilchelvam never gets about Anandham for all his intellectual superiority over the latter.

2)Yes that’s a good point Qalandar. As I read it one of Rathnam’s theses here is that ‘iconicity’ of this scale defeats traditional biography. In other words the biographical treatment always by definition eludes the truth of the icon. But of course all that the ‘audience’ has on the other side of ‘iconicity’ is the biography or the ‘work’. Both of these do not explain how the transcendence comes about which is what Rathnam is after in these films. To cast it yet another way the ‘biographical’ is of the order of the ‘factual’ whereas the ‘iconic’ is of the order of an ‘event’. Hence the latter can never be explained by the former. Because the even re-calibrates everything.

It is in this sense entirely appropriate that Rathnam does not allow us any kind of easy empathy. Because one might empathise with a ‘man’, not quite with an ‘icon’. So Nayakan is always the story of a man and resultantly the film in the trilogy which invites our ‘empathy’ to the greatest extent. Iruvar I would argue is again a film that does not invite us to empathise the way Nayakan does though is mediates between Nayakan and Guru on this register. This is why the principal tone of Iruvar is one of reminiscence and longing. Anandham can never quite recapture his lost paradise which on my terms is the man he was before he became an icon. In fact Iruvar’s entire second half involves an act of distancing on the part of Rathnam, distancing the audience from Anandham to the exact degree that he finds himself distanced from his past.

By the time one gets to Guru one is treated to the ‘dark side’ of this spectrum, which is to say the polar opposite of Nayakan. so while Nayakan and Guru are structurally similar the tone is very different as is Iruvar’s from the other two. And I continue to insist that it is the same set of themes and concerns that Rathnam reads in very complementary ways across these three films. Depending on what reading one comes up with any one of these films is most problematic or less so than the others.

3)Henry and Goodfella: I think that the drama in this film is an extension of the performance in many ways. And the key Abhishek scenes, where he is larger than life, are quite electric in my view. When he addresses the public company meetings, when he addresses the commission, when he angrily knocks on his cashier’s door in the middle of the night and so on.

qalandar, I was perhaps less clear with what I was saying about the ‘dark’ side within the contexts of the trilogy. I do agree entirely with your set of points. What I meant was that inasmuch as Nayakan is the life of a man first and foremost who also happens to become an icon of sorts at points it is an ‘affecting’ one. And it is even a ‘domestic’ story in many ways with enough masala moments to go with it. But the fundamental question of the film concerns the moral rectitude of Velu Naicker. IS the man good or bad? This is the question the film literally asks at the end? Velu Naicker is of course unable to answer this. But there is a rationale here — whether one thinks Velu good or bad he is in a way comprehensible because he has been subjected to certain kinds of violence in life, To survive in that economy he becomes what he does. Mitigating circumstances if you will and the Deewar refrain of others being as guilty as the protagonist and even moreso for reasons of ‘priority’ crop up in Nayakan.

With Iruvar you never have the criminality in any important measure. There is a man who becomes an iconic star and then an iconic CM. There are at points questions of corruption but no one watching Iruvar would ever think these extraordinary, certainly not comparable to Velu’s or Guru’s infractions. So the question never properly arises here.

With Guru Rathnam gets rid of Velu’s rationale. He replaces it with Guru’s lust for ‘progress’ and ‘personal aggrandisement’. In effect he makes of him a perfect capitalist. As I’ve been saying elsewhere the twinning of both is a common feature of the capitalist ethic and its global dissemination. It is because Guru is a kind of ’sunshine’ protagonist in this trilogy that Rathnam bars the kind of audience access to Guru that is allowed to Velu Naicker. The viewer is impressed by Guru, not moved by him. of course Guru himself is moved at many key points even after he becomes iconic. In fact he even has two selves, he is one way with close friends and family and then as his ‘public’ self displays a certain theatricality. The classic example here (I am indebted to someone for this insight) is when we see a nervous Guru in the helicopter before his meeting with the minister and then a very self-assured, calm, ‘theatrical’ Guru when he actually confronts the minister.

I think we are seduced by Guru but we don’t really love him, at least not after he becomes transcendent (this by the way is true of Yuva also where Lallan cannot be loved). It is this distancing on Rathnam’s part that prevents the film from becoming ‘hagiographical’ even though the hints of such an approach are often evident in the film.

