‘RK Nagar’ movie review: Self-infliction in the time of self-isolation

A cacophony of muffled voices echoes across the cinema hall just when the censor certificate surfaces on the screen, warranting reluctant cheers and whistles from the half-empty crowd. The lights gradually begin to dim, only to be disrupted by flashlights from phones, leaving the rest of us clearly livid. Audiences, as usual, are late for the matinee show of RK Nagar, supposed to have hit theatres at least two years back.

This is how the scene would have played out, had RK Nagar had a theatrical release — like any regular day inside a movie theatre under normal circumstances. But these are not normal times. So, the movie quietly dropped on Netflix with a late night announcement from its producer, Venkat Prabhu. RK Nagar comes at a time when the gatekeepers of Kollywood are torn between the industry’s traditional modes of operation and its unwillingness to adapt to changes with the times, in a post-COVID (strangely, it does sound like post-Colonial, right?) world where the opening weekend numbers would no longer be detrimental to a movie’s fate or performance. If you look at it from that angle, RK Nagar’s release could be viewed as revolutionary — only the release, mind you.

There is hardly anything exciting in this movie, let alone it being revolutionary. It does open with a scene that threatens to say something profound or even revelatory, but the tone-deafness in the writing is consistently even. Akash, a school student, is shamed amid his classmates for using a cellphone. What he does next is the reason why Jayaprakash Radhakrishnan made Lens; he turns his cellphone into a weapon against his teacher, filming inappropriate videos of her and uploading them onto adult websites. We see a swarm of people browsing for the video on Akash’s phone, which is swiftly intercut with the teacher’s phone, and the camera pans across to show her body hanging from a rope. I was least- expecting this kind of a staging and, naturally, it left me like: “Okay, it looks interesting.” But half of that interest was lost in a follow-up to this, where news clippings of Blue Whale Challenge, domestic abuse, sexual assault, sexual crimes and pretty much everything that is wrong in society, are shown — supposedly positioning itself under the ‘socially-conscious’ tag.

There are a lot of questions unanswered in RK Nagar beginning with its title. Why RK Nagar? It could have been anywhere in Chennai, no? Does it have to do with the joke that was the RK Nagar elections? Or, is Saravana Rajan taking a familiar route in establishing how political leaders exploit gangsters in their quest for power, given that the primary conflict is between Lottai (Sampath) and Mannu (Inigo Prabhakaran), belonging to two different parties? If this were the case, then why have a cartoon-ish Shankar (Vaibhav)? Why insert a cursory, dream song with bikini-clad girls for the hero’s introduction? Why devout half the time, injecting is-this-even-romance scenes and I-ran-out-of-ideas-so-item-songs? It seems as though the script was written on water.

Lottai and Mannu have a history. The latter is greedy for power, and the former? Obviously, the Messiah to the people of RK Nagar. Both are vying for the other’s blood and Shankar, the poor lamb, is caught between the two wolves. But, for some strange reason best known to the director, Lottai sees a successor in a tailor that is Shankar. I wish I could say what a tailor-made script!

Shankar has romantic encounters with Ranjani (Sana Althaf), owner of a garments company and the daughter of RK Nagar’s chairman Sundaramoorthy (Santhana Bharathi), also Mannu’s uncle. You cannot help but suspect if Saravana Rajan is paying an ode to cutesy scenes of the ‘80s Tamil cinema or making a parody of them, in Shankar-Ranjani’s portions. Picture this: Shankar mistakes Ranjani for Kamatchi, an employee at the garment factory. In fact, the very reason he falls for Kamatchi (who is actually Ranjani) is because she belongs to the working class and there also seems to be a vilification of the upper class. But RK Nagar also has a parallel story with teenage boys who indulge in cyber crime. If you are going to make a movie about voyeurism, why not make it as the film’s core? Why be dishonest to your own material?

The downside to releasing movies on OTT platforms — perhaps, a blessing for film critics/reviewers — is that golden button sandwiched between Ctrl and Zero. Yes, unlike a cinema hall where one may not have the luxury of cancelling whatever they had subscribed to in the first place, one can skim/skip through the not-so-great parts of a movie without making too much fuss. Hey, I am not making a confession here.