Review of K. Hariharan’s Kamal Haasan — A cinematic journey: A masterclass in acting

Review of K. Hariharan’s Kamal Haasan — A cinematic journey. Unravelling Kamal Haasan, actor, filmmaker, technician, and a quick-change artist who can metamorphose into many characters

At a recent press conference ahead of the launch of his sequel Indian 2, Kamal Haasan is asked a question that makes his colleagues on stage with him smirk. He’s asked if he’s upset that though there are three pretty heroines in the film, he himself has no consort. Kamal raises the mic and with great assurance, answers: “My consort in the film does not have to be a woman.” In that one sentence, is buried a touch stone. Kamal, with this, reveals the consummate artist he is, his relationship with cinema, his philosophical approach to the medium, and that while he’s celebrated as a hero, his tango with the movies goes far beyond formulae and stereotypes.

That is what K. Hariharan captures in Kamal Haasan: A Cinematic Journey, no easy task to begin with, but probably best executed by a filmmaker, with a deep understanding of politics, history and culture, but more importantly the ability to link all of them in a single intelligible strand. He picks 40 films (from Kamal’s repertoire of about 260 films) and executes a contextual analysis, one that is replete with references to world cinema, its masters, political theories, running parallel to real time events. That is the strength of this book; the craft of a chronicler to pick from a veritable smorgasbord to lay out on his charcuterie board, a select pick of the finest, though not necessarily the most popular, slices. This will then serve again, as a touchstone, a window that opens into the soul of Kamal Haasan, the actor, filmmaker, technician, the bahuroopi, a quick-change artist who physically metamorphoses into many characters, in its fullest sense.

The book opens, appropriately, with aplomb, right in the middle of intense drama, the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the birth of Kamal. While Hariharan stays off the personal life of the star, he wraps the early personal life of Kamal and the influences of his immediate, liberal family, into a capsule that seeks to measure the heights he has since achieved. For someone who learnt, not formally or in schools, but from actors and directors-turned-mentors, from screen, from behind the camera, and from life, there now stands a man, a consummate entertainer, but more, a veritable ashtavadhani of multiple talents and achievements.

The trick would probably be that Kamal never considered his education was complete, with a degree or a school leaving certificate, neither of which he possesses. He is, therefore, constantly seeking to learn, to innovate, and to find joy in what he discovers. After a recent trip to China, he spoke with child-like awe of the revolution that was happening in the east with animator and film screening itself. At these points, he’s completely oblivious of his own achievements, his ability to inspire awe among compatriots.

Kamal is the sutradhar in a sense, not only because this book is about him, but because the author relinquishes this role to him. He allows Kamal, and his movies, to hold together a nation and state in the throes of development, freed from the shackles of colonisers. In one chapter, while talking of the epoch-making collaboration between Kamal and his biggest mentor, K. Balachander, Hariharan leaves an indication of how he will be treating his subject and book: “The performance and conviction that builds the story’s characters are many times more important that the personal story and beliefs of the actors.” As mentor and protege plumbed the depths of film making, the author retrospectively strings together the social themes they explored, and the way they were handled. If the whirring celluloid projector alone were enough to cause a revolution, this consummate pair — Kamal and KB — would have dragged society by its ears into a more progressive, liberal matrix, with their caste-agnostic, and feminine themes, the portrayal of contrived human relationships, the deliberate casting of androgynous heroes and facilitating the redemption of rebel heroines. Behind the camera, and the mask and facepaint, were revolutionaries, marching to Bella Ciao, urging change in the urban, middle class households their movies were set in. All without, as Hariharan points out, diluting the tenets of mainstream entertainment.

The book is rich with small stories that illustrate the prowess that Kamal holds, not just in acting, but in all aspects of film making. The sharp way in which he detects that there was no film in the camera by merely observing the sound it was making, on the sets of 16 Vayathinile, for instance, is a hat tip to the phenomenal knowledge he holds within himself. While it stays away from Kamal’s later avatar as a politician too, just as it skirts wide off his personal life, this book is a deliberate chronicle of the emergence of Kamal as a political animal, as if he had no other option, given his circumstances.

Hariharan also summons equipoise to raise questions on motive, and technique, something the ardent movie watcher and fan, would probably dismiss in the realm of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. For the avid movie goer, this is an unputdownable book, racy like the moments before the splendid cinematic transformation of the rather effeminate Kathak dancer Viz into the athletic spy Wizam Kashmiri, in Vishwaroopam. By then, as the audience, we learn that Viz might actually be a Tamil Muslim, but nevertheless, that scene is a revelation. It’s another touchstone, a masterclass in acting. We’ve probably been rendered speechless multiple times, watching Kamal on screen, but Hariharan’s book is still a revelation.