In Mari Selvaraj’s autobiographical film Vaazhai, set in the late 1990s in Karungulam, a village in Tamil Nadu, two young boys—Sivanaindhan and Sekar—keep sparring as fans of Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan, respectively. Fandom implies uncritical love, and the boys are in this spell of unironic devotion. Both of them harvest and lug bundles of raw bananas on weekends, a job they hate. In order to get out of it, Sivanaindhan pricks himself on his foot, so he can tell his mother he was impaled by a thorn and cannot work. Sekar, the Kamal fan, smirks, and taking after his idol, says that he does not need method acting or proof of a wound. His wailing performance will be enough for his mother to be convinced that he is injured.

This is a charming framework through which to see not just how fandom parts friends but what Kamal Haasan—who has been on screen since 1960, from the age of 6—has done to the very art of acting. His performances are, ultimately, performances, be it an urban Lothario or a rural, disabled, blind or mute person. Maybe it is his sad eyes, his gruff voice, the often starched use of stiff English in dialogues, or the elocution of austere Tamil poetry that are immediately recognisable as him. Throughout, you often see the distance between actor and character, and yet, he refashions this distance as space to stake his artistry. Sekar is, after all, caught lying by his mother.

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Although Haasan, an autodidact with a constant chip on his shoulder about those who studied acting, lops prosthetics on himself, from Nayakan (1987) to Avvai Shanmugi (1996), from Indian (1996) to Dasavatharam (2008), where he reached the pinnacle of his fetishisation of proliferation with 10 different roles—he is not an effacing actor. Because this effacing, too, is a performance you can see through, as though the masks were made of glass. He is never the hero as much as the hero performed, never the lover as much as the lover performed. To be able to make artifice palpable: that is Kamal Haasan’s screen presence, at once blinding.

Text, context, and subtext

The filmmaker, writer, and critic K. Hariharan attempts to theorise this artistry in Kamal Haasan: A Cinematic Journey. Choosing 40 films from his oeuvre of over 260 films—between 1975 and 1985 itself, Haasan was in 120 films, roughly 12 films a year, a film a month—and placing them against the political context in which they were made, Hariharan shifts the spotlight from text to context.

He briefly tells the story of the film, to then luxuriate, patiently, awkwardly, in the politics around which the film brewed—this plot point in Raaja Paarvai about the stepmother is reflective of Dravidian disillusionment; that landlord-moneylender in Sakalakala Vallavan is clearly an allusion to Indira Gandhi. Hariharan looks at Sivam in Anbe Sivam replying casually “I am also God”, and screams “Marx!”, the man who “sees the universe pulsating within dialectics of a continuing set of oppositions”. You do not have to be a Marxist to see how untenable and stretched, even wrong, that comparison is.

How can Freud the fraud not make an appearance? The chilling Nandakumar in Aalavandhan becomes, in this reading, a platform where “Freudian archetypes meet with Indian mythical characters caught in the dilemma of Tamilians trapped at the crossroads of Dravidian chauvinism and liberal pan-Indian aspirations”. He could have added subaltern studies and some postmodern bits while he was at it. Why not? Why not?

Hariharan sees K. Balachander’s films—with stories of family and betrayal—as a reaction to the DMK-AIADMK split that happened in the early 1970s. The family immediately becomes a microcosm for the state. (He incorrectly overuses the word “dystopia” when he probably means a less than ideal society or one rife with issues.) A paragraph describing the AIADMK’s electoral performance in 1996 dangles awkwardly between two paragraphs describing Haasan’s films, his performances. Something about “Dravidian betrayal”, a thought left half-opened.

If, like most people believe, politics is downstream from culture, Hariharan is of the view that culture is downstream from politics. Not just that culture is downstream from politics but that culture is only politics. This reading is highly claustrophobic and suspiciously causal. “The context is more important than the text—why was a film made in such and such a manner, in such and such a time, in such and such a space,” he says in an interview with the film critic Baradwaj Rangan.

“Turning the text into a frump, this book also turns the spectator into a bore. If this is what it means to read cinema, we are better off watching it.”

This reading of cinema, the fetishising of depth, the irreverence towards chance and artistic intuition, is sterile. A posture of overdetermination, it allows for theory to sound like fact, for an assumption to sound like a conclusion. On simmer, if you reduce this book, what you end up with is a condensate of theories, neither substantial nor provocative.

Unstable throws of interpretation

The careless, casual way in which today we say “The Angry Young Man” is a product of the disillusionment of the 1970s that comes from us performing psychoanalysis on the writers Salim-Javed from the distance of both space and time. It is reckless, this reading, which sometimes feels like over-reading to the point of decimating the text itself, turning films into trends. This act of trying to make the unconscious conscious is, as Janet Malcolm writes in Trouble in the Archives, “pour[ing] water into a sieve”.

There are some unstable throws of interpretation here. While discussing Swathi Muthyam (1986), a story of a woman banished from her family for marrying into a lower rung, Hariharan invokes NTR’s rise to power and how this film “hint[s] at an appeal to NTR that he should come out of the oyster and glisten like the most exotic pearl” while also noting how “Indira Gandhi’s leadership had developed several cracks”—she was assassinated in 1984. Where are the cracks if there is no wall?

More problematic is that even if Hariharan wants to dwell only in subtext and context, the rigour seems to be missing, unlike say Sudhir Kakar’s strange yet strident psychoanalysing of Hindi cinema or M.S.S. Pandian writing about the rise of MGR with dogmatic clarity, or even S.V. Srinivas’s footnote-embroidered monograph on Chiranjeevi.

Trite conclusions are framed as profound realisations in distracted sentences: “I believe that the strong sense of naivete that Kamal claims as his most powerful weapon in real life surfaces very strongly as these characters [in Gunaa, Hey Ram, and Aalavandhan] struggle to cherish their deep sleep while also having to wake up to slay the monsters harassing the nation/mother/lover.”

Love for theory

This book also turns the spectator into a bore—where mirrors in the frame of a film become “self-reflective motifs, forcing us to look into the various layers offered in the narration”.

If this is what it means to read cinema, we are better off watching it. What you get from this book is not a love for cinema but a love for theory, theory that is often weak in its stride, is often overstated, and which refuses care in thought and grace in articulation.

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Look at this description of “humorous” cinema: “an impersonal mechanical performance by a motorized apparatus, which needs enormous manipulation in order to make the necessary humorous impact”.

If comedy were a person tracing the contours of this sentence, they would be flung into self-doubt—is this me? To make the familiar radiantly unfamiliar is the job of the theorist. To make the familiar a stranger? That is bad form.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.