Jigarthanda DoubleX review: A ham-fisted, vague political commentary
Jigarthanda DoubleX (Tamil)(2.5 / 5)
When Karthik Subbaraj’s Mahaan released in 2022, I wrote on how the director’s grasp on political issues seemed to get increasingly chaotic from film to film. When Jigarthanda DoubleX was announced, the title suggested it would be a spin off of Karthik’s first-ever gangster flick, Jigarthanda (2014). One could only hope that DoubleX would be more like its namesake and less like Petta (2019), Jagame Thandhiram (2021), and Mahaaan — three films where Karthik is eager to make all sorts of ideological statements in place of engaging storytelling. But that was not to be.
Like its predecessors, Jigarthanda DoubleX is a tormented declaration of Karthik’s political views, nearly three hours long, with some elements of his earlier brand of filmmaking still in tow. In the mid-1970s, Ray Dasan (SJ Suryah), an aspiring cop, is wrongly convicted of murder. His only hope for redemption is to assassinate Madurai-based rowdy Caesar (Raghava Lawrence) in an undercover operation. He is conscripted by a high-ranking police officer Rathna (Naveen Chandra), who in turn is posted among a forest-dwelling tribal community in the mountains and has set up his own ruthless fiefdom in this remote outpost. The Adivasi village he repeatedly harasses with violence is also plagued by a mysterious ivory-smuggler, named Shettani. Caesar, who originally hails from this same tribal village, is given the flimsiest backstory for why he became a gangster. He teams up with Ray to make a biopic about his own life.
This last part vaguely recalls the 2014 Jigarthanda, which features a young filmmaker called Karthik (Siddharth) who tries to make a movie on Assault Sethu (Bobby Simha), another Madurai rowdy. Apart from this, DoubleX manages to construct another belated connection to Jigarthanda towards the end, but it only serves to highlight how vastly superior the first film is.
From over-the-top theatricality to edge-of-the-seat suspense, 2014 Jigarthanda had it all. Assault Sethu was absurd and terrifying and so superbly performed, the film was hard not to like. When he’s made to act in his own biopic, his carefully constructed larger-than-life persona crumbles hilariously. He is that bad in front of a camera. Jigarthanda worked not only because of a well executed script, but also due to an actor who wears quirky characters like a second skin. The Madurai gangster trope that Kollywood seems to love is subverted here intelligently. Sethu is not an aspirational figure for toxic masculinity as is the case for most ‘Madurai rowdy’ films. He is an awful person whose undoing is simply a video camera.
Raghava Lawrence in DoubleX is a poor successor to Bobby Simha. His performance is at best, erratic. While he makes some throwaway comments on how badly cinema industries treat dark-skinned actors, it falls flat because of how insipid Raghava’s acting is. This is almost ironic, given Jigarthanda’s plot.
But what really waylays DoubleX is Karthik Subbaraj’s obsession with offering commentary on various crises. The film’s motto is that cinema must be socially conscious because it is a means of instigating change. It is hard to argue with the sentiment, but what use is it, however well-meaning, when the director doesn’t succeed either in telling a coherent story or in highlighting injustice beyond a superficial showcase of oppression as spectacle?
Whether it is the struggle for Tamil Eelam spoken of extensively in Jagame Thandhiram or police brutality towards Adivasi communities referred to in DoubleX, Karthik is an outsider to the lived trauma. His solidarity lacks an in-depth understanding. In DoubleX, this manifests simply as Adivasi communities wearing side-buns, stereotypical ‘tribal’ jewellery, and tedious lectures on the goodness of elephants. In reality, human-animal conflict, especially among communities dependent on the jungle, is far more complex.
Read: Beyond 'elephant whispers', we need to hear the Kattunayakar's voice
Apart from all that, there’s a fleeting reference to the sengol, actor-turned-politicians who pretend to be saviours of the poor, and an authoritarian woman chief minister. All these references have the depth of a cut-out, and seem to stop just short of drawing a meaningful conclusion about what the director is critiquing. We get the idea, but without more detail in the story, they remain ambiguously constructed villains.
The sengol, in recent political developments, symbolises the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s attempt at winning over voters in Tamil Nadu. Perhaps the allusion to the sengol in DoubleX is a critique of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and the late Jayalalithaa, but the scene comes and goes so quickly, it’s difficult to safely draw any such conclusion. Similarly, the critique of how lands belonging to Adivasi communities are stolen by the nexus of corporate and political greed, is lost in the convoluted subplot about Shettani who is also a tribal man but inhumanly violent.
Also read: Explained: The sengol in Tamil history and BJP’s appeasement plan
Ham-fisted, half-hearted, vague political commentary is more dangerous than no commentary at all in cinema. Particularly when it is about issues such as forest rights that a majority of film-goers themselves have only the vaguest comprehension of.
Jigarthanda DoubleX, in that regard, does not give due diligence to the problem faced by scores of Adivasi communities. It also does not serve to bring out the absurdist comedy and gift for building up suspense that we know Karthik is capable of, ever since his debut film Pizza (2012). All that saves the film is SJ Suryah. His performance is pitch perfect, hobbled only by Raghava’s bad acting, as he fails to provide the ideal counter to Suryah’s character.
If Karthik Subbaraj believes that cinema is a means to political change, he needs to put more thought into it, than superficial gestures that might garner a few claps. Or he could just revert to his filmmaking of his early career, because that at least provided a much needed break from usual predictable Kollywood fare.
If the film has anything truly appreciable, it is in its second half, in how the Adivasi community chose to stand their ground. But even that quickly becomes a spectacle for upper caste viewers. Cinema with social commentary is great, if it speaks up in a meaningful manner for marginalised people. When their marginalisation becomes the means to sensationalise a script, directors need to think about whom their film is ultimately for.
Also read:
From Petta to Mahaan: The increasingly chaotic politics of Karthik Subbaraj