In terms of effect therefore we love Velu Naicker, we do not love Guru. I would argue that Anandham is somewhere in between, in any case definitely not as ‘empathetic’ a character as Velu. Here also Rathnam has to adopt this approach to maintain some legitimacy to the ‘duo’. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any point to it since it still is more Anandham’s film than anything else (of course there is literal duo here but also the duo of Anandham’s two selves, the two men that inhabit every film in this trilogy, i.e. the man before and after he has become iconic).

And ultimately Guru’s vision is one we buy because it is the dominant narrative of our world not because we sympathise with him. I suspect that audiences are not terribly affected by his criminal infractions either! Rathnam certainly provides the character with a defense but the audience has been sold long before this.

So Qalandar when I mentioned the ‘dark side’ what I meant was a character who is the polar opposite of Velu Naicker only to the extent that he has been distanced from us and therefore never actually gains our sympathy. This is a bit of a risky strategy but Rathnam fills it up with the character’s charisma. He gambles that we will be ’seduced’ by Guru even when we do not love him, that we will identify entirely with his capitalist drive. But this is a bit ‘dark’ because where Velu for always ‘human’ before anything else Guru becomes an ‘idea’ at some point. Not that he does not have his human, private side but the film beyond a point accesses this less and less. Without Abhishek’s enormous performance here the film would not have worked as it did. We are not sympathising with him. We are just always drawn to him.

And to the extent that Guru offers less surprises than Nayakan and Iruvar (I am in agreement with Goodfella here) this is because Guru’s iconicity as a character is taken as a given in the film, in some ways even before he becomes an icon. This is the point I’ve been trying to make. There is no genuine passage from man to icon in the film as the man here is always convinced of his destiny and the iconicity that lies in wait for him. At the very beginning the character says pointing to his forehead that it’s all written there!

[The character reminds one of O’Toole’s Lawrence who in many ways has the same kind of swagger and confidence and conviction about his ‘destiny’. Interestingly Lawrence says that “nothing is written” when he means nothing that is written can ever be an impediment to his drive toward self-fashioning. Guru does not mean something too dissimilar when he seemingly states the opposite. What is written on his forehead is only what he believes anyway. The ‘written’ or the ‘legal’ are never obstacles for either character!]

Rathnam has staged the man to icon passage twice in the trilogy. here it is because he’s looking at things from the other side that he does not need to stage that passage once more. Guru is not about a man turned icon and the tensions that come about because of this but more about the ‘effects’ of iconicity however it comes about. This makes Guru very different from the earlier two films. This is why also unlike the earlier two films Rathnam needs the actor who can instantly suggest that sort of physical charisma. His later iconicity seems less surprising because he is of course always something of an icon to the viewer, something which Velu and Anandham certainly are not when their films begin. Because of these different choices the ‘iconic’ is something more mysterious in the earlier films, always more elusive; in contrast it is a bit more awe-inspiring, perhaps even a bit frightening (the second company meeting moment with the rain and and dark hues and Abhishek addressing the crowd in a more than usual baritone is a bit like political rally replete with fascistic tones — of course Guru is actually spurned here!) in the recent film but Rathnam also arrives at a different sort of truth here.

Guru’s Final Scene

Abzee’s extremely suggestive post (in addition to his original piece) has stayed with me now since he put it up here and while I don’t agree on his specific continuity point (as I make clear in my response) I nonetheless think he’s onto something larger here. Within his thesis I am interested in something even more specific — what is the ’status’ of the final scene in Guru? How are we meant to read it?

Basically one sees the very old Guru in the last scene of the film standing before an empty stadium (as he has been in the first) repeating the lines fom the earlier scene as well (except that there are no fadeouts which is surely crucial). But there’s something else that happens here. At one point there is a frontal shot of Guru and Ash and his daughters can be seen standing in the distance (i.e. as one looks over his shoulder), in the background. Now the camera pans back to the stadium and the stadium is packed with a cheering crowd and of course Abhishek delivers some rousing lines. Again the film ends on a closeup of Guru and it is a bit hard to decipher his expression. Initially when I saw the scene I thought that the camera panning back to the crowd when initially the stadium had been empty was a rather ‘cool’ effect by Rathnam. But on a second viewing I realised that there was something ambivalent about the scene. The pan does not suggest just a chronological logic. It is rather too ambiguous. I am now unsure as to what note the film really ends on because I am unsure how to interpret this shot. But there is definitely a sense of illusion here which certainly would connect well with Abzee’s surmise on the opening moment. In any case I thought I’d throw this out there. I continue to be intrigued by this closing scene even on a third viewing. Because there is something a bit ’strange’ about it…

Abzee
Satyam- Thanks. I was actually getting worried that I may be losing my bearings. But the fact that you have been just as piqued by the stadium scene(in its opening and closing variants) as I am, irrespective whether we may read it the same way or not, is very reassuring.

