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Super Deluxe Review : In an Ensemble of Quirky Characters Vijay Sethupathi Reigns Supreme

The film can be seen as a spiritual successor to 'Aaranya Kaandam'.

The opening credits of Super Deluxe are reminiscent of Kumararaja’s earlier work Aaranya Kaandam, and are played over Senthamizh Paadum from Vaira Nenjam, if I remember correctly. The opening scene, too, reminds one of how Subbu was introduced in Aaranya Kaandam. There, the woman was treated like a piece of meat. Here, the woman feels pleasure. You hear the squeaky sounds of the bed. The camera slowly pans to establish every minute details of the room. All this happens over ‘I’m A Disco Dancer’ song, and the title card appears in a Kumararaja-esque style. Cast: Samantha Akkineni, Fahadh Faasil, Vijay Sethupathi, Ramya Krishnan, Mysskin and Gayathrie Director: Thiagarajan Kumararaja Storyline: Six actors. Four writers. Two cinematographers. One unusual film. In more than one way, Super Deluxe can be seen as a spiritual successor to Aaranya Kaandam. If the latter was about male impotency, Super Deluxe embraces the idea of sexual fantasies; Kumararaja delves deeper into the darker side of human mind, without being least judgemental about his characters. If Aaranya Kaandam tried answering what dharma is, Kumararaja takes it a notch higher in Super Deluxe and questions the concept of morality, and how humans derive their own boundaries, in a more exploitative way. It makes a comment about chaos theory and how meaningless life is. The film, in many ways, is the result of a confluence of four different world views (written by Kumararaja, Mysskin, Nalan Kumarasamy and Neelan K Sekar). And it’s amusing how Kumararaja connects interrelated themes and subjects within the confines of his milieu. He seems to rejoice the genre-hopping; the film begins as a black comedy and ends like a dramedy on life, sex and spirituality. And that's the least spoiler-free review one could write about a film that is overly layered. At its heart, Super Deluxe is about four stories that are interwoven together, making it hard to guess who wrote what. Mugil (Fahadh Faasil) and Vaembu (Samantha Akkineni in a remarkable performance) are in a marriage of convenience. Something terrible yet insanely-funny incident happens to them and that triggers a series of unwarranted events. Their conflicting-yet-affectionate nature makes you wonder as to what would have happened to Chappai and Subbu (from Aaranya Kaandam) had they lived together. Elsewhere, a motley group of sex-deprived teenagers visit a CD shop to satisfy their quest for bittu padam. For some strange reasons, I kept thinking about Chittu and his gang from Aaranya Kaandam, and what if it was their coming-of-age story, before they discovered the art of seducing older women? Kumararaja never really explored the warring relationship between Kodukapuli and Kalaiyan, and brushed it off with a powerful “avaru en appa”. But he does in Super Deluxe, which comes in the form of Shilpa (Vijay Sethupathi) and Rasukutty. Shilpa is the most honest portrayal of a transgender in a long time. She’s humanised; we see why she’s rejected by society. We empathise with her when she says this about sexuality: Serupa maathi podra mathiri. We sense her helplessness when she’s assaulted at a police station. It helps that Vijay Sethupathi was chosen to play this complicated, dark character. He brings a certain vulnerability, especially when Shilpa meets Arputham (Mysskin). Which brings us to the shockingly-delightful story about Arputham and Leela (Ramya Krishnan in her boldest role yet). Super Deluxe draws humour from the most unlikeliest places. When Shilpa demonstrates how eunuchs earn money with a sharp clap, Rasukutty says, “Ae...super pa nee.” The film, in fact, makes a self-reverential joke about Aaranya Kaandam, when a gangster prods an important question: kadaisiya enna padam paatha? Remember the Kamal-Rajini banter? A deeply religious person turns blind eye to an important piece of information. His whole life has been a lie. And when he breaks open the sacred sculpture, he finds diamonds in it. It's a brilliant touch. Another filmmaker would have explained the why. Kumararaja doesn't. Watch Super Deluxe Video Reviews Here No other filmmaker has probably romanticised the Tamil cinema universe with pop culture references as much as Kumararaja. Consider the scene where a character croons Vanithamani from Vikram before watching porn, or the one where a character drapes saree over the Maasi maasam song (It isn’t a coincidence that a doctor is named after MS Viswanathan). If Subbu went through a Baasha-like transformation in Aaranya Kaandam, a character here (ironically named Manickam) undergoes a similar transformation. There are inside jokes too. Arputham invents his own bible called Anjathey Nambu. Rings a bell? And these bits aren't added just to make them look cool. In one of the earliest stretch, a character says, “Dai rascal! Enna maranthutiya?” For a moment, it felt as though Kumararaja was asking this question to us: it’s been eight years since he made a film. If Super Deluxe is what you get from a filmmaker who was in exile, then you don't mind waiting a few years from now till he comes up with his next eccentric film. Credits: The Hindu

Super Deluxe Movie Review: Thiagarajan Kumararaja crafts a path-breaking film that deserves more than one watch to understand the depth in each characterisations, says our review.

