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Agni Nakshatram
1988 146’ col Tamil d/s Mani Rathnam pc Sujatha Prod. p G. Venkateshwaran lyr Vali c P.C. Sriram m Ilaiyaraja lp Karthik, Prabhu, Amala, Nirosha,G. Umapathi, Janakaraj, V.K. Ramaswamy, Jayachitra, Sumitra, Vijayakumar, Tara
Rathnam’s hit follow-up to Nayakan (1987) is a music video-type fantasy with rapid cutting, hazy images and flared lights. It also boasts one of the most sexually explicit song picturisations to date: the camera slithers along, peeking at a woman autoerotically engaged in an indoor swimming pool. The plot involves two half-brothers, one a cop (Prabhu) and the other a streetwise hood (Karthik), the two mothers (Jayachitra, Sumitra), and the shared father (Vijaykumar) who runs separate family establishments for them. The end, adapted from the Godfather (1972) hospital sequence, has the two brothers uniting to reinforce, literally, the law of the father (who is a Judge). After the unsatisfactory conflict between the brothers, one realises, in the critic K. Hariharan’s words, ‘that the real hero of the film is actually behind the camera [p]ulling out every gimmick available in the ad-man’s repertoire’.