Kuselan Confirmed!

So the news that Rajnikanth will do another film before Robot has now been confirmed as K.Balachander made the announcement at a press conference yesterday. The film - called Kuselan - will be produced by KB's Kavithalaya, directed by P.Vasu and will be the remake of recent Malayalam hit Katha Parayumbol. With news about Robot confirmed by both Shankar and Rajni at Sivaji's Silver Jubilee function, the recent trailer of Sultan and now this, Rajni officially has 3 films lined up. I can't remember the last time this happened. Its quite a change from the last 10 years or so when the long silence after each film made us wonder if the previous film was in fact his last.

Based on reviews about Katha Parayumbol, the film revolves around the friendship between an actor and a barber. Childhood friends years ago, the film focuses on how the barber's life changes when the actor arrives in his village for a film shoot. Mammootty plays the actor while Srinivasan, who also penned the script, plays the barber and Meena plays the barber's wife. Kuselan will ofcourse have Rajni play the actor with Pasupathy playing the barber. The rest of the cast hasn't been finalized/announced. It seems like an apt title considering the folklore where Kuselan was a poor man who asked for nothing from his rich friend but was given everything. With Kuselan obviously referring to the barber's character, its interesting that Rajni, after Chandramukhi, is once again acting in a film not named after him.

I have absolutely no regard for P.Vasu as a director. While I didn't mind that he foisted a string of maudlin, sentimental movies upon us, his biggest crime, in my opinion, was the massacre of Bharatham, one of the classics of Malayalam cinema and one of my personal favorites. Not content with stripping the film of all its subtleness and emotional impact, he further compounded our misery by casting himself in the role played by Nedumudi Venu, one of the finest character actors Malayalam cinema has seen (he pretty much massacred Manichithrathazhu too but was saved by the fact that he cast Rajni and ended up giving him his career's biggest hit). So a groan was my first reaction when I read that he would once again be directing Rajni in a Malayalam remake. But now that the news is confirmed, I've resigned myself to the fact and have been trying to see something positive in it (its kinda the opposite of the chee indha pazham puLikkum story!).

Along those lines of seeing a silver lining, my first thought was on who else could've been chosen to direct the film and I'll admit to not coming up with too many alternatives. Directors who I would've liked to see Rajni act under, like Murugadoss and Dharani, are out because of this film's sentimental theme. We've had a few directors like Vasanthabalan(Veyyil) and Radhamohan(Mozhi) impress us with sentimental movies recently but they are too new to direct Rajni, who obviously prefers to work with established directors. So the only other director I can think of is K.S.Ravikumar and apart from the fact that he is probably busy with finishing up Dasaavathaaram, he's not particularly good at directing sentiments either. The other scary part is imagining how Vasu will kill the original in the name of modifying it to fit Rajni's image. Vasu has already said that Rajni will have a bigger role than Mammootty had in the original and that the film will have typical Rajni-film elements. This was expected but this doesn't scare me as much this time because of the storyline. The fact that Rajni will play an actor - a superstar actually - will allow songs, fights and other elements to be inserted without much awkwardness. They could always be explained away as being part of a film shooting(Mammootty himself did this in No.20 Madras Mail where he played an actor and so appeared in a variety of get-ups for film shoots)! And finally, there's the fact that Vasu is always known to wrap up his films fast, which means that we will probably see Kuselan hit theaters this year itself. I'm hoping for a Diwali release since its just been too long since we had a thalaivar film for Diwali.