Soorarai Pottru Review: It Is Everything Cinema Should Be

Soorarai Pottru(Tamil, Amazon  Video With  Hindi/English Subtitles)

Starring Suriya, Paresh Rawal, and Aparna Balamurali

Directed  by  Sudha  Kongara

Rating: ****

Emotions run high when Maara(Suriya)runs out of money to pay for his  business-class ticket to reach his  father’s deathbed.In a film that captures the  essence and value  of impatience  Maara is running short of cash…and time.  As he frantically  goes around the departure  lounge of the  airport requesting passengers  to loan him the  money, we realize with a shock what drives  dreamers  into acts of impossible audacity.

 It’s the will to  open gates which are closed for the non-members  .As Maara Suriya pulls out all stops.Indeed  Soorarai Pottru is a bio-pic that  knows no full stops, just like its protagonist who can go to any lengths to achieve his goal.  Director Sudha Kongara erects an edifying edifice  of  hope, aspiration, dream , disappointment and  eventual  victory.

  As far as  films about defying all odds are  concerned, this one  takes  the cake, and the bakery. Speaking of  which, Maara’s better-half Sundari played  with  feisty energy  by  Aparna Balamurli,wants  to   consolidate  her  bakery business. So she  cuts  a deal with her  husband.He will fly his  plane she will cater her cakes  on flight. Deal? Let’s  shake on that. Or better still a tight  hug. The advantage of  doing business with  your wife.

 This is a film that  hits all the right notes, and doesn’t shy away from the tropes. As  a wise man recently said , it’s not  about the tropes, but what a  filmmaker  does with them. Sudha Kongara  is very clear in her intentions. This is a Suriya film ,and so it is designed  with all the expected   bombast and  braggadocio associated with the star. Suriya,  God bless his  productive  superstardom, has all the best lines and scenes  in his confrontation scenes with  airline tycoonParesh Rawal whose obviously dubbed voice gives nothing away except pure one-dimensional evil. 

It’s  a simple deal, really.  If  you  must have a Superhero, then you must have a  villain to match. I wouldn’t say Rawal matches Suriya’s  wit with the  whims of one-upmanship except for one key sequence midair where Rawal turns  a plane around to spite Suriya saying, “If you own a business-class ticket  I own   the plane.”This must be the only scene for which Paresh rawal must have agreed to  play the cardboard villain.

The  odds are  laid out very clearly. This is  a film about a Super-hero who wants to  fly the  poorest  of the poor. As he tells the on-screen Vijay Mallya,  “You are  a socialite . I’m a  Socialist.”  Having enunciated  the  film’s pop-politics so equivocally , Soorarai Pottru vividly  assembles scenes  of  impoverished men and women taking their first flight  into  fancy. These are    stuff that  aspirational cinema thrives on. This  film  takes  the audience uncommonly  deep  into the rudimentary  dreams  of  the Common Man

This is Suriya flying business-class in a film about  flying economy. Too bad, his co-star Aparna  Balamurli steals  almost every scene  from him when they are together.Women, I  tell you! They must be kept at home to make cakes. Otherwise one of them goes out and makes a film like Soorarai Pottru which makes all the male filmmakers  of  the country  break into a cold sweat.Why didn’t they think of making a film on the king of budget aviation  Captain Gopinath? Why  so many bio-pics on  gangsters and serial killers? Why not more Gopinaths?