Inevitably, he’s good at conveying intimacy in personal relationships but he likes to give it texture by setting the romance against a bigger canvas. His love stories are more profound than just ‘boy meets girl, they overcome obstacles and walk away happily into the sunset’ but not too complex to put an average viewer off. Ratnam’s heroes are charming everymen and heroines, part-traditional part-rebellious. It’s a top-flight crew, so people remember the music, just as well as they do the visuals (PC Sreeram, Santosh Sivan, Rajiv Menon). It’s a top-flight crew, so people remember the music, just as well as they do the visuals. They are brought to life on screen by Arvind Swami, Revathi, Prakash Raj, Rajinikanth, Mohanlal, R Madhavan, Manisha Koirala, Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai, Kamal Haasan etc. Many of the zeitgeisty earworms are the collective efforts of such maestros of their game as Ilaiyaraaja, Vaali, Vairamuthu, SP Balasubrahmanyam, AR Rahman, KS Chithra, Sujatha Mohan, Hariharan, Sadhana Sargam, Madhushree, Gulzar, S Janaki, Mehboob and so on. Another reason, if you need one: Ratnam attracts the biggest talent. So, is it abstraction alone that has kept ‘Mandram Vandha’, ‘O Priya Priya’, ‘Chilakamma Chitikeyanga,’ ‘Dil hi chhota sa,’ ‘Tu hi re,’ Nayakan’s theme tune ‘Thenpandi Cheemayile’, ‘Snehithane Snehithane,’ ‘Kabhi neem neem’ and even the dance anthem ‘Chhaiyya chaiyya’ so timeless? What makes these tunes so intimate and yet universal is the fact that they reflect and represent the vibrancy and restlessness of what it means to be young and in love. India’s nonlinear and free-flowing “oral tradition” of storytelling is a constant frame of reference, he admits. The man himself justifies his music’s vital magic realism by underlining its abstractions. After hearing his thoughts in this masterclass it soon becomes evident that in a Mani Ratnam film the song is just a palate cleanser which has come to occupy the glamour of the main dish. You will be blown away by the ambience, the imagery and philosophy of the musical interludes that “lets you reach an arc of celebration, whether it is joy or sorrow, whichever emotion,” as the master from Madras put it in a 2015 interview with BFI. By comparison, the songs are the exact opposite - grand, carefree, stylised, ambitious and absolutely follow no rulebook. His plots have all the requisite ebbs and flows and rich human drama. Nobody seeing Mani Ratnam’s songs could tell that they are shot by the same guy who made these films. You can hum the music without knowing which film it is from. He draws a bold and colourful picture through his distinct brand of songs that somehow fit the context of the film and at the same time, transcend it.
Yet, it is in the songs that Mani Sir lets his imagination run wild. Cities like the director’s hometown Chennai, Delhi or Mumbai usually serve as a backdrop. Rooted in a social milieu instantly familiar to most Indians, they are urban in outlook and take up the delicate nature of life, love and relationships as their subject.
(Express archive photo)Īll of Ratnam’s 26-odd films as a director, beginning with his debut Pallavi Anu Pallavi in 1983 starring a raw Anil Kapoor and Lakshmi, are adamantly realistic and true-to-life. “His images sank into our souls,” writes critic Baradwaj Rangan in Conversations with Mani Ratnam describing the imprint his work has had on Kollywood fans like him that came of age in the 1980-90s. Starting with his breakout, Mouna Ragam (1986) that tells the story of a woman (a spunky Revathi) torn between an old flame who’s shot in an unfortunate mishap moments before their court wedding and a husband she doesn’t love to O Kadhal Kanmani (2015) that updates the idea of ‘love’ for the iGeneration that prefers live-in to marriage, Ratnam’s genius is the single-minded ways in which he has put his faith repeatedly in the vagaries of human relationships. He’s the ultimate word in song picturisation. In Ratnam’s case, the ‘score’ is where the action is. What better way to celebrate his birthday than to plug into the prodigious music and dream-like song situations that his films have given us over the last three decades? With most filmmakers, the ‘action’ is where the action is.
Mani Ratnam - ‘Mani Sir’ to the movie industry and fans - turns 65 today.