Ramanaa

Ramanaa, a professor teaching ethics at university, spends his days explaining in class how bribery rots a society, and his nights running an organisation of his students that abducts corrupt officials and puts them on trial. The abducted are sentenced as if before a court. The film is not interested in crime. It is interested in the privatisation of justice: it applauds its hero's method and opens no debate about it. That is the most striking thing about it now, because the world it builds treats state institutions as entirely useless. The form is Tamil commercial cinema: crowded hall scenes, long speeches, songs and lines delivered straight at the audience. It is A.R. Murugadoss's first film as director. The same idea, a hero stepping outside the system to punish directly, would recur in his later work, and the film was remade several times in Indian cinema. Vijayakanth plays Ramanaa, with Simran and Ashima Bhalla in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like Tamil action drama of the 2000s and message films. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by the logic of the lynch mob. The film does not question its hero's executions and gives the opposing view no room at all.