Natchathiram Nagargiradhu on Netflix review: Pa Ranjith's ambitious blend of love, theatre, and caste

From political dramas like Madras to an underdog sports drama like Sarpatta Parambarai, Pa Ranjith just manages to surpass himself with every movie. For some, his 2022 romantic musical drama Natchathiram Nagargiradhu might not be his best work but what cannot be denied is that he has yet again displayed enough versatility and freshness to set it apart from his other films. 

With every new film, the viewer is to expect the unexpected. So far, that is the beauty of the Tamil writer-director’s filmography. While last year’s Sarpatta gloriously subverted familiar boxing movie tropes, Natchathiram Nagargiradhu manages to blend discussions of ‘modern love’ with some much-needed discourse on caste, class, gender, and sexuality. 

Before we understand Ranjith’s chaotically beautiful and diverse universe of romantic parallel stories, we must understand how the director’s well-written and increasingly relevant screenplay manages to go beyond what we might see as modern love. 

Just take the Amazon Prime series Modern Love as an example. After the success of the English original, the anthology format was experimented with Hindi (Mumbai) and Telugu (Hyderebad) versions. Much like the numerous Indian Netflix romantic anthologies, these shows attempted to discuss romance across different demographics, cities, and age groups but somehow succumbed to one cliche or the other.

Ranjith’s characters, on the other hand, do believe in the power of love but they also live in a world where love differs across social groups. 

In this context, one of the standout scenes comes in the beginning itself when a group of actors discuss what their next play should be about. The acting troupe’s leader and director Subeer (a lovably warm Regin Rose) floats the idea of doing an experimental play on love. When he asks his troupe to brainstorm their notions of love, the diversity in their personal and political thoughts comes off in a chaotically beautiful manner. 

While a queer couple touch upon how modern love doesn’t need to be heteronormative, another actor joins by saying, “love is love.” But before a rosy Utopia of same-sex equality can be painted, another character adds how romance might be lovey-dovey only for upper castes. When another actor adds a discussion on Brahmanical hegemony, a debate spurs as the one questioning heteronormativity angrily remarks that other castes can also be aggressors. 

This is the argument proposed by the protagonist Rene who is then countered by her upper-caste ex Iniyan as follows, 

This scene is just the tip of the iceberg with Ranjith’s screenplay offering a lot of questions but no easy answers, revealing the grey areas of his characters. This in itself seems praiseworthy as the socio-political elements never seem to come off as forced or on the nose. 

The ensemble cast includes a mixed bag of cisgender, transgender, homosexual actors. While most of them are Tamil speakers, one of the actors is also a French woman. But this diversity is hardly tokenistic as each character serves a purpose, offering their individual philosophies that stem from their respective background. Basically, Ranjith doesn’t incorporate a “hyperwoke” approach to just divide people between “cancellable” and “uncancellable”. 

In fact, unlearning and taking responsibility for one’s actions serve as driving themes in the narrative. Ranjith, who is otherwise outspoken on his political thoughts pertaining to Dalit identity and casteism, relies on a more poetic approach to showcase individual flaws that unravels gradually, without any fetishised and “filmy” notions of achieving equality. 

Natchathiram Nagargiradhu is very much set in the real world: a world where people aren’t treated equally, where the educated care about archaic notions like caste, where honour killings happen on a regular basis. Even the play that the theatre group came up with delves into such dark realities. 

Still, Ranjith doesn’t rely on exploitative trauma. Be it in the emotional moments or the satirical, Ranjith uses his characters’ debates, rants, and outbursts to get to the point instead of explicitly showing hate crimes for shock value. 

The prime example of this is Kalaiyarasan’s character Arjun. An aspiring film star, Arjun’s personality exhibits the toxic masculinity of the actors he looks up to. His notion of love is a possessive one. He finds it hard to acknowledge the existence of queer identities. But instead of just painting him as problematically evil, Ranjith humanises him. 

