Mahan,a mighty milestone in narration

    There is a famous saying that every saint has a sinning past.This has been proved in the spiritual biographies of Pattinathar and Arunagirinathar of Tamil Nadu who attained spiritual exaltation after an obsession with wealth and debauchery, respectively. The recent film Mahan which has seen an Amazon Prime Video release, catches the imagination of the audience by the punch and thrust of its title as well as by its remarkable and unique mode of narration assiduously adopted by Karthik Subbaraj and compactly edited by Vivek Harshan.

  Mahan cannot be called a mere crime thriller.No.certainly not.From the start till the contrived climax,there is an underlying heaviness composed of suppressed emotions. The poignant element in narration is the measured underplay in acting,commendably performed by every actor starting from Vikram as Gandhi Mahan, Bobby Simha as  Sathyavan Soosaiyappan, Dhruv Vikram as the son of Vikram bearing the name Dadabhai Naoroji,Sanath as Rocky,Deepak Paramesh as Anthony,Vettai Muthukumar as Gnanam and Simran as Nachi and the wife of Vikram.No actor deviates from their character and no Tamil film in the recent past has so naturally fixed all the actors to their respective roles.

  Mahan could actually be called the starting point for Dhruv Vikram towards creating imprints on his pathways to real acting,because his earlier films Aditya Varma and Varma did not rightly bring out his performance potential.For Vikram it is yet another best performance,as an individual craving for a life of the 95%of the people  rather than remaining as a member of the 5% purist creed.But for Dhruv Vikram, here is the beginning under the inspiration of his performance-oriented father,both in life and on the screen.

 The film vibrantly succeeds in exposing the pretentious prohibition lobby and subtly throws light on the misplaced stories about Mahatma Gandhi,by trying to extricate the portrait of the Mahatma from political controversies.Instead it brings to book the extremist ideologies between different schools of thought.Mahan neatly exhibits the dividing line between criminal extremism and ideological extremism.The crux of the issue is that even the Mahatma adhered only to moderate ways of thought and never indulged in ideological extremism.

  The final telling point is the blow of Nemesis against each one's thoughts and deeds. But in this process of crime and punishment,the less erring are unduly punished as in the case of Soosaiyappan {Bobby Simha} and his son Rocky{Sananth}.In fact it is Gandhi Mahan who pulled Soosai and his son to a more sinning routine, though his initial spark of intoxication was drawn from them.

 Ultimately the more grievous sinner, Gandhi Mahan is allowed to live,after redeeming himself,may be because his redemption will keep on hurting his conscience,with brutal memories of his shady past.Incidentally,Mahan also succeeds in avenging the undue death of Soosaippan and his son by casting another criminal web.Santhosh Narayanan deserves a special pat for his interlude music during the stunt scene between Vikram and his son and the convincing background score through out the film.On the whole Mahan is a hard hitting heavy film,creating a mighty milestone in narration.  

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