Conversations with Mani Ratnam by Baradwaj Rangan: Book review
My father introduced me to Mani’s movies during my college years. I remember people of their generation elevating Thalapathy, Geetanjali, and Nayagan every time a song was played on TV.
My social teacher, who was Class X during the release of Geetanjali, mentioned it several times during my school days. Then we have people talking about Roja, Bombay, Alaipayuthey, and the list goes on and on.
I started with Thalapathy and covered most of his films while I was in B.Tech. And then came around this book during an interview Mani was giving to Baradwaj Rangan. My first and only theatrical experience of Mani sir’s film until now is Chekka Chivantha Vaanam (Nawab in Telugu), and I ended my marathon of his movies with his first commercial hit Mouna Ragam (like the non-linear way of watching his films :D).
I purchased this book in June with my first salary and started reading it during my vacation in the last week of December and finished it very recently. Baradwaj had a set of conversations with Mani sir sequentially spanning his filmography until Kadal. Though I missed two of his movies (Anjali & Kadal), I went ahead and read discussions about them, as well as I, knew the stories of both films.
The book starts with Mani’s early days watching films, his family background in the film industry. It covers all of his movies in order while clubbing his movies before Mouna Ragam into one chapter and allotting every other film a chapter each.
When you have a mine of talent to extract answers from, you need to use your brain to get them efficiently, and we can’t find a better person than BR to ask these questions. The two National awardees discuss all the films deep enough to know why a particular frame is in the way it was picturized and tiny details.
Mani’s answers are straightforward, at times witty, and thoughtful about the movies and characters that he wrote. Before reading this book, whenever I watch any film, I used to think and write about stories alone, ignoring the characters as I thought it’s the story that drives the characters and not vice-versa.
The depth of characters that Mani wrote and the detailing to their names, costumes, the way they talk, behave and drive the story can’t be appreciated any lesser. While reading the book, I felt both are sitting beside me and talking to each other, and I am a student who’d like to explore more to get answers to my questions.
Frankly speaking, I started this blog to write about a series of blogs on Mani’s films as I thought I had a vivid idea of his movies until I read this book and realized I don’t even know 1% of what went into his head while writing the characters and stories and bringing them on screen.
He mentions the collaboration with his technicians — Ilayaraja, ARR, Santosh Sivan, PC, Thota Tharani, Sreekar Prasad, et al. and their way of working with him. I was unaware of motifs being used in the score of the film until watching this video:
He is also known for breathtaking visuals in songs as well, and his practical answers to the questions surrounding them aren’t expected. This book, for sure, is a textbook for me to understand how stories can be told with minimal expenses and knitting the storylines and characters like Yuva using all the elements present on the screen to tell the story:
I was taking notes while reading the book to quote them here, but it gives away too much to those willing to read. My humble suggestion would be to watch all his films before opening the book. Even though the book is structured sequentially, it has questions about Mani’s other films in a chapter about a particular film.
There are many points to cover on his films, but I’m ending this piece here so that I can write another article on his movies! Do read the book, and you can’t stop appreciating this genius. Thank you, Mani sir, for introducing me to your world, for introducing the great ARR, and Aishwarya Rai ❤
If you are interested in appreciating films, I have a suggestion to put forward: After watching a movie, write/think about what you liked and disliked. Then watch the other films made by the same filmmaker, and you’d get an idea of his/her influences, thoughts running through the mind, and you can observe a pattern in the characters or the stories. Hope it helps :)
