Today, 26th July, Suriya turns 49, is just a year away from hitting a half-century. Saravanan Sivakumar debuted in the film industry in 1997 at the age of 22 years with Nerrukku Ner. Nandha directed by Bala is said to be Suriya’s first big commercial breakthrough that also proved his potential as an actor too.
In TeluguFunda’s series Retro Reviews, let’s revisit Suriya’s Nandha once again.
The eccentric filmmaker Bala had squeezed many actors alive from the madness of superheroes. Out of all those, Suriya and Vikram are the current star heroes who did unconventional roles that star heroes wouldn’t dare to do and became bankable actors for unconventional stories. This continues even until now, Vikram will be seen in Thangalan on August 15th as a savage-man who can tear up a snake alive. The seeds of their growth as actors were sown by Bala.
Nandha is the second movie of Bala’s, after Sethu (1999). Bala is a direct-filmmaker. He doesn’t deviate from the story for the sake of commercial purposes. Even if it is a song praising a hero, there are the politics of Bala visible in the film. We hear the praisings of Tamil Nadu and advocating global humanism. (The context of those scenes are the Tamil “repatriates” who fled from Sri Lanka’s Civil War).
Fun Fact: Yuvan Shankar Raja, the music composer of Nandha, also debuted as Music Composer in 1997- the same year Suriya debuted as hero.
In the Cinematic Universe of Bala, the poor characters are emotionally ruined by their internal traumatic conflicts. This has been the common theme all along his movies. A few critics have even called it ‘poverty porn’.
Suriya as Nandha is a convicted child-turned-criminal overnight and comes out of jail seeking motherly love only to be abandoned by his own mother for the crime he had committed. Nandha is stuck in the loop. He doesn’t get the love and affection from his forever unforgiving mother, he gets frustrated and commits more crime, his mother hates him even more. He is stuck in the loop of intention to change and be ‘better person’ and be the person he already is and do better things for the society. Nandha is a loyal angry puppy that needs a pamper-figure.
In this loop of moral conundrums, Nandha gets the patriarchal approval from Raj Kiran as Periyayr. A lost soul gets his solace in the arms of a fatherly figure.
The characters of Bala might appear as anti-social. Whatever you may believe, they are certainly asocial. They are independent characters disconnected with the society and its accepted norms. For example, Nandha does have a sense of right and wrong, but he cares less for the established institutions that care for what is right and wrong. Those characters can create parallel governments too, why not?!
Nandha does all things that a criminal does– but for the sake of justice.
The moral grey-ness of characters is revealed when the hero becomes the typical extra-judicial hero as a better alternative to the existing spoilt judicial system. The unconventionally written moral grey characters come to life when they act beyond what we might imagine. The second interaction of Nandha with Periyar in his house after Nandha standing up for the right cause gives the feeling of chills that naive Nandha might be falling into the trap of Periyar. But, that doesn’t happen. Instead, they bond even more, doing what a government ought to do but can’t and doesn’t.
Similarly, we may expect Periyar’s son, Saravanan, to be the insecure jealous-son (which he turns out to be at the end), who can’t win the approval of his father. But, we don’t see it in action until Periyar’s horrible murder. The murder scene of Periyar on the hospital bed is one of the most violent scenes without any explicit violence. It is a scene where you want to close your eyes for a minute but you still can’t move your pupil, because Bala doesn’t even stutter a moment while capturing the rawness of violence and poverty. It has become his signature mark.
Fun Fact: Nandha got ‘A’ certificate for violence and drug usage after 6 cuts. The most violent scene I was referring to was already a 40% trimmed version of its original scene.
The subtle revealing of details silently makes us appreciate Bala for not making the ‘detailing’ as a loud announcement of “detailing”. But, in the first scene of the movie, when she is in the noisy temple with Shehnais and tablas playing, we see a random male casually enquiring about her husband. She can’t hear it. Not because of the noisy music played. Because, she can’t. We get to realise, somewhere in the middle of the film, that Rajshree is in fact dumb and deaf. It is not a plot-twister. It is an emotional-topping for the story that can be seen only if you look.
We see that Bala being the Bala all over the film, what the audience of 2001 might not have seen coming is the complete overhaul of Suriya as a plain faced, wide-eyed cold and silent violent man, who is also extremely sensitive to simple motherly emotions. Suriya, just invented as an actor with Nandha. If Nandha wouldn’t have happened, what could have been the trajectory of Suriya? This makes me wonder– how would the career of Vikram could have translated if Bala wasn’t there.
Nandha is the biggest milestone because it is the first milestone in his career that proved his versatile experimenting nature.
Nandha was also dubbed in Telugu under the title ‘Bala-Surya’. It is available to stream on youtube for free. The original tamil versions are streaming on Sun Next and Aha.
