“If I get any­where near what Mahen­dran sir did in Uthirip pookkall, I’ll be a happy man.“
– Direc­tor Manirathnam.

There are 2 types of direc­tors. Direc­tor and direc­tor of direc­tors. Tamil film indus­try pos­sesses the rich­est chain of great direc­tors. There are few who are pre­dom­i­nantly por­trayed in this cat­e­gory, start­ing from Srid­har to Ameer. Mahen­dran is one such GEM in the industry.

If lit­er­ary works are prop­erly used, it will turn into fine cin­ema. Uthirip pookkall is one such great exam­ple. Mahen­dran read the [ only ] short-novel of Pudu­maip­i­than — Sitran­nai and fas­ci­nated towards the chil­dren Raja and kunju. He then devel­oped them into his own ver­sion of film. Mahen­dran had ear­lier worked with 28 dif­fer­ent projects start­ing from his first movie ‘Naam moovar’ [ Story writer ]. This includes Thangap padakkam, Kali, adu puli attam etc., The 29th project is Mul­lum Malarum pro­duced by Venu Chet­tiar of Anandi films, which was a grand suc­cess and fed fresh air in Tamil cin­ema. Mahen­dran worked ini­tially in Thuglak for 3 years, writ­ing cin­ema reviews in the sec­tion ‘Post mortem’ — a good friend of Cho.

This film is all about peo­ple, their nature, feel­ings and stub­born­ness in their stand. I admire the way the char­ac­ters are etched, visual nar­ra­tion of story. He wrote pages of dia­logues when he was a story writer and when started his direc­tion career he imple­mented visual nar­ra­tion with bare min­i­mum dia­logues. To add, he was accom­pa­nied by the top tal­ent of those times Ashokku­mar, b.Lenin and Ilaiyaraja.

Uthirip Pookkall — Drama/1979/Tamil

Produced,written & Directed by : Mahendran.

Music : Ilaiyaraja

Cin­e­matog­ra­phy : Ashokkumar

Plot :

Sun­dara vadi­velu [ Vijayan as Su.va. ] is a rough natured school cor­re­spon­dent who has his phys­i­cally weak and soft spo­ken wife Lak­shmi and 2 kids Raja & Bha­vani. Lakshmi’s sis­ter Shen­bagam and their father live in the same vil­lage. Lakshmi’s father owes a big sum to Su.Va. Also, Su.Va has an eye on Shen­bagam. The entire vil­lage is unhappy with Su.Va’s behaviour.

Prakash, a new teacher arrives to the vil­lage and later harassed by Su.Va. Prakash devel­ops love with Shen­bagam. Mean­while, Sarath and his wife Premi, come to the same vil­lage to work in the health cen­tre. Sarath is an old neigh­bor of Lak­shmi [ before her mar­riage ] and even he pro­poses his wish to marry her, to her father. But it was late then as she was engaged with Su.Va. Su.Va. approaches his father-in-law for get­ting his sec­ond mar­riage with Shen­bagam. Every one opposes this atro­cious deci­sion. He doubts his wife’s rela­tion with Sarath and keeps her sep­a­rated. Sarath, feel­ing guilty for this, leaves the village.

The vil­lage peo­ple raise strongly against him this time but Su.Va. cares nobody.With his mother’s sup­port, he mar­ries another girl from the next vil­lage. Prakash gets the per­mis­sion from Shenbagam’s father for their mar­riage. Mean­while, some­thing hap­pens and that leads to the finest cli­max ever shot in Tamil films.

View :

- Mahen­dran metic­u­lously devel­oped his char­ac­ters so that they look unique and stub­born till the end of the story. Even the local bar­ber Samikannu has got one of the finest sup­port­ing char­ac­ter roles. Nobody looses their char­ac­ter in the flow of the story. Mahen­dran was so cour­te­ous to offer a sum to Pud­hu­mai pithan’s fam­ily though he was just inspired by the work.

- The film starts with the flutes music in title and a cliched folk song of IR [ Sen­ti­ment Sithravad­hai :) GAma­ran did the dam­ag­ing lyrics]. The story starts from the health offi­cer Sarath and the teacher Prakash reach­ing the village.

- Watch out for the bril­liant and vil­lain­ous per­for­mance of K.Vijayan. Though he deliv­ers rationed dia­logues, his looks and grim face expresses a lot more about what he thinks. He is one of the best vil­lains por­trayed in Dhoti/Jibba/Shirt [ My other favorites are G.Umapathy in agni Natchathi­ram and Thi­la­gan in Chathriyan ]. Each and every word uttered by Vijayan car­ries his thoughts. His intro­duc­tion shows his com­plete char­ac­ter [ Ennaya sat­tai pot­tirukke.. Cin­e­makaran maadiri ! ]. Sparkling dia­logues and close expres­sions show­ing his com­plex, anger and vengance.

- Aswini as Lak­shmi. The way Mahen­dran selected her was inter­est­ing. Mahen­dran was look­ing for Lakhmi’s role and his friend in Ban­ga­lore was in a loss that time with a movie pro­duced using Aswini as hero­ine. That sad face fas­ci­nated Mahen­dran and his Ban­ga­lore friend begged him not to use her as she is con­sid­ered bad, sen­ti­men­tally. Mahen­dran was adamant and he suc­ceeded in find­ing the first homely lady por­trayal in Tamil cin­ema [ even Shoba has the traces of cin­ema ]. Grim looked, rarely smil­ing and emo­tion­ally packed Aswini’s per­for­mance was a major ele­ment in this movie.

