Chennai Express

I can safely say that the class voted to see the movie.

I was taking a joint class of the Direction and Acting students at the IFTI, the film school in Meerut. We’d spent a day improvising a script, then a second day shooting the script. But on the day of the editing we suddenly found ourselves ‘free’ as the editors were pre-occupied. So what do we do, the classes voted to watch a movie and I said fine, so long as you agree to analyse the movie later.

The Directors wanted to see ‘Gravity’, but apparently its print was not good- being downloaded from a Bit Torrent site. So the Acting students won, they had wanted to see ‘Chennai Express’.

Personally I didn’t mind it at all, having seen bits of the movie on TV and enjoyed it thoroughly. So a chance to see it whole, even though it was on a video projector, off an MP4 downloaded print.

The movie was as the bits seen earlier had promised- thoroughly enjoyable. A bit thin on narrative logic here and there, but it pulled it off with  the sheer momentum of the narrative and ‘star power’.

What came as a full on surprise to me was the sheer volume of visual effects that the movie contained, and this was not a science-fiction or imaginary world movie. If anything this was a comparatively ‘rooted’ movie set in the present day India, most of the time taking care to identify its geography. But here literally every scene was being enhanced by visual effects, compositing and matte work, along with occasional completely CGI shots. I pointed this out to the students, comparing it to our ‘classical’ movie texts of ‘Mughal-e-Azam’ and ‘Sholay’, which are practically devoid of visual effects, living off the skills of the director for their effect upon the audience.

Visual effects are nothing new in cinema, even in India they are as old as Dadasaheb Phalke. But visual effects to enhance a realistic movie are the new norm in Hollywood and elsewhere, especially when shooting on digital formats. I hadn’t realised how developed this was in Indian movies until Chennai Express. But it’s a great way of adding the extra visual ‘oomph’ to stories. Especially stories that rely on ‘situations’ rather than narrative movements to make their mark.

But I could be totally wrong about this as my knowledge of contemporary Indian cinema is poor and there is a lot happening in different ways in the movies. But this use of VFX to enhance stories can only be good for movies.

I only wish they’d pay more attention to the ‘craft’ of cinema and not just the techniques. I mean its all very well to use a telephoto lens to enhance the close-ups of your lead stars, but can we do a bit more with the ‘cuts’ too.

Having said the above, I must admit to being thoroughly impressed by the movie’s use of background music and sound effects. Hats off to the makers for that.