On the face of it, Sarpatta Parambarai is a coming-of-age movie. But that’s like saying that The Godfather is a gangster movie. Pa. Ranjith has created something truly beautiful.
On one hand, you have a young man who is pulled towards the ring by his love for boxing as a sport, on the other hand, his mother’s fears of whether it will lead him down the path his father took keep him away from the ring.
On one hand, you have a retired boxer who has created a dynasty that is on the verge of collapsing. On the other hand, you have a failed boxer who has found a boxer through whom he can realize his shattered dreams.
All this is placed in the context of the 70s when India too was trying to find the direction it must take. The stalwarts of the freedom struggle had passed. Indira Gandhi was centralizing power. The Tamils through the DMK were hellbent on retaining their culture and history.
While the upper castes fought for their share of the cake, the backward and lower castes fought to stake a claim in the new India that was emerging.
Pa. Ranjith brings all these strands together to create a movie that one is forced to watch in rapt attention.
While Arya and Pasupathy assay their roles beautifully, I was personally taken in by G. M. Sundar. He hardly gets any dialogs in the movie, but he says so much more through his acting.
Simply because this movie and Toofaan are boxing stories, they will be compared. That is unfair to Toofaan because Sarpatta Parambarai is at a whole different level. It manages to tell a sports story in the context of the culture and location in which is it set. Compared to it, Toofaan tells a boxing story in the context of Bollywood and not society.
Finally, I must thank Sridhar Subramaniam for giving me the cultural context in which to watch the movie. Being a non-Tamil I would have missed that strand altogether. It is credit to Pa. Ranjith that even if you don’t get that strand the movie is still brilliant.
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