Movie Review: Speech-Movie Double Helix

Kamal Hassan spoke at the Harvard India Conference in 2016 (link), and again in 2018.  I attended the 2016 conference and heard him speak.  I have had a long association at HKS and had attended many speeches in the atrium.  Indeed, I was at HKS just yesterday for a conference on healthcare economics!!

In his 2016 speech, Kamal Haasan spoke about freedom, art, and the duty of the artist to truth.  I thought it would be interesting to examine his movie Anbe Sivam through the lens of this speech.  

I have taken 6 key lines from his speech and looked at the movie through that lens.  

Hope you enjoy it!

Expletives are a matter of expression; they define a character.

Language in Anbe Sivam is colorful. His character, Nallasivam swears, jokes, argues. When he teases A. Aras in the bus, or shouts in pain during the storm, he is establishing character. The movie trusts that unvarnished speech can reveal key aspects of the themes and characters in the movie. 

Artists are not messiahs, they are mirrors of society.

Nallasivam’s theatre troupe stages its play in the open street. He mocks the factory owner who cheats his workers and the crowd laughs with the freedom of recognition. The artist reflects the truth as they see it until others begin to see it. Even the accident that scars Nallasivam turns his body into a mirror of collective pain. The camerawork was very interesting focusing on Nallasivam’s deformities as though they were the deformities of society itself.

Constant questioning is the oxygen of a healthy democracy.

The journey between Nallasivam and A. Aras is a moving argument. The movie provokes question on why we should help others, what is faith, who deserves dignity.  Their bickering on the train, their shared hunger in the village, their final reconciliation are all parts of the same dialogue. Kamal’s line about questioning is embodied here as growing friendship.

Freedom must come with responsibility, not with fear.

This theme runs through the film like in the union meeting, where he demands fair wages. Even when faced with his would-be killer, he answers violence with calm. The final act, where A. Aras gives blood to a stranger, he is also learning courage.

Any government institution or religion trying overtly or covertly to coerce your mind … is something we should all be wary of.

This was the rare mis-step in the movie.  While he articulated this point eloquently in his speech, he veered strangely into Marxist ideology in the movie, which almost seemed like an inorganic draft to the overall core theme of the movie and the way the plot was unfolding.  In other words, in the movie, for a brief moment contradicted his philosophy he articulated in the speech.

Freedom of speech is unlike love. With freedom of speech you must be ready to say as many things as you need to, before you say sorry.

Nallasivam’s voice fills the story, insistent, comic, bruised. The entire story arc between him and A. Aras was Nallasivam saying many things he needed to, and I dont think he said sorry either!

In summary, if I were to share a regular movie review, I would say Anbe Sivam is a fine caper full of humor and with Chappani / Chaplin like pathos.  

But viewed through the prism of his 2016 speech, the movie animates his humanist philosophy and desire to cherish freedom as a precious gift that needs to be defended with courage.