Vada Chennai

North Chennai. Anbu is a young carrom player with no interest in politics, gangs or anything else. The fight for power in the neighbourhood pulls him in anyway, and over the years he ends up at the centre of the thing he avoided. The narrative runs from the late eighties to the early 2000s and does not proceed in order. Vetrimaaran writes and directs. Dhanush plays Anbu, with Ameer, Samuthirakani, Andrea Jeremiah, Aishwarya Rajesh and Kishore. The structure is deliberately hard. Time jumps constantly, the same event is shown again through different eyes, and you are expected to assemble who did what yourself. Vetrimaaran designed it as the first part of a trilogy, and the story does not close. The setting is a political choice. North Chennai is usually associated with crime in Tamil cinema and looked at from outside; this film looks from within, at how the fishing community was squeezed economically, at the question of the harbour land, and at how politics used both. The prison sections are the strongest material. The violence is not aestheticised and the hierarchy is built in detail. Who it is for: viewers who like Tamil crime cinema, Vetrimaaran, and complicated construction. Who it is not for: it runs past two hours forty with a crowded cast, and it ends without arriving. The sequel has still not come.