Films being screened at the 51st International Film Festival of India span many world languages including Romanian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Danish. After a week of foreign cinema diet—and frenetic subtitle reading—it felt like homecoming to catch a Tamil film, Thaen (by director Ganesh Vinayakan), which is about a family on the hills whose natural life is disrupted by the arrival of a factory.
The topic is relevant and the director’s scathing views on governmental corruption quite useful—but it all would have been more hard-hitting in a better film. Thaen, unfortunately, is blunted by unconvincing performances, false dialogues, and much melodrama.
It’s also a film that for all its good intentions, ends up authenticating superstition. Its lead characters test the health of their romantic future by engaging in an old custom involving a plantain stem, a custom that later gets validated.
Thaen, in also trying to launch a takedown of the corruption and greed in the medical system, makes the mistake of stretching its criticism so far as to mount doubt about the very utility of science-based medicine. Thankfully, the sour aftertaste of this rather crude film was washed away by a film screened later in the day which too makes a point in favour of environmental protection: Nathan Grossman’s documentary about Greta Thunberg called I Am Greta. The film needed to offer more insight on what makes Greta great.