Movie Name:Super Deluxe Director:Thiagarajan Kumararaja To appreciate or rave about Thiagarajan Kumararaja has become a cliche, but Super Deluxe gives you no other option. It is just the second film for the director but a giant leap for Tamil cinema - in terms of storytelling, editing, and more importantly, ideas. While sharing his initial reaction to the story of Super Deluxe, Nalan Kumarasamy, one of the writers of the film, said, "We feel that we are all playing the same game but when I heard the narration, I realised he is playing a different game altogether." Super Deluxe is a different game indeed. The film is like an alien in Tamil cinema, but, ironically, it is the closest depiction of Tamil society we have seen. Kumararaja has himself said that it is hard to pin Super Deluxe down under one genre. It is easy to call it a black comedy, but there are a lot of things at play here. Without a doubt, the film is dark. It looks at perversion, sex, cuckolding, porn, sexuality, and god with a big lens, unlike any other Tamil film has done before. But even in a film about gloomy things about life, there is a heart in Super Deluxe, a big one. The tone the film takes in dealing with the subjects is refreshing and unprecedented. Take this scene for example: As Shilpa (Vijay Sethupathi) comes out of the room after being sexually assaulted, her little son asks her "Adichaangala (Did they beat you)? Shilpa, wiping her tears, says, "Yes". He then asks, "What did you do in response?" Shilpa subtly puts, "Kadichaen (I bit)." Given the situation, the audience is left wondering how to react to such a joke. The film is eccentricity at its best. The story of Super Deluxe has many stories running parallelly. Each has some sort of connection to another. Shilpa, a transperson, goes back to her wife and son after seven years. Vembu (Samantha) and Mugil (Fahadh Faasil) are trying to get rid of a body. Three teens are in pursuit of a 48-inch TV, which has to be replaced before the parents of one of the guys return home. Their journeys make up for one psychedelic trip called Super Deluxe. The most surprising aspect of the film is Thiagarajan Kumararaja's social commentary. It is omnipresent in the film. Every street and gully has a poster of a B-Grade film or the other. Every scene has some noise that runs in the background. It could be a song from television or a recorded advertisement of a street vendor or a melodramatic dialogue from a movie playing on TV, the world of Super Deluxe is a symphony of noises just like ours. And the kids in the film! When Tamil cinema uses children only as instruments of love and melodrama, a boy in Super Deluxe keeps shouting 'f**k' a million times. Kids are just a reflection of adults in Super Deluxe. Their halos are mercilessly taken away. The aesthetics of Super Deluxe make all the difference to the film. The locations the director has chosen to even stage a mundane scene is so unique. Also, unlike the director's first film Aaranya Kaandam, Super Deluxe is more colourful. Each frame keeps reminding you that the film is quirky. At times even an unremarkable gully looks like something peculiar through PS Vinod and Nirav Shah's camera. Music or noise is omnipresent in Super Deluxe, and without Yuvan's BGM, a scene like Shilpa's meeting with Arputham (Mysskin) wouldn't have worked at all. More than the performance of Vijay Sethupathi, Ramya Krishnan, Mysskin, Samantha and Fahadh Faasil (who are incredible), the teary face of Gayathrie and the bulging eyes of Bucks with all his perversions and the super intelligent Ashwanth Ashokkumar make Super Deluxe a league apart. Super Deluxe is a leap, a giant one. Thiagarajan Kumararaja crafts a path-breaking film that deserves more than one watch to understand the depth in each characterisations, says our review. 4.5 stars out of 5 for Super Deluxe. Credits: India Today

