Nayakan on All-'Time' Top 100 Movies
Bollywood is shorthand for Bombay Hollywood, seat of the largest Indian film industry. But it manufactures only about 200 of the thousand or so Indian feature films; a half-dozen regions boast production sites larger than most of the worlds national cinemas. Madras, capital of the Tamil state, is one such place, and its leader - arguably India's top pop-film auteur - is Mani Ratnam. His movies, often dramatizing social unrest and political terrorism, churn with narrative tension and camera energy that would be the envy of Hollywood directors, if they were ever to see them. Nayakan, an early, defining work in his career, tells the Godfatherish tale of Velu, a boy who e mbraces a life of crime after his father is killed by the police. Velu (Kamal Hassan) has trouble juggling his family life with his life-and-death mob "family"; Ratnam has no such difficulty blending melodrama and music, violence and comedy, realism and delirium, into a two-and-a-half-hour demonstration that, when a gangster's miseries are mounting, the most natural solution is to go singin' in the rain. - Excerpt from Time Magazine.
Again, just like the Oscars for a tamil movie, I don't think something is achieved when you have a Tamil movie featuring in the list of global all-time favorites. But it's a feel good factor. One reason why I am personally happy is for Mani Ratnam's Nayakan[needs subscription making it to the Time's Alltime Top 100 movies, is that despite being based on Mario Puzo's God Father God Father script, Nayakan had its own share of Mani Ratnam's brilliance at throughout the movie. If you ask me to stick out a single favorite shot from the film, I may be dazzled. Nayakan had a team that was one of the best during that decade. It had geniuses like Illayaraja, PC Sriram and the Nayakan himself.
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