There is a scene near the middle of Kadaisi Vivasayi that contains, in miniature, everything the film is capable of. Maayandi – eighty-two years old, sun-darkened, hard of hearing – stands before a judge who has ordered him remanded to a city jail on a charge of killing peacocks. The courtroom exchange is already quietly comic: the judge repeats herself, Maayandi asks her to speak up, she grows mildly exasperated. Maayandi does not protest his innocence or his dignity. He asks, with the unhurried gravity of a man stating a plain fact, what will become of his paddy field. Each of the few hundred plantings, he says, is a life. He cannot simply abandon them. The judge turns to look at the policemen who brought this case – that slight, incredulous turn of the head says everything the film cannot quite bring itself to say directly. Is this gentle soul, this man whose primary concern upon being jailed is the welfare of seedlings, really who you think he is?
This film has a lot of potential in showing without telling, and it announces a film of real promise. That Kadaisi Vivasayi does not fully honour that promise is unfortunate and disappointing.
The film is set in a village where rain-fed farming has been dying quietly for years. Real estate interests want the land for corporate agriculture. The young have largely left for cities, carrying with them no knowledge of when to sow or how to read the sky. When lightning strikes an ancient tree and kills it – a bad omen by general village consensus – the community decides to propitiate their குலதெய்வம் (deity). The ritual requires, among other things that are themselves dying arts – clay pottery, பறை percussion – a small offering of locally grown rice. Only Maayandi knows how to farm the old way. And so, at eighty-two, he ploughs his ancestral land again.
Director M. Manikandan is at his strongest in the patient observation of this premise. There is an unhurried quality to the film’s best passages: long stretches of a village street, a field at different hours, an old man moving through his routines with the quiet authority of someone for whom these actions are not picturesque but simply life. When Maayandi’s grandson discovers, apparently for the first time, that his grandfather lives without electricity, Manikandan records the moment without commentary. The grandson’s surprise is allowed to be what it is – not a lesson, not a symbol, just a young man briefly recalibrating his understanding of who this person is. It is enough. Similarly affecting is the sub-plot of a head constable, initially contemptuous of the idea of tending a farm, who finds in it an unexpected peace – the film’s suggestion that the loss being mourned is not merely agricultural but psychological, a mode of inhabiting time that modernization has foreclosed for most of us.
At the centre of all of this is Maayandi himself, played with extraordinary restraint by the non-professional actor Nallandi. Wrinkled, unhurried, his hearing quite diminished but his eyes still clear, he tends his land with a patience that is indistinguishable from love. When a real estate agent offers him more than the land is worth, he does not moralize. He simply does not sell. His is an attachment too old and too quiet for the rhetoric of refusal. In jail, running a mild fever, he receives his first injection at eighty-two and notes – with the flat amusement of someone surprised by little at this point – that he had never needed one before. The detail tells you a few things about the life he has lived.
It is against this restraint that the film’s lapses register most painfully. The subplot built around Ramaiyya – a man undone by grief, who believes his dead wife still accompanies him through the world – is played by Vijay Sethupathi, whose presence alone imports a kind of star gravity that the film’s modest world cannot absorb. The Ramaiyya material might have been salvageable as elegy. It is not. In one scene, Ramaiyya encounters a wandering ஆண்டி (ascetic) who gives him திருநீறு (sacred ash). We know Ramaiyya’s habit: he always asks for an extra portion, for the wife no one else can see. This time he forgets. The ஆண்டி, somehow aware of the invisible wife, packs the extra portion himself. The scene is pitched as transcendent – close-up on Vijay Sethupathi’s face, swelling music, camera lingering on the space where the ghost-wife presumably sits – and lands as pure manipulation. It is not that the emotion is false in itself. It is that the film’s methods here are exactly the methods it elsewhere refuses: the nudge in the ribs, the instructed feeling, the viewer managed rather than trusted.
A similar unease attends the sub-plot involving an elephant, played mostly for whimsy via Yogi Babu, that never justifies the screen time it consumes. Both diversions feel like concessions – to commercial convention, to the perceived anxiety of audiences – and they cost the film dearly. So does the score, which in the film’s weaker moments resorts to soaring violin strings and guitar upswells precisely when the material would be more powerful in silence.
The comparison that haunts Kadaisi Vivasayi is with Kottukkaali (both recommended by Ajithan). Kottukkaali operates without songs, without a background score, with an intensity of focus that never wavers. It trusts its material completely. Kadaisi Vivasayi trusts its material most of the time, which is not the same thing.
There is a broader tendency in Tamil cinema – and in Indian popular culture more generally – to treat tradition as unambiguously imperilled and modernity as its vandal. The politics of this framing are simpler than the reality: migration is not merely loss, corporate agriculture is not merely evil, and the young who leave for cities are not merely ungrateful. Kadaisi Vivasayi circles this complexity without entering it. Maayandi himself is more nuanced than the film around him: he accepts that the world will change, does not rage at it, simply tends what is his to tend. For somebody so deeply marinated in an old world – in its textures and rhythms and requirements – the passage of that world is a loss that does not require argument or accusation. The film comes close, in its best moments, to depicting this without editorializing. But it cannot finally resist the editorial. The subplots, the score, the crowd-pleasing symmetry of the ending – collective harvest, successful tribute, darkening clouds and a peacock opening its feathers in the final frame – all signal an unwillingness to sit with the difficulty of what it has set up.
What the film accomplishes, nonetheless, is not nothing. In an industry where the default is spectacle, melodrama, and star-driven excess, Kadaisi Vivasayi makes a quiet, low-budget argument for slowness, for non-professional faces, for the intelligence of the audience. That argument is real and worth making. M. Manikandan has genuine talent – his instincts for the telling detail, the unnarrated moment, the image allowed to breathe, are evident throughout. There are many scenes that demonstrate what he is capable of when he fully trusts himself.
The disappointment, then, is proportional to the promise. Kadaisi Vivasayi is a film that knows how to be still, and then, at periodic intervals, loses its courage. The last farmer deserved a film with the courage to be the last of its kind too – uncompromising, unadorned, unwilling to soften the ache it so clearly feels. Instead, the clouds gather, the peacock dances, and we are reassured.
Transverse 