Language: Tamil Cast: Vijay Sethupathi, Samantha, Fahadh Faasil, Ramya Krishnan, Mysskin Director: Thiagarajan Kumararaja How does one talk about Thiagarajan Kumararaja’s second film, Super Deluxe? A logical place to begin is perhaps the director’s first film, Aaranya Kaandam. Super Deluxe is certainly something of a companion piece. The monologue-y trailers are similar, as are the multiple storylines revolving around ensemble casts and bound by an overarching philosophy. (Remember “Edhu thevaiyo adhu dharmam” from Aaranya Kaandam?) There’s even the sense of a cinematic universe being created, one that contains both films (and maybe future films from this director). The women in these films have similar-sounding (and male-sounding) names: Vaembu/Subbu. From a poster on a wall, we sense that Jackie Shroff’s character from Aaranya Kaandam appears to have existed a little before this film’s timeline. I could even imagine the father-fixated little boy (a superb Ashwanth Ashokkumar) in Super Deluxe growing up to be the Guru Somasundaram character’s son in Aaranya Kaandam. And remember the little plane that the Ravi Krishna character “swallowed” as part of a magic trick? We get big planes here, and they perform their own bits of magic. And yet, the films are different. Aaranya Kaandam was filled with adrenalin-pumping pleasures: the pulse quickened at the pulp rhythms, the slo-mo stretches. And the film was emotionally direct: you felt for the Guru Somasundaram character and his son, and you laughed at the story about the gangsters named Gajendran and Gajapathy. Super Deluxe is far more ambitious, and moment for moment, far less instantly gratifying. It’s a long, slow fuse that keeps you on edge about when it will explode, and when it does, it’s a big bang. Or, perhaps, the Big Bang. WTF, right? More on that, later. For now, I’ll just say I’ve never seen anything like this in Tamil cinema, with its mix of the sacred and the profane, the epic and the intimate, the earthly and the otherworldly, the pop-cultural and the philosophical. It’s a film you want to view as much with a microscope (zooming in on the details) as a telescope (zooming out to the bigger picture). The characters, then, are as much microbes as stars in the cosmic scheme of things – as puny as the ants and centipedes we see in frames, and as vast as… Well, let’s discuss that after you watch the movie, shall we? But here’s a partial list of the people you’ll meet. There’s Vaembu (Samantha Akkineni), who’s married to Mugil (Fahadh Faasil). Another story involves Jothi (a very affecting Gayathrie), whose husband is now a transwoman named Shilpa (Vijay Sethupathi). A third story is about a bunch of hormonal boys, and the parents of one of them: Leela (Ramya Krishnan) and Arputham (Mysskin). Leela is a former porn actress, and Arputham has turned into a religious nut. He’s formed his own cult after a near-death experience at sea, which explains the marine-blue walls in his “place of worship”. Themes and motifs keep sneaking in and out of the various story threads. So the blue on Arputham’s walls bleeds into the shirt that Mugil wears and onto the sari on Shilpa, just like the mole on Leela’s back finds a twin in the one above Shilpa’s lip. If you like getting off on details like these, Super Deluxe is like Penthouse and Playboy rolled into one. All of this would be little more than postmodern pranks if not for the film’s magnificent design. This is not the first film to tell the story of three couples, but where earlier directors treated these stories like intimate domestic drama, Super Deluxe makes them something almost infinite, spanning the breadth of human (and other) existence I’m sure alert readers will chip with more of these “patterns”, but here’s a sampling. A corrupt cop (Bagavathi Perumal) is compared to a public toilet – and a public toilet is where Shilpa gets into trouble. The tears in Vaembu’s eyes CUT TO a teenager’s tears in another story. Two of the episodes feature an absent father. A man (Mugil) is humiliated by his wife’s doing, just like a woman (Jothi) is humiliated by her husband’s. The exquisite line that Shilpa uses to explain herself (“just like we sometimes slide the wrong foot into the wrong slipper, I was put into the wrong body”) is echoed in a sound thrashing delivered by a gangster. His “weapon”? A pair of slippers. A television programme about aliens is linked, later, to posters of Aliens on a dirty wall. And on the same wall, we see the poster of a film whose subject is life and its mysteries. The same could be said about Super Deluxe. This is a lip-smacking combination of “high” and “low” art. You could write essays about how this director’s vision is deliberate (perhaps even dictatorial, even though