Blue Star movie review: S Jayakumar’s ‘Blue Star’ is a cricket drama that could have used less cricket and more human drama

S Jayakumar makes his debut as a writer and director with Blue Star, presented by Pa Ranjith. The film is about how an underdog team from Arakkonam defeats an elite, white-uniformed, English-speaking (also upper-class and upper-caste) team that trains at the “MCF” Cricket Club, possibly a substitute for the MRF Pace Academy. . . But even within Arakkonam, there is a division between the dominant and the oppressed: there is the “oor” and there is the “colony.” In other words, the local enmity, personified by Ranjith (Ashok Selvan) and Rajesh (Shanthnu Bhagyaraj), needs to be corrected. The locals have to put aside their differences to unite against a common enemy that says they are missing “Thagudhi” – the merit – of even stepping onto that well-tended cricket pitch. The man who keeps that land well maintained (Bhagavathy Perumal) is also from Arakkonam. He was once a cricketer. He now he mows the lawn.

There’s a lot of text and subtext in this premise, set in the 1990s, even if the genre itself offers few surprises. The most intriguing character, perhaps, is Anandhi (Keerthi Pandian). She plays Ranjith’s love interest before mysteriously disappearing from the script. He gives her something that makes her happy, but then she says that what she really wants can’t be bought in any store. And then we see what that is, what she wants, and it’s a beautiful moment of joy in this predominantly male universe. Some of Ranjith-Anandhi’s early scenes benefit from quick cutting that breaks up a scene and uses parts of it over a large amount of screen time. We see a scene of Anandhi watching Ranjith play cricket with his team. We see a scene where Anandhi and Ranjith meet on the flyover of a train station. Fragments of the previous scene are introduced into this one. Combine this with a constantly handheld camera and you get the feeling of watching a relationship develop in real time. You have a feeling of cinema.

But in other places you have the feeling of a radio play. There is a lot of exposition, about the characters, about the game. After a point, it becomes exhausting in a nearly three-hour movie when we are told things non-stop, instead of dramatizing them in interesting ways. And the frustrating thing is that there is so much potential for human drama. Why does Anandhi suddenly stop knowing Ranjith and start writing letters to him? We know why, but it could have added some much-needed excitement to a narrative that relies excessively on the intricacies of cricket. Lagaan, was also basically a full game played on a big screen, but how beautifully each character and motivation was recorded! These individual characters, these individual (as opposed to collective) motivations fueled the cricket and made the match that much more impressive.

Or what about Rajesh? His arc evolves from considering Ranjith as a sworn enemy to accepting him as a friend. But this is developed in such a weak and generic way that we do not get the feeling that a man begins to understand and empathize with the “other.” I wish Lizzy Anthony’s mother had had more to do than simply quote Christian Scriptures. I wish Bhagavathy Perumal’s character hadn’t been so saintly, a cross between the coach and the Buddha. She says that sport can cure hate, and we see it in a shot where a stretcher appears at the end. But we don’t feel this feeling. The real big game in Blue Star – between the teams of Ranjith and Rajesh – ends in the first half, and it seems that the writers subsequently struggled to find a balance between cricket and drama that would guide us through the rest of the film.

All the artists are serious, but Prithvi Rajan is the one who stands out. He plays Ranjith’s brother Sam and captures the film’s most extravagant scenes – love scenes and dramatic scenes. If Pa Ranjith decides to do Attakati – 2, you don’t have to look any further to find your leadership. And Sam’s part gives us some good writing too. There is a letter that leads to a fight with his brother, which leads to a revelation about Anandhi which leads to Ranjith’s loss of form in the game… Blue Star I could have used more of this nuance. But the rest of the film is broad. MCF players are portrayed as evil monsters who mock the Arakkonam people and don’t have a single decent bone in their body. And the less said about his coach, the better. The man is simply a caricatured personification of class/caste prejudice, not a real human being.

To know how this film could have been better, we only have to look at Pa Ranjith’s film. Sarpatta Parambarai. That was also a story about a sport, about inequality, but it took us deeply into its protagonist and, through him, we saw this world that he was a part of. Blue Star, on the other hand, has no depth. This equates a Hindi-speaking working-class man with Ranjith’s outsider status. He comments that that man must have had such big problems that he had to leave home and look for work in a new place whose language he does not know. He’s a nice aside. But it would have been more beautiful if the central characters had been developed with similar aspects, with equally casual observations that revealed them to us. At one point, members of the opposing team are revealed through an animation and voiceover that resembles… a PowerPoint presentation! Blue Star It means well, but it needed much better writing and filmmaking to be what it really wants to be.

Audience Rating