Director Sudha Kongara offers a highly woven cinematic story that urges us to follow our dreams.
How far would you go to achieve a crazy dream of yours?
If you are Nedumaran Rajaangam, also known as Maara (Suriya), you would give it your all.
Soorarai Pottru revolves around Maara’s life and a dream he seems to cling to for eternity: building a low-cost airline so everyone can fly. For a movie based on aviation (or rather the book Just fly about the founder of Air Deccan, the life of Captain Gopinath), the beginning is practically at full speed. There is a problem with the landing of a certain flight, but Maara communicates with the pilot to land somewhere else. It is not smooth in any section, but it lands. However, the problems have only just begun for the man behind the airline.
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Maara is of humble origin; his father is a school teacher who always asks for a change. But his background and upbringing (in Sholavandan, near Madurai) won’t make him stop thinking about flights every day.
However, there is a problem. Owning an airline is not your daily dream. Tamil cinema has long chronicled the tales that follow their dreams. But, Soorarai Pottru, like its protagonist, takes aim big and makes the stakes even higher.
Along with him comes Paresh (Paresh Rawal), who appears to be a derivative of Nana Patekar’s character Haridada in Rajinikanth. Kaala. Like Hari Dada, Paresh cannot bear to see a man breathing his empire and wants to crush it. Watch out for the scene where Maara meets him for the first time … let’s just say it was a reunion that also reached great heights, literally.
Soorarai Pottru
- Cast: Suriya, Aparna Balamurali, Paresh Rawal, Urvashi, Mohan Babu
- Director: Sudha Kongara
- Plot: a teacher’s son sets out to blow up the common man
The confrontation also reminded him of the electrifying Kaala-Hari Dada confrontation; there is a smile in Paresh’s voice and despair in Suriya’s. But one wishes director Sudha Kongara had pushed the boundaries regarding Paresh, and hadn’t turned him into a largely corporate monster who is basically saying, ‘the rich are still rich, the poor are still poor’ in different connotations. .
Ultimately, the movie boils down to dreams: if Maara has her eyes on the sky, her love interest, Bommi (Aparna Balamurali, who was last seen in Sarvam Thaala Mayam in Tamil) has a relatively simpler one. The main couple’s chemistry isn’t the best, but Sudha’s writing is solid: Bommi has the same investment in her partner’s dreams. Much more could have been explored in this conflict between husband and wife, a scene set in a bakery deserves applause, but the film always goes back to the central point of the plot, and it is understandable.
The characters that surround Maara are also the result of excellent writing: a father whose ideals would not allow him to be friends with his son, and a mother who struggles to negotiate peace between her two favorite people in the world. Maara’s friends (played by Vivek Prasanna and Krishnakumar) also get short but effective roles, as does Mohan Babu as Naidu. Director Sudha also deserves praise for using everyday language to explain some technical terms; Maara describing a licensing authority as “an RTO” and comparing his airlines to a food restaurant makes him smile.
The intensity of the proceedings softens in the second half, when somehow things seem to fall into place too quickly, with help coming from unexpected places for the protagonist. However, Suriya as Maara holds the show together. After slightly tepid appearances in his latest films, the actor scores highly as a man in love with a dream and willing to do whatever he can to achieve it. Composer GV Prakash helps him put on a good show, whose Veyyon Silli Y Usurey numbers set the right tone.
All of this will work if you accept the time frame in which the movie is set … long before mobile phones and social media took over our lives. If Maara was in 2020, he could have tweeted to the powers that be, but alas, all he had was a pager. And a stubborn determination that we will surely adore for quite some time.
Soorarai Pottru is currently streaming on Amazon Prime
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