the co-writers include Nalan Kumarasamy, Neelan K Sekar and Mysskin). Note the careful use of deeply saturated colour by cinematographers PS Vinod and Nirav Shah. And note the very specific props, like the kuthuvilakku that acknowledges Arputham’s former self, from when he was a Hindu. And yet, at the same time, you could write essays about this film’s use of “matter songs”, whether ‘Vanithamani’ from Vikram or ‘Paal Vannam’, the wedding-night number from Paasam. A moment where Shilpa disrobes is set against ‘Maasi maasam aalana ponnu’, and the semi-clad images (what we see on screen, and what we recall from that older song) are such contrasts that it’s like listening to a bhajan at a disco. Also, recall that this song is from Dharma Durai, which is also the title of a… Vijay Sethupathi movie. All of this would be little more than postmodern pranks if not for the film’s magnificent design. This is not the first film to tell the story of three couples, but where earlier directors treated these stories like intimate domestic drama, Super Deluxe makes them something almost infinite, spanning the breadth of human (and other) existence. (Those ants! That centipede!) Thiagarajan Kumararaja has said he was sparked by the looping story-structure of Jafar Panahi’s The Circle, but I was equally reminded of something like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, which gave the epic treatment to a series of mundane incidents that do not usually get the epic treatment on screen. (There’s also an equivalent, here, of Magnolia’s “rain of frogs” moment; I almost fell out of my seat.) But the Magnolia moment was Biblical. Super Deluxe, on the other hand, is casually dismissive of a judgemental being sitting up there in the sky. Everything’s just… chaos, as “random” as the design that created life on our planet. Which is why the film’s working title, Aneedhi Kadhaigal, would have been just as good a fit. Super Deluxe suggests something plush and expansive, like the priciest room in the kitschiest hotel. And yes, there will be those who say that there’s perhaps a little too much room in this narrative, which clocks in at nearly three hours. Perhaps you couldtake away the track revolving around Arputham — Leela would have still driven that story and brought it to its glorious conclusion. But without Arputham, we wouldn’t have had that connect to the oceans, which is, after all, where life apparently began. And we wouldn’t have had the connect between Arputham and Shilpa, through a line about forgiveness. Which is why you feel nothing could have been left out, everything has its place in this design. This sprawl, this “messiness” is part of this movie’s DNA. But Aneedhi Kadhaigal, which translates to “amoral tales”, would have pointed to one of the most rewarding aspects of Super Deluxe. The wife who cheats on her husband, the porn actress who’s unapologetic about her work (and how cheeky to see this character played by an actress known for her “Amman” roles), the man who did ghastly things to children, the teenagers who cheat and steal — they all come close to being punished, but they all get away with happy endings. This is Thiagarajan Kumararaja basically saying “fuck you” to conventional Tamil-cinema morality, where “loose women” and “evil men” end up suffering for their sins. Leela’s spectacular retort to Arputham, near the end, questioning his “God”, is one of the most thrillingly nihilistic lines uttered in our cinema. It’s not a message. It’s not a moral. And yet, it strikes at the very core of one’s belief systems. There’s a lot of everything in Super Deluxe. There’s a lot of entertainment. There’s a ton of black humour. (The name of a man who needs money? Wait for it… Dhanasekar.) There are elements from sci-fi. There are elements from noir. (Think of the dubious statue in The Maltese Falcon). There’s a farting corpse that functions as some sort of marriage counsellor. There are also gorgeous grace notes, like the child who does not discriminate, yet is very clear about what he wants. In other words, there’s a lot to take in during a first viewing. While watching Super Deluxe, I felt what Pauline Kael described in her review of The Godfather: Part II: “the exploding effects keep accumulating. About midway, I began to feel that the film was expanding in