Pariyerum Perumal

Pariyan enters law school. He is the first person from his village to do so and the classes are in English; he knows none. He sits in the lecture and does not understand. Jothi helps him; she gives him her notes and explains the words. They become friends. Jothi is from an upper caste. Her family learns of it. Pariyan is beaten in public at a wedding and nobody intervenes. What follows is worse. Pariyan does not step back, but what he faces is not a person. His dog is called Karuppi and we see at the start what happens to her. Mari Selvaraj writes and directs; it is his first film. Kathir plays Pariyan and Anandhi plays Jothi; Yogi Babu and G. Marimuthu are in the cast. The language is Tamil. The director Pa. Ranjith produced it. The matter it treats is caste; the film takes it not as background but as its direct subject and does not censor the violence. The narrative starts like a love story and deliberately breaks that shape; the outcome is not a romantic resolution. The scene with the dog at the opening sets the whole direction and finds its answer at the end. The music is by Santhosh Narayanan; the songs speak directly inside the narrative. The film was taken as a sign of a new vein in Tamil cinema and the director became known through it. The scene at the table at the end resolves nothing, and that is deliberate. Its limit is the watching; the violence is explicit, the narrative offers no hope, and some scenes are hard to sit through. Who it is for: viewers who like Tamil cinema and social narrative. Who it is not for: it is hard, bleak, and the ending open.