Remember the theme music that played right before the evening news on Doordarshan (or Doordarshan Samachar as it used to be called)? It’s the same theme that plays as the title credits roll before KV Anand’s Kavan. All it takes is a few seconds of that music and we’re transported back 20 years to a time when news was just news. Plain and simple.
So it feels like a rude awakening when we discover that Kavan is set very much in today’s times, when news is much more. It’s also ‘entertainment’ or ‘giving the audience what they want’, as the head of a news channel in the film explains. Kavan is KV Anand returning to the zone where he’d set Ko, just that we replace the photojournalist protagonist with a television journalist here.
The protagonist in question is Tilak (Vijay Sethupathi), the only student in film school to raise his hand to become a documentary filmmaker while all his classmates chose feature films. His first documentary is about the river Ganga and his mother claims to be one of only two people who’ve seen it.
So when the same guy takes up a job at a corporatised news channel, he’s reminded again, that truth doesn't sell for much. This channel wants a ‘Breaking News’ flashing every 30 minutes. The winners of the channel’s reality show is decided based on how well participants can be commodified as opposed to how talented they are. Even TV award functions are cheekily satirised when KV Anand himself is shown negotiating for a Best Director award.
Yet when the idealist in Tilak is reignited, sparks fly and so do the TRPs. There’s a great ‘ Mudhalvan’ moment in the film (Kavan is happy to doff its hat with a Raghuvaran reference) when Tilak goes rogue right in the middle of a live television interview with a powerful politician. What if Mudhalvan’s Pugazhendi chose to clean up the media business instead of the politics of the state. What if a news channel becomes the subject of an expose. That’s Kavan for you.
But the film’s hardly as exciting as that may sound. It’s not exactly ‘breaking news’ when we’re able to predict Tilak moving to a lesser-known channel the moment we see T Rajendherr being cast as a channel owner. There’s no scoop either that Kavan’s central conceit revolves around an issue (about a factory poisoning ground water levels) we’re told very little about.
Why not spend a few more minutes explaining how paid news can whitewash the image of politician’s instead of claiming it can. How about going into the details of how the media profiles an activist to make him a terrorist, just because his name is Abdul.
In their hurry to compress several issues into one film, nothing seems to be explored in detail. The result, is a film with a few great moments tied together by large stretches of elements that make it more commercial. In the end, it’s funny how the film becomes a lot like the channel it disses. Too many commercials for such little news.
(The article first appeared in The Hindu Cinemaplus.)