my head like a soft bullet.” If you recall, The Godfather: Part II is more leisurely paced than Part I, less immediately affecting, but by the end, far more profound. That’s how I’d describe the relationship between Aaranya Kaandam and Super Deluxe. Part of the emotional aloofness we feel comes from the slightly disorienting way the narrative plays around with timelines, and the shot-taking that follows this grammar. We aren’t “eased” into scenes. There are very few establishing shots, and we are thrust into interiors from which we view the action. (A lot of scenes, therefore, end up being framed by doorways, or else cramped in the alleys between tightly grouped buildings.) We get the sense of being trapped with these characters, and only when they inch towards liberation do we feel their freedom. The visuals, too, open up. The set pieces are not flashy (like in Aaranya Kaandam), but slow-burn beauties, like the sensational stretch of chaos (Sathyaraj Natarajan is the editor) that ensues when a boy sets out to kill his mother. Both in the writing and the making, the director is leagues ahead of the form he displayed in Aaranya Kaandam. The more logical (as opposed to the experiential) part of the brain keeps raising questions. Is the best way to wreck a car to park it across railway tracks and pray that a speeding train isn’t too far away? Would a man who evidently cares about his wife and son just take off like that, and not even send the odd “don’t worry about me” message? What functions do Mugil’s anti-Establishment rants serve – are they confined to his personality, or are they, too, part of the Big Design? (Fahadh Faasil seethes marvellously.) But piece by mysterious piece, everything comes together, and the smallest details pay off in the most delightful ways – like how Mugil’s acting classes allow him to “perform” (though off stage, and with no audience). Super Deluxe is produced by the director himself, and it’s interesting to note what his company is called: Tyler Durden and Kino Fist. The former is the id character from Fight Club, the ugly-secret part that few of us expose in public. The latter is what Sergei Eisenstein called his technique of intellectual montage, using editing not just to let the story “flow” but to manufacture meaning through violent juxtaposition of images. I’m not saying all of this actually happens all through Super Deluxe — these are, after all, philosophies. But there is the sense of a filmmaker who has unleashed his id, and is refusing to play by the rules (of Tamil society, and of Tamil cinema). There is the sense (though much gentler and subtler than with Eisenstein) of provoking reactions not just through the telling of a story but by slapping its components together and making us live spectators to whatever is taking shape. This is an utterly unique film, a brave film. We see this bravery in the songlessness, in how Yuvan Shankar Raja calls attention to a situation about infidelity by reusing his father’s classic song about infidelity (Ennadi Meenatchi). A less-secure composer might have fought harder to impose himself on the score, which is marvellously minimalistic. We see this bravery in Samantha, who does some of her best acting in the scene set in a warehouse. She unleashes her own Tyler Durden, doing an up-yours to conventional wisdom about what heroines (especially married ones) should and shouldn’t do. And we see this bravery in the spectacular Vijay Sethupathi, who makes Shilpa come alive through the tiniest, most offhand gestures – say, the way he gracefully adjusts his sari pallu. I thought that, for a Tamil-film leading man, the transwoman aspect of this character was itself an indication of ballsiness. But there’s more. That scene in the police station, with that corrupt cop? Wow. Most of our stars simply want to play-act as heroes, with punch dialogues and “mass” moments. Here’s one who emerges heroic even with his “masculinity” completely erased. Credits: Film Companion Super Deluxe Story: A couple try to dispose a dead body; a little boy gets a surprise when he meets his estranged father; a son discovers his mother’s other side; a religious man starts having doubts over his God… What connects these four stories? Super Deluxe Review: Super Deluxe gives us four stories and the protagonists in each of