Pay very close attention to what Balaji Tharaneetharan shows in "Baththa." It's a film in which minor details acquire major significance, while things that initially appear to be major sources of conflict eventually reveal a more tender meaning. At first glance, nothing especially stands out about the scene where the titular character, played by Vijay Sethupathi, is told by his daughter (Baby Sahasra Shree) not to sing. It just looks like a casual father-daughter moment. But the real meaning behind his singing and her apparently harmless "please shut up" request comes into focus near the film's end. Similarly, a note bearing the words "The door is open" seems to promise chaos and violence, but when we finally read it at the very end, it acquires a much more heartwarming connotation. Balaji's "red herrings" might as well be pink. He misdirects or withholds information because he wants to make the audience all sentimental. His story is certainly unpredictable in the way it changes shape at specific junctures. But rather than settling for mere shocks, Balaji layers comedy, social commentary, and even suspense into his twists and turns.
The first major reveal comes when Baththa is trapped inside the bathroom. Before arriving at this payoff, Balaji keeps you on your toes by closely following Sabari (Master Sai Prithviraj), a young boy studying in the third standard, as he enters his school (it's locked for vacation) to retrieve a toy from the staff room. Since the door is locked, Sabari enters the room through a window. On his way out, however, his stomach turns queasy, and he rushes to the bathroom. Will he get locked inside while doing his business? But Sabari comes out and heads towards the exit, only to turn back towards the staff room. Why? To lock the cupboard from which he retrieved the toy. On his way back, he also locks the bathroom door. And this is where Balaji pulls back the curtain and reveals that Baththa has been locked inside. He bangs on the door, and Sabari almost opens the latch. But just before he can do so, Baththa threatens to kill whoever is responsible for trapping him inside, filling the boy with terror. Poor Sabari. Like the other children, he is already frightened of Baththa. His violent public outbursts have made him notorious and feared among the residents. Among the children, meanwhile, these actions have taken the form of scary stories that have both inflated Baththa's image in their minds and left them terrified of this local gangster.
No wonder, then, that Sabari gets scared by Baththa's threats and leaves the school without unlocking the door. From here, Balaji begins to engage with the mechanics of a survival thriller. But this genre often depends on a person being trapped within four walls while their whereabouts remain unknown to everyone else. Here, however, Sabari knows exactly where Baththa is and even feeds him crushed rusks. Balaji introduces his own tweaks to the genre's mechanics and goes one step further by turning the entire ordeal into an exercise in deflating the ego of a ruthless gangster. Baththa goes from threatening the "culprit" to begging him to set him free. He warns that if he isn't found, the streets will be flooded with blood. But when Sabari looks out from his house, he sees nothing but men, women, and animals going about their daily routines. Only Baththa's wife, Kannima (Lijomol Jose), his daughter, and his two close friends are shown to be extremely worried about his disappearance. For everyone else, life goes on as usual. The world doesn't stop for Baththa; outside his immediate circle, his absence barely registers. For all his threats and bluster, he isn't nearly as indispensable to the world as he imagines.
What being trapped inside a bathroom teaches Baththa is how important one's family is and why one shouldn't take expressions of affection for granted. This idea of family returns later when another man explains that he chose to lie to save a colleague from being beaten to death because he imagined the suffering his colleague's injuries would cause his wife and children. The movie, in other words, is neatly written. Every i is dotted; every t is crossed. In that sense, it reminds you of Balan: The Boy, directed by Chidambaram. And, unfortunately, like Balan, "Baththa," too, lacks a sufficiently distinct point of view—its images largely serve to convey information rather than express a particular visual or emotional perspective. As with Balaji's other films, I admired this one more for its conceits than for their execution. That's because his images seem designed chiefly to contain and deliver his clever twists and ideas. When the end credits begin to roll and you look back at what you have watched, you feel as if you have spent time with a man who was busy flaunting his cleverness.
For Balaji, the characters, conflicts, and circumstances become mere vessels for channeling his messages and thoughts. Every line, every beat, every moment is neatly connected to something else. His love for a connect-the-dots narrative reduces psychology to plot points, and in place of emotional punches, all it yields are well-intentioned notions. Sabari's guilt over locking Baththa inside the bathroom gives rise to little more than "frightened expressions." Sure, he doesn't feel hungry at first, but that's only because Balaji wants Sabari to buy rusk, allowing a shopkeeper to figure more prominently in the story later. (Sabari's hunger returns only after this "seed planting" is done.) Sabari's friends, like Sabari himself, are afraid of Baththa. So, after seeing him riding in Baththa's car, don't they ask him about it? Don't they bombard him with all kinds of questions? What nightmares does Sabari have? Does he ever think about confiding in one of his friends? Balaji seriously underestimates the emotional richness and curiosity of children's inner and outer worlds. Or rather, he's simply blind to anything that doesn't fit into his rigid conception.
That rigidity—the calculated withholding and release of information—takes the bite out of a crucial character revelation. Eventually, we learn that Baththa likes to sing, but as a child, he was taunted and discouraged by his classmates and teachers. The film says that this is why he turned to a life of crime: to intimidate the very society that had ridiculed his passion. In theory, this backstory sounds heart-wrenching and cruel. On screen, however, it registers as just another turn in the narrative, one among many that change the story's direction throughout its runtime. A more emotionally open film might have let us spend more time with Baththa singing to himself in the bathroom. Alongside realizing the importance of his family, he might also have confronted how much he misses singing and how little other people's opinions should matter to him. Baththa, after all, mentions that near-death experiences make one see the value of one's life and everything one holds dear. Is singing not dear to him? Of course it is. But Balaji doesn't want to disrupt the carefully constructed machinery of his plot. Hence, despite the apparent smoothness with which the film changes gears, it ultimately feels like the work of a screenwriter so wary of spoilers that he would rather reserve his characters' feelings for a later revelation than allow them to develop organically in the present. Balaji is restricted by the strict demands of his tightly built story. "Baththa" only looks free on the surface. Look closely and carefully, and you'll find that it's merely going through the motions of mechanically checking off a set of boxes. This is undoubtedly the product of a clever screenwriter. That cleverness drains all the emotional weight out of this comedy-drama, leaving it blandly likable, easy to digest, and thoroughly neutered.
Written by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times