I agree with you that there is indeed something ’strange’ about the final scene. I’d like to believe that Mani Ratnam is not the director who would simply in indulge in something because it looks cool. There is definitely something at work in the strobe effects of the Commission speech and the transition of the empty stadium into a packed one, with Guru seeming rather alone at the podium, even his wife and kids out of focus in the background.

I would like to give you more food for thought on these two scenes. During the opening and closing variants of the said scene, the song Jaage Hain plays in the background. Read the lyrics and tell me what you think they are trying to convey. I asked Qalandar the same question in another thread.

jaage hain deer tak
hamen kuch deer sone do
thodi se raat aur hai
subah to hone do
aadhe adhure khwaab jo
pure na ho sake
ek baar phir se neend mein
woh khwaab bone do

Read the last four lines especially. I think they convey a dying wish to have a go at one’s dreams again and hopefully fulfill them this time around.

Satyam
The lyrics (I had read this but forgotten about it) certainly makes things more problematic. And gives your theory that much more plausibility. I think a reading of how the beginning and ending work alters of course the ’sense’ of the film’s narrative.

When the film opens and Guru’s standing before an empty stadium you get the sense that this man has sort of reached an end in life. The best is behind him. But in the end it turns out to be exactly the opposite as the stadium gets populated. The lyrics definitely sense that there is something ‘dreamlike’ or the ‘imaginary’ or even the ‘visionary’ about these sequences.

I get back to your insight. To make sense of both opening and closing scenes the final scene before the commission necessarily has to be ‘de-stablised’. In other words the scene becomes questionable and this would explain why Rathnam presents it to us so oddly (Strobe).

Here’s some more food for thought. Sujatha tells Nanaji that she will make Guru fit in about 2 months, you then see the two daughters singing ‘jaage hain..’. The next scene is ‘two months later’ and we know the rest. What if that scene in the hospital is a kind of ‘end’ for Guru and overcoming the medical condition as well as the commission’s investigation is the ‘dream’? And the central narrative of the film then emerges out of this? Rather than the whole film being ‘imaginary’ or ‘haluccinatory’ (which is certainly possible) it’s fuses the real with the imaginary and as such the ‘real’ emerges from a narrative that is bookended by the ‘imaginary’…?

To be honest I am myself a bit stumped by this. I am not exactly sure how to resolve this. My own approach clearly has inconsistencies as well. But ultimately I believe that one way or the other the ’stability’ of the film is in question. Rathnam is enormously sly here. He provides a central narrative that everyone can accept but there is something more than meets the ‘eye’ (pun intended!). The film has certainly seemed less ‘optimistic’ to me on successive viewings once one gets past the obvious.

This would again present the Rathnam ’split’ in a new way. Rathnam is of course always interested in doubles (as Qalandar has pointed out better than anyone else). Within the trilogy it is also about the ’split’ between the private and the public, the personal and the iconic. Guru takes a step forward here and presents a protagonist who is self-consciously theatrical in public (I expand on this here — http://www.naachgaana.com/2007…..-viewing/). There is a private v public within the same film. This wasn’t true for Nayakan or Iruvar. But this kind of ’split’ is easily analogous to the one we’ve been talking about here and minimally establishes Guru as a ’self-fashioner’. Given that he’s also telling us the story of Guru this fact should give us pause…

Qalandar
Re: “Rathnam is enormously sly here.”

He isn’t the only one: am I the only one who thinks Gurukant is sly, leering almost, toward the audience in the film’s opening scene? Why? What wool is he pulling over our eyes? Or is it merely the (to use satyam’s phrase) “parallel text” moment of “look, it’s still abhishek even if he looks like he’s 60 or whatever”)?