Dorothy

One of the great joys of watching a Kartik Subbaraj film is enumerating a list in your head of his possible sources of inspiration. It remains true for his latest directorial venture, Dorothy, too. Like how a home without a woman’s touch has echoes of Kanu Behl’s Titli (2013) – a film about a carjacking crew, comprising a father and his three sons. A scene where the couple bows down to touch an elder’s feet, only to cut to a marriage scene when the couple gets back up, but the man has been replaced by someone belonging to the same dominant caste as the woman. It’s the kind of deadpan comedy scene I’d expect in a modern Malayalam film. A character tries to clumsily kill someone, and repeatedly fails, reminiscent of the assassins in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges (2013). A black-and-white track takes place in the present, while cutting to a flashback in colour, like in Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). There’s also the grit and rigour of the Madurai gangster film, championed by the likes of Vetri Maaran, M. Sasikumar, given how the film centres itself around young boys being taught to ‘man up’ each time they walk, eat or wince while seeing a floating corpse, violence. They’re also repeatedly told crying ‘like a woman’ is disgusting.

Karthik Subbaraj’s Dorothy is a cinema of red herrings and foreshadowing. In the beginning, it declares itself as a ballad to the friendship of Karthi (Rishikanth) and Subbu (Sananth), their early childhood in school, their companionship that triumphs caste, and their affection that transcends class. It is an inception that’s familiar to the Tamil audience, one that evokes so many films from the past, from Uyarndha Manithan, Paarthal Pasi Theerum and Alayamani to Sattam, Annamalai, Thalapathy and Friends. Subbaraj sets it closer to his stomping grounds—in and around a village in Madurai in the mid-90s. If the last fifteen years are any indication this points to only one genre—the gangster saga known as 3Ms, Madurai Murder and Mayhem—and so goes Subbaraj, populating the film with familiar tropes and beats, making Karthi and Subbu the muscle for a local thug.

Subbu (Sananth) has just escaped the irate brother of the woman who was comforting him after a loss. Something compels him to seek out the hulking brute and explain that he has no romantic designs on his sister. This goes down badly, and soon Subbu, in an open field, is fighting for his life. His best friend, Karthi (Rishikanth), joins in, just about evening the odds. it’s a strange fight: stop-start, lots of long and overhead shots, action at the edges of the screen or outside it. Though the younger men keep launching into flying kicks, neither they nor their opponent really know how to fight, so the whole thing has a clumsiness that belies the increasing stakes. At one point, a dung beetle carefully rolling a ball is foregrounded, and the silly, deadly fight becomes a blur in the back.

Acceptance is a hard pill to swallow. Perhaps that is why “tolerance” survives in the lexicon of diversity. Here, the word feels almost offensive. Who are we to tolerate someone simply because they fall outside a dictionary definition of who they are supposed to be? Early in Dorothy, Subbu (Sananth) quotes a line about gender discrimination being the worst form of bias. The film treats that not as a slogan but as a first cut. The binary comes first: male or female. Only after that hurdle do caste, class and the other divisions get their turn. Karthik Subbaraj starts with those smaller divisions. When Subbu befriends Karthi (Rishikanth), a young boy from a lower-caste, lower-class family, the film looks ready to walk a familiar road. This is still a Subbaraj film, though, and it is not heading towards a hackneyed triangle, least of all one built around a woman named Dorothy (Keerthy Suresh).