these stories are tested in their beliefs in the strangest ways. For the married couple Vembu (Samantha) and Mukil (Fahadh Faasil), the situation in which they get into is a test of their marital relationship. It is a test of her love for her son for Shilpa (Vijay Sethupathi), a transgender who has come back to her family. For Arputham (Mysskin), who has survived the tsunami and found a new God, and Leela (Ramya Krishnan), a former porn star who is desperately trying to save her injured son, Soori, it is a test of their belief in God and humanity respectively. And there are also three lads who face a literal test of bravery. Giving out anything more about the plot of Super Deluxe will ruin the fun and joy of experiencing something singularly unique. There is a heartless and horny cop, a quirky don, a publicity crazy politician, a greedy doctor, unwanted neighbours, a loyal Man Friday, and more in this crazy world that Thiagarajan Kumararaja has come up with. The performances are first-rate all around. Vijay Sethupathi’s Shilpa is a new high for the actor, while Fahadh and Samantha are instantly likeable. Mysskin and Ramya Krishnan are solid while the gang of boys are great finds. Then, there is Ashwath, who wins our hearts, and a cast-against-type Bhagavathi Perumal, who makes us want to murder him. There is black comedy, double entendres, swear words, WTF moments, political and social commentary, romance, sentiment and even a musing on what it means to be life on Earth. There is ambition, genius, and also a beating heart. Credits: TOI

“Got porn, Madam?” That’s what the high school boy known variously as Milk Carton and Egg Muffin asks a DVD store clerk after some stammering feints in the Tamil movie “Super Deluxe.” And, yes, Madam has porn. But, surprise: When Egg Muffin and his pals start to watch it, one of them becomes enraged. That’s his mother onscreen. This sets off a chain of mostly comic events that are, by turns, ominous, bloody and cosmic. And that’s just one plot strand. In another, a married woman’s ex-boyfriend dies in her bed, setting off a chain of comic, ominous events. In a third, a little boy pines for his father to return, and the father does — but now transformed into a woman. (Another chain ensues.) The director Thiagarajan Kumararaja, who also had a hand in the script, takes his time setting all these shaggy, laconic story lines in motion. Part of the movie’s pleasure in its early going is figuring out whether and how they will all merge. Another pleasure is visual. Colors pop off Kumararaja’s palette (the cinematographers are P.S. Vinod and Nirav Shah), and there’s always something to look at in his Chennai. This isn’t gleaming, ascendant India; it’s the lived in one, crumbling around the edges, a little romanticized but recognizable in its narrow alleys and concrete stairwells and power outages. “Super Deluxe,” Kumararaja’s second feature, has been a while in coming after “Aaranya Kaandam” (2010), which was a critic’s darling. No wonder — Kumararaja’s work is stylish and wry, with an indie-cinephile sensibility. (It’s no accident that “Kill Bill” and “Gangs of Wasseypur” posters hang on the DVD store’s wall.) Part of that sensibility is a frankness about sex that’s still unusual in Indian movies, especially commercial ones. Though nothing explicit is shown, all the story lines in “Super Deluxe” have a little sexual motor, and there’s plenty of frank, off-color language, too. Kumararaja also elicits some wonderfully deadpan performances from his actors. The teenage boys have a believably nerdy-raffish rapport And Samantha Akkineni, as the cheating wife, builds a character of unexpected depths. “Super Deluxe,” though, runs three hours, and Kumararaja loses his way in the draggy, overlong second act. It includes not one, but two drawn-out scenes of threatened rape. (We know the ugly outcome of one, though it happens off camera.) That these scenes, with their leering Bollywood-ish villain, verge on the cartoonish doesn’t save them. They’re part of a tonal problem — what was mostly delicate and offbeat tips into something cruder and messier. They also serve as a reminder: Cinematic sexual liberation for (and by) men can be punishing for women. Credits: NY Times Read the full article

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