For instance, the first time Arjun sees fellow actress Sylvia (played gracefully by the late actress Sherin Celin Matthew), he is told by a fellow actor to refer to her as a transwoman instead of any other offensive term. Such hints of unlearning regressive notions are strewn across the film.

Arjun is, by no means, perfect. However, his eventual transformation into acknowledging the nuances of the society around him offers a sense of optimism that feels realistic. It goes on to show how “Twitter activism” does bring about a change but among the privileged few who get to be a part of such a discourse. But Arjun’s metamorphosis is rooted more on an on-ground level of social change. 

One of the most impactful dialogues from Ranjith’s script sums it up well,

Kalaiyarasan is in top form as Arjun, making viewers hate him when required and even slightly empathise for him in moments. Arjun’s transformation is eventually not just in terms of his politics but also his acting skills. Grown on a dose of mainstream cinema, his acting initially is increasingly melodramatic until the play’s director Subeer sternly instructs him to quit his cinema theatrics and focus on doing actual theatre. 

The divide between cinema and theatre are similarly brought out in the film with none of the actors subscribing to any pretentious notions of high-art. In one of the chuckle-inducing scenes, a comedy actor called Ayya Durai (an effortlessly laidback Gnanaprasad) tells Arjun:

Apart from Kalaiyarasan, lead actress Dushara Vijayan is the standout performer along with Kalidas Jayaram. The former plays Rene, an outspoken theatre artist belonging to a caste lower than her ex, Jayaram’s Iniyan. 

The toxic tension between the two is introduced right from the opening scene when Rene is annoying Iniyan. In a fit of rage, Iniyan remarks, “All said and done but your ‘nature’ doesn’t change, right?” The ‘nature’ in question is a stereotypical assumption about her caste. For those who have seen the Amazon Prime original Tandav, you might remember a similar dialogue by Saif Ali Khan's character when he talks about a lower caste man 'taking revenge' by sleeping with an upper caste woman. 

Meanwhile, Rene’s response is a direct and powerful one. 

What must be noted here is that Iniyan is an educated upper-caste man, a far cry from the aforementioned Arjun. So, the intention to show casteism in its different manifestations is quite clear from the start. And this again is a testament to Ranjith’s ambitiousness as his screenplay manages to go beyond just the established binaries of good and bad, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, and so on. Enough films have explored these binaries. Ranjith sets out to explore further intricacies. 

Both Rene and Inniyan are complex characters as we can see from their romance in flashback sequences as well as their post-breakup tension as they still act in the play together. And both Vijayan and Jayaram succeed in holding the viewer’s attention throughout the runtime that clocks at 2 hours and 50 minutes. 

But just like Sarpatta, Natchathiram Nagargiradhu uses the best out of its long duration. With so many characters and perspectives to offer with a stageplay’s making in the background, it is hard to imagine Ranjith’s ambitions taking shape in a shorter runtime. 

Contributing to this runtime, there is a fair share of songs, most of which carry a raw and organic feel given that many of the play actors are also shown to be musicians. Unlike his previous films, Ranjith hasn’t collaborated with Tamily industry legend Santosh Narayan, opting for producer-singer Tenma instead. 

While Narayan is a great music director for grand, orchestral scores, Tenma’s acoustic and experimental fusion prowess works in the film’s favour. After all, Ranjith is also a musically-gifted person given how he and Tenma founded the indie band Casteless Collective. And here, his musicality shows with the songs easily blending with the plot rather than functioning as segues. 

Ultimately, Natchathiram Nagargiradhu is an interestingly relevant take on love and politics that should serve as a blueprint for all those artists who subscribe to the motto of “art is political”. Without any big claims or dramatic speeches, Pa Ranjith’s film subtly turns out to be quite a revolutionary work in recent cinema that must be watched and discussed (or even debated) by all. 

We're going with 4 out of 5 for Natchathiram Nagargiradhu.