Katrathu Thamizh

With great regret, I submit that I don't know Tamil well enough to even review this movie with enough depth. I watched an interview given by Ram and the poor man doesn't speak English well, admitting it with irony. That sort of makes us even.
Its surely the best movie I have seen in many days, and it is particularly touching that I saw it on the day after I completed reading a brief biography of Guru Dutt, who could well be a cinematic alter ego to Prabhakar. I was also reminded of Pyaasa in the film, or at least, how the film radically fled from Pyaasa's poetry and melancholia to murder and ferocity.
Not that I wish to take anything away from the director's own vision, but there was something nagging at my mind all along, do I see this film as a realistic portrait of conditions, or as a semi mythical portrayal of a rebel, a Realistic film or a Romantic film? If its the latter, I have no problem watching it and enjoying a Quixotic ride allowing myself to cry "Ate!" and letting hell off its leash. But if its the former, I am pretty scared shitless.
Even as I write this blog I wonder at all my decisions so far, and my latest (yes. I have decided to go the Katrathu Tamizh way, fucking around in humanities.) It seems somewhat absurd. Here I am, moderately talented in English, with a thousand blogs to compete with me and with a thousand more with inferior thoughts but a more engaging (meaning vulgar) style, for the attentions of passing idiots. I mean, is this what I am going to offer agencies as a persuasion to hire me? Ah well, I have a nice way out...
But back to the film, though its difficult reviewing it, I couldn't study it too much, I was too busy drinking it in. Lets see. Cinematography superb, unforgettable, it has a sort of focus that is at once phantasmagoric and real. I remember this scene in the film where there he traipses down from the top floor of his dump of an apartment, the scrawls on the wall almost throb under the sole light. The thing to wonder is that even such photography has a powerful, mesmerising effect (curious how real life can be so tantalising).
Acting is....overwhelming. Again, the realism in it is fantastic. Some of the best examples are the superb performance by his tamil master, who speaks in a rolling patois of Malayalam and Tamil, Karunaas' crisp and believable comedy when kidnapped and ordered to record Prabhakar's (Jeeva) confession, and Jeeva himself, living the role with every sort of nuance and shade. It is too flat to say that he lives the role, he does more, he forces the role onto us, he represents a community, he lends flesh to an abstraction.
Katrathu Thamizh is a harrowing, Kafkaesque film. A post graduate in Tamizh goes on a rampage after a failed (or foiled) suicide attempt. Eventually, he returns back to his naivete, but is forced to commit suicide with his wife.
I am still reeeling under the effects of the film, so I will write a more detached review few days later....