Tamil literary pioneers recommend novels that would make for great movie adaptations
Tamil cinema has been witnessing a spree of book-to-screen offerings like Vetri Maaran’s ‘Viduthalai’ and Mani Ratnam’s ‘Ponniyin Selvan’ series; now, writers Imayam, Su Venugopal, Bava Chelladurai and Na Murugesa Pandian pick their favourite literary works that are now ripe for adaptations
(Originally published in The Hindu on April 26, 2023)
The trend of adapting literary works to the big screen is now booming, thanks to directors like Vetri Maaran (whose recent release Viduthalai: Part 1 was an adaptation of B Jeyamohan’s Thunaivan) and Mani Ratnam, whose magnum opus releasing this week, Ponniyin Selvan 2, is bringing Kalki’s novel to life. However, even with such occasional cross-overs, cinema and literature struggle to find the right symbiosis, and the debate on what makes a film adaptation of a novel successful seems never-ending.
“A lot of these movies, like Viduthalai, are not purely adaptations, but are movies that are inspired by literature,” says writer and literary enthusiast Bava Chelladurai, adding that a short story or a novel often acts as a stimulus or inspiration to find screenplays. “Vendhu Thanindhathu Kaadu’s source was a short story called Mul by Jeyamohan; however, the film starts where the story ends. So the story was only an inspiration to make a film,” he adds.
Tamil writer Su Venugopal, who says that the two-hour film format struggles to fully flesh out the essence of a novel, has a bone to pick with directors “who use literary works just to quench their desperate need to have a basic story in hand”. Venugopal understands that cinema cannot fully translate the nuances, underlining insights, or scenes detailed with magical realism or the extraterrestrial. “Further, what a novel intuits is something I doubt films can bring about.” But he does wonder why many film adaptations either miss the heart of the novel or struggle in structuring around it, ultimately diluting the essence in the process.
Writer-literary critic Na Murugesa Pandian, on the other hand, feels that cinema need not reflect everything that is being told in the novel, but “should visually tell how the filmmaker perceives the story”. What he has an issue with, apart from mainstream cinema’s stuck-in-a-rut commercial formula, is filmmakers not delving deep into what made them like the novel in the first place. “Screenwriters, filmmakers, and producers need to read more Tamil literature to break the formula,” he says.
Acclaimed writer Imayam dislikes when writers complain about film adaptations of their work: “The written form has its aesthetics and grammar, which shouldn’t be looked for in cinema’s structure. The experience of a novel is very subjective, and so when a filmmaker makes a novel his own, we shouldn’t point that as a mistake.” He adds that it isn’t right for an artist to question another artist once the work is handed over. “Also a producer is a businessman. You cannot lecture about artistry. Cinema is a mass medium and it’s for the common folk; the makers also have a responsibility to convince the common man through their films.”
Further, he says, cinema is a………..
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