- I can’t eas­ily leave other char­ac­ters as just ‘oth­ers’ [ matrum palar ! ]. Chaaruhasan [ first film ], Sun­dar, Mad­hu­ma­lini, Charu­latha, Mas­ter Raja, Baby Anju, Samikannu, Bhoopa­thy, Sarath­babu, Premi, Vijayan’s mother [ few of them are from Kan­nada indus­try ] — every one of them was utilised fully. I was touched by the per­for­mance of the bar­ber Samikannu and his dia­logue ‘Naan ambat­tanaa porand­hadhu en paavamyaa’ with tears in his eyes. The movie has fewer dia­logues but they are as sharp as paper cut­ter. Charuhasan says after hear­ing the 2nd mar­riage pro­posal from Vijayan .. ‘Naan nalla tha­gap­panaa irukken.. bro­keraa illai’.

- There’s a scene where Prakash swims eas­ily in the river and warned by the assis­tant of Su.Va. that periyavar doesn’t like any­body swim­ming as he doesn’t know swim­ming. This was used in the later part of the movie. In another scene, Su.Va warns Prakash not to roam behind Shen­bagam. He asks Prakash to drink the tea before the dia­logues and once he con­veys his thoughts, he’ll ask Prakash to keep the tea and go back to class.

- To con­vey his 2nd mar­riage thought to his wife, Vijayan does some unusual stuffs like buy­ing flow­ers to her, tak­ing her to cin­ema and hotel. She eagerly walks out and sees the sky. The direc­tor con­veys the same with the local bar­ber utter­ing the dia­log ‘Amma sand­hoshamaa irukaanga.. Innaiku mazhai vara pogudhu’. Azhagiya kanne music is used in that sit­u­a­tion and IR rules.

- There’s fight scene between Sarath and Vijayan. Vijayan turns furi­ously towards Sarath and the visu­als are shown for strong wind, furi­ous river. The next shot shows Sarath wash­ing his bloody lip in the river water and he col­lects his glasses/foot wear scat­tered in the bank. I really won­der the shock Mahen­dran cre­ated among the so called unre­al­is­tic fight sequences in Tamil films. ச‌ண்டையைக் கூட‌ க‌விதையா சொல்லி இருப்பார்.

- IR needs a spe­cial men­tion not only for the bril­liant com­po­si­tion of ‘Azhagiya Kanne’ [ HINDU once men­tioned this song as Mon­al­isa of music :) ] but also his themes for var­i­ous char­ac­ters and sequences. He bridges the silences of the char­ac­ters and audi­ence with his music. He aptly uses the Azhagiya Kanne music in apt sit­u­a­tions. Kan­nadasan wrote the stu­pen­dous lyrics and the song sum­ma­rizes the entire story.

- Though Vijayan is shown as a vil­lain, he has a soft cor­ner for his kids. The dia­logues he talk to his kids at the end was a dis­turb­ing one. The end title credit shows what is actu­ally meant in the film title.

- B.Lenin [ his first film ] needs a spe­cial men­tion for his com­mit­ment in uplift­ing the good­ness of a story teller. Before the first saranam of Azhagiya song, there’s a flute music used where a flock of sheep is shown as visual — After that group of vio­lins emerge and in par­al­lel a sin­gle sheep jumps out in sync with the music. The edi­tor described that piece of sync was appre­ci­ated in his edit­ing. VT Vijayan assisted Lenin in this movie.

- Have you ever won­dered when title card say ‘DESIGNS : BHARANI’ ? For exam­ple, before this film’s release, the poster had a photo of aswini sadly sit­ting sadly with her 2 kids. This design pro­moted the movie as an unusual film and gave a good iden­tity to the work. The same Bha­rani later spoiled the work called ‘Johnny’. Though Johnny was a music based film, the pro­mo­tions made the posters with Rajini angrily div­ing with an umbrella with mul­ti­ple images in colours [ remem­ber that ??!! ] — the poster set that it was an action film and Johnny suf­fered because of this. Mahen­dran told this. [ Dei.. Unaku mat­tum eppadaa sonnaru :) ].

- Mahen­dran was intro­duced as assis­tant direc­tor to kasilingam in Kanchi Tha­laivan film by MGR. MGR watched Uthirip pookkall and became emo­tional, it seems. He said to Mahen­dran that ‘I’ll sleep peace­fully today’ which meant a lot to Mahendran.

Con­clu­sion.

Direc­tor Vas­anth [ though I don’t admire him ] said he would fil­ter 1 in 1000, 1 in 100, 1 in 25, 1 in 10 and finally just 1 best Tamil film and that is Uthirip pookkall. The impact it made on Tamil direc­tors and writ­ers was tremen­dous. The same year 1979 opened the gate for Balu mahen­dra for Azhiyadha kolan­gall, his first Tamil venture.

Uthirip pookkall is highly con­sid­ered par with any of the best films made in the wolrd cin­ema [ except the 2 junk songs in female voices .. poda poda bokkai and one more SPSailaja song ].

Mahen­dran once quoted that ‘Even if I try out again, I can’t repro­duce what I have achieved in Uthirip pookkall’. Great ! I salute this 30 years old n fan­tas­tic film.

–Toto.

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