Ratnam’s Baptisms (GF on Kadal)

SPOILERS GALORE!

Kadal plays like a greatest hits reel of Mani Ratnam’s favorite ideas, visual devices and story threads, refracted here through the lens of a vividly realized local world. The most memorable of Ratnam’s accomplishments in this film is his very distinctive, very focused sense of place. Few of Ratnam’s works in recent memory have felt this entrenched in its locale. Only Raavan, which spent virtually all of its running time in the thick of the forest, comes close on this score. And this isn’t the only way in which the last two films from this singular filmmaker appear connected.

If Ratnam’s ambitious, misunderstood previous film presented a vision of the world where the Gods were fallen, broken things, his latest offering has a more optimistic or, at least, a more balanced spiritual bent, concerned as it is with redemption, with ascension. Each one of the central characters here is offered a moment of resurrection—whether it’s the passing shot of a sleeping child roused from atop his mother’s corpse, or the introductory moment for a young woman who alights from a hospital gurney, unhooking her IV and walking out as if she’d simply shaken off her mortality. Then of course there’s the priest who is imprisoned and later released, or the self-professed Satan, who is reeled back into the story—and back to life—after his banishment and near-death. In Raavan, Ratnam blurred the lines between the hero and the villain—here he’s still interested in their dynamic but he’s rather more focused on the project of secularizing the ideas of good and evil.

That might sound like a strange thing to say about a movie that’s as steeped in Christian tropes as this one. But then it’s also strange for an atheist to make a film that on the surface appears to valorize God. Kadal, though, seems interested in doing so only to the extent that it remains tethered to the demands of its setting. Beyond its surface gestures, however, there are attempts in this film to interrogate faith and to place the responsibility of good and evil on the shoulders of individual players and the choices they make rather than the emissaries of God or Satan, as respectively played here by Arvind Swamy (in what is easily his career-best performance) and Arjun. The vehicle for this experiment is Gautham Karthik’s character, a young rogue sprung from the Ratnam archives—a shadow of several Ratnam anti-heroes from the past but primarily a successor to Kamal Haasan’s Velu, Rajnikanth’s Surya and Abhishek Bachchan/Madhavan’s Lallan/Inba. Those previous characters were all, like Kadal’s Thomas, born into poverty and betrayed and abandoned by their families, resorting to crime and violence in order to survive but also and perhaps more importantly to carve out a place for themselves in a world that has otherwise relegated them to the periphery. The Faustian pact that Thomas’ spiritual predecessors in Thalapathy, Nayakan and Yuva/Ayitha Ezhuthu make in order to transcend their lot is literalized in this film as both Arvind Swamy’s priest and Arjun’s mob lord vie for Thomas’ soul. That neither of these figures truly takes their prize in the end seems, to my mind, the point of Ratnam’s film and one of its most creditable successes.

Three sequences in Kadal are especially useful in this reading of the film, and they also help to explain the film’s title. Each of these moments involve Thomas confronting a baptism. The first occurs when he’s a wayward child and the priest who has become his Father and father (to borrow Rangan’s insightful phrasing) leads him to a beach where teams of fisherman are setting out for the day. The priest approaches a boatman along the shore and asks him to take Thomas along to teach the boy his trade, vouching for the child, (a homeless orphan) and pleading for his admittance into this insular community, and doing so (in a smart move by Ratnam) as he wades, fully robed in his vestments and with the boy in tow, into the water—the very picture of a baptism in action. Initially reluctant, the fisherman agrees and Thomas is accepted into a fold for the first time in his life. The second moment, occurring years later, is a less figurative and ultimately failed baptism. Thomas, now a teenager in love, asks the priest to actually baptize him, to allow him to formally enter the church, which is here an extension of the community. But when word gets out around town that a prostitute’s orphaned son wants to be baptized, and has registered his estranged father on the church record, swarms of indignant, intolerant villagers spurn Thomas. In a provocative move, Ratnam stages this scene of exclusion within the church, slyly leveling a criticism against the oppressive strictures and hypocrisy that religion can be susceptible to, while setting up the divide in this film between The World and The Church. Ratnam paints a less inclusive vision of the latter than he does the former, signalling the idea that the choice between good and evil can perhaps be most effectively realized outside the purview of religion.

The final baptism is the most remarkably choreographed, occurring during an energetically cut and tastefully CGI-d climactic action scene on the sea. This is first and foremost one of Ratnam’s finest dishoom-dishoom moments in a career that hasn’t really been about these, but that nevertheless is littered with great, distinctive action set pieces such as Nayagan’s muddy, bloody bout between Velu and the policeman Kelkar, or the ferocious, rain-soaked prison kabaddi match in Yuva/AE, or the gripping shootout between rebels and the Sri Lankan army in Kannathil Muthamittal. Kadal’s final showdown aboard a storm-battered ship is a wonder to behold and ends in a moment that superbly brings the central ideas that Ratnam has explored all along to the fore and that subsequently produces the film’s most emotionally resonant, joyous moment. A protracted fight that sees Thomas struggling between the priest and the villain (mainly to keep them from killing each other) ends with the latter snagging his foot on some rigging and getting strung up to face certain death as he dangles above the violent, open sea. The blocking of this moment risks awkwardness but it is vital to preserving Ratnam’s project. Because the priest is now placed outside the church and faced with a decision in which the act of baptism—lowering the sinner into the water—is itself a sin! Importantly, the priest fails the ethical test offered in this moment, and it is the boy who has been cast out of the church that finally intervenes, saving the villain’s life and rejecting this final and most vital of baptisms. The subtext here is remarkable for how it complicates the dynamic between this Faust and both his God and Satan.

In the films’ coda, Ratnam presents a Christmas Day parade that includes a resurrection (the priest is again folded into the community that had cast him out; here he leads the march) but there are a few things that mark this sequence with the sense that God is, if not exactly absent, then at least not as vital to the proceedings. One is that the priest himself has been literally and figuratively de-robed, no longer an official emissary of God, and the other is that the once contested soul, Thomas, is nowhere to be found in this celebration. He has no place in the church even if, in the end, Ratnam has offered him a place in the world. It’s no wonder that this film carries the charge of Ratnam’s previous works—this narrative is about the duality, the tug of war that exists at the core of every ideological struggle, and here Ratnam appears to want his protagonist not simply to split the difference between the extremes, but to ultimately exist outside of the established order. In this way, the castaway in Kadal becomes the survivor.