IF you care for them, Raghu Thatha has several things going for it. It’s a rare Tamil film led by a female star Keerthy Suresh, a proven actor. The ensemble boasts of a laundry list of good performers beyond its lead—MS Bhaskar, Devadarshini, Ravindra Vijay and relatively fresher faces who add so much to the film—Rajesh Balachandran and Ismath Banu. It is written and directed by Suman Kumar—a veteran of Amazon Prime’s The Family Man and Farzi—in his feature debut. But more than anything, it is a film that props up the genre of comedy, something sorely lacking in all Indian cinema and especially Tamil for a long time. 

No, do not throw Aranmanai 4 at my face. We get enough action, more gore than necessary, more decibels than is healthy, the rare romance and if lucky, a good romantic comedy like Thiruchitrambalam but that is all there is with an almost widespread misunderstanding that audience will come to the theatres only for those kind of star turns. Raghu Thatha is a welcome palate cleanser—it is funny and clean for the most part, the writing is smart and the characters are sweet, charming and memorable. It is not perfect or without flaws, but it is a solid addition.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not moralising here but over the years it is not that the audience’s taste has changed, and they stopped coming to theatres, it is just that we’ve stopped making some genres well or at all, and those that enjoy them chose to stay away. But back to Raghu Thatha. We are at sunrise of the 1970s in the village of Valluvanpettai (the film winks at us right from the title) and Kayalvizhi (a wonderful Keerthy Suresh) works in Madras Central Bank and moonlights as a writer under the adopted pseudonym Ka Pandiyan—compulsions of a woman novelist. She is the apple of her grandfather’s—Raghu aka Raghothaman (MS Bhaskar)— eye, a Tamil activist who has taught his ways to his granddaughter, one who not only grew up a thinker but also a fiercely independent woman with activism rooted in her veins. As a child, she recites revolutionary poetry, participates in agitations and accompanies her grandfather to the anti-Hindi protests of the 1960s and this forms the political bedrock of this admittedly light comedy. Will Ka Pandiyan be forced to learn Hindi and, if so, how can she do it without giving up her staunch values?

Marriage is an albatross swirling around Kayal’s neck, the family imposes it upon her the way the central government tries to impose Hindi nationwide. But then she meets Selvan (Ravindra Vijay), a man who shows interest not just in her but also in her writing. He is gentle, vulnerable, charming even and while this doesn’t blossom into romance straightaway, Kayal reciprocates a friendship. These character-establishing scenes glide, with sprinkled humour and broad traits. Some of the funniest scenes are in Kayal’s workplace, the banter between her Brahmin colleague Alamelu (Devadarshini bringing a more subtle version of her Ramany from the popular TV series Ramany vs Ramany), the manager Gupta (Rajeev Ravindranathan), his nameboard highlighting an ‘h’ in his name so that the Tamil people pronounce it correctly, and later with the office boy Suneel who might be from a land far away from Tamil Nadu but speaks perfect Tamil. 

Raghu Thatha is part drama, part screwball, a film where characters and identities are suspect as is ideology. Marriage looks like an escape to independence one second and a prison sentence the next. The same goes for Hindi. Rules are rules, the world insists around Kayal even as she tries to navigate them while conspiring with her brother, his wife and Alamelu to craft her way to liberation. 

Raghu Thatha is light on its feet and the film rarely takes itself too seriously. It is not plot-heavy; the story is simply a means to create comedy out of a political and contentious issue. It could be the production design but some of the staging looks theatre-like. Kayal’s bank, the bus stop — they all look and feel artificial, like they are props on stage. Everything is too sanitised and projects a clean aesthetic that doesn’t reflect the period setting of the film (the Tamil ad saying "ini veetil savaram elithu" for shaving blade in a roadside shop is a nice touch though). The Ekta Sabha subplot is forgotten midway and makes for a clunky reentry. Some anachronistic touches like freeze frames of waves hitting rocks and birds flying do add to the comic bits but a song of pathos—similarly old school— earlier in the film doesn’t go with the larger tone of the film. 

Raghu Thatha is more of a writing and performance triumph than filmmaking. But the film’s turn from light conversational to a comic caper is almost seamless (editing by TS Suresh). A test for Kayal, in more ways than one, ends in a chaos-ridden examination hall. Her wedding is similarly a frantic farce where a proud chauvinist finds refuge in the kitchen. One can only hope that Tamil cinema too finds refuge in a variety of genres beyond the big-budget yelling and hacking contests.

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