Review: 7G Rainbow Colony
Baradwaj Rangan
Baradwaj Rangan
(C) The Economic Times, Madras Plus - Oct. 21, 2004
Some twenty-five years ago, when Shankar, in 'Oru Thalai Raagam', fell
for a girl who wouldn't give him the time of day, he retreated quietly
in his bell-bottoms, singing pathetically to himself, "Naan oru raasi
illa raja."
How times -- and Tamil cinema youths -- have changed! In '7G Rainbow
Colony', today, Kadhir (Ravi Krishna) falls for Anita (Sonia Agarwal),
who regards him like "therula kadakkara saani." But darned if he's
going to back off and lip-sync mournful philosophical numbers! He's
relentless; he goes about his pursuit of her like a dog gnawing at a
rubber bone. Love me, he says. She slaps him with 'chappals'. At least
be my friend, he pleads. She barks, "Ippadi pichaikaaran maadhiri
kenjariye, vekkama illai?" But shame, to him, is as alien a concept
as, say, respect for his "baadu, kezha bolt" of a father, so he
perseveres... and literally arm-twists her into reciprocating his
feelings.
Kadhir is such a 'porukki', women don't bend to pick things up when
he's around because he'll stare down their tops, and if he ran into a
youth from a Mani Ratnam movie, he'd do what he does here: spit on the
car of that "high-class kammanaatti." He, of course, sneeringly slots
himself as low-class, claiming, "Greeting card-la rose vachu I Love
You solla theriyaadhu" - and '7G Rainbow Colony' is about his
transformation into someone who does hand over a greeting card and a
rose to a loved one.
Director Selvaraghavan knows that Kadhir isn't all rotten. He's just a
youth whose utter ordinariness, whose complete lack of any special
talent, has made him opt for this armour of bluster. Selvaraghavan
also knows that Kadhir is a product of his parents' overindulgence.
The father (an empathetic Vijayan, Mallu accent still intact) rants,
rather poetically, that his shoulders ache from still supporting his
useless son, but that hasn't stopped him from giving this useless son
a room and a bed to himself, while everyone else sleeps huddled on the
floor outside.
And thus we end up caring a great deal about someone who'd normally
make us shudder and shrink back in disgust -- and this is clearly a
Selvaraghavan specialty, along with Christian imagery (after the
missionary backdrop in 'Kaadhal Kondain', nuns and a Pietą figure
feature here at key moments) and, yes, sex. Such a whiff of the
forbidden lingers over the proceedings, you wonder if that unpeeled
banana thrust in front of a girl (as breakfast) is just fruit... or a
phallic symbol. (Another instant sure to get Freudians salivating is
when a man, post-coitus, snuggles into his lover's arms in apparently
the same way he used to snuggle into his mother's.)
One part of your brain screams that this is sheer sensationalism --
but it isn't, quite. Even when a mother asks her daughter to try on a
bra in her presence, or when a girl declares her love in a men's
toilet, you never get that wink-wink feeling as when, say, Bhagyaraj
stumbled upon why God _really_ created the drumstick. Selvaraghavan
doesn't seem to be in it for the titillation -- sex, to him, is simply
another facet of his characters, like, perhaps, the violence in Kadhir
that incites him to turn a cricket match into a bloody brawl, or the
loss of confidence that makes this normally-competent singer render an
off-key 'raja... rajadhi raja' at a talent show.
There's the usual fight in the rain, the usual seduction dance that's
more ridiculous than romantic, but the writing, mostly, is quite
unusual. After a dose of the preachy sermonising that often turns
Tamil cinema into groaning Moral Science lessons -- this time about
understanding your parents -- you expect a treacly happy-family
scenario; instead, you get a quiet illustration of the uneasy truce
that exists between fathers and sons. Even love-story staples like
parental opposition and elopement are presented in ways that don't
make them feel like staples at all.
The problems with '7G Rainbow Colony' are just a few maybes -- maybe
the leads could have been less stiff and studied, more casual and
spontaneous; maybe the (brilliantly conceived) ending needn't have
gone on for so long that what's at first unexpected threatens to
become uninteresting. But let's not complain about a film that's raw
and alive and throbbing with the pulse of the underprivileged youth,
with Yuvan Shankar Raja's electric guitar wails underlining their
angst and acoustic guitar strummings playing up their passions. Just
as those on the fringes of society have landed a mouthpiece in Bala,
in Selvaraghavan, the slackers and the losers of Tamil Nadu may have
finally found their poet laureate.
yeskay
>How times -- and Tamil cinema youths -- have changed! In '7G Rainbow
>Colony', today, Kadhir (Ravi Krishna) falls for Anita (Sonia Agarwal),
>who regards him like "therula kadakkara saani."
>
LOL! No wonder he is missing in ngs these days! :)
rkusenet
"yeskay" <yes...@nowhere.com> wrote in message news:cl8k3k$j...@netnews.proxy.lucent.com...
ROTFL.
That was my first reaction when I read the story of 7GRC. I knew that
it is only a question of time before it will be mentioned here :-)
rk-
Cricfan
Then you may want to read this:
http://karthikblogs.blogspot.com/2004/10/eve-teasing-and-physical-abuse-inside.html
Cheers
Arun
Baradwaj Rangan
> Then you may want to read this:
> http://karthikblogs.blogspot.com/2004/10/eve-teasing-and-physical-abuse-inside.html
>
That's a sad state of affairs, but is there a connection between what
RK wrote and the link you posted? You say, "Then you may want to read
this," that's why I ask...
The incident received coverage in Chennai papers, but funnily it
hasn't made women's groups etc. go up in arms, the way they did for
Boys, New etc. And the film itself is supposedly turning out a
superhit.
Aditya Basrur
Sad. I was hoping you'd hold out for Bollywood instead of doing a Madhavan
and getting in through the Tamil route.
Aditya