Remembering 'Agni Natchathiram'

Bharadwaj Rangan has a great piece on Manirathnam. Instead of the usual dissection of Mani and his movies(with a couple of glowing lines about each of them), Rangan writes about how Mani made his best movies when he focused on Chennai(or atleast, Tamil Nadu) and how he seems to have diluted and compromised his art when he expanded his canvas to the whole of India. I couldn't have agreed with him more. But the pleasant surprise for me was the admiration for Agni Natchathiram that came through in the article.

I've always felt that Agni Natchathiram never got the respect it deserved. It is never spoken about in the same breath as, say, Mouna Raagam or Naayagan though it was released right after the latter and is usually little more than a footnote in articles about the director. But the film has always been one of my favorites and reading Rangan's article brought the memories flooding back. Hence this post...

I think Agni Natchathiram's biggest problem was that it was released after Naayagan. When you last made a movie that was widely considered one of the best Tamil movies ever, how could you ever live upto people's expectations with your next? People went to Agni Natchathiram expecting another Naayagan and obviously, that was not what they got. But I feel the film is a classic in its own right.

Agni Natchathiram's always been my favorite example for the power of the screenplay. A 1-line story about warring stepbrothers uniting to save their father was transformed into this sleek, stylish and energetic film solely because of Mani's screenplay. Realizing the flimsiness of the story, Mani concentrated on the picturization and presentation and it showed in every frame. The film's style was way ahead of its times and could stand up to any film today. It would probably rank as the film with the most number of slo-mo shots but every one of them oozed with style. Every meeting between Prabhu and Karthik positively crackled with energy and even the over-the-top climax was transformed into a thrill ride with those flashing lights.

Agni Natchathiram was also the film where Mani adopted the technique of a separate, unnecessarily vulgar comedy track(thank goodness it died a quick after two movies). Inspite of giving us a great, oft-used line("En Pondatti Oorukku Poittaaaaa!"), the track is the only black spot in the classic film.

Though my last viewing of the film was more than 5 years ago, I remember almost every scene vividly. Prabhu asking Karthik for his license after throwing it away; Amala's Oru Eli, Rendu Eli... self-introduction; Nirosha's blunt conversation with Karthik about her pregnancy; the bloodspray on the crying kid to show Vijayakumar's accident; the final broken piece of glass falling away after Karthik break's Prabhu's house's window... the film is just this great collection of memorable sequences. But I'm pretty sure that knowing all these scenes is still not going to spoil my next viewing of the film. Now that's the sign of a true classic!