Bison Movie Review — Sucharita Tyagi

The necessary struggle required to become good at sport is inherently suitable for melodramatic, cinematic storytelling; tarah tarah ke conflicts are in-built in the life stories of sportspeople, before you even hear the first thing about them. Woh jhoojh chuke hain.

Aap is hi saal dekh lo — F1: The Smashing Machine, Marty Supreme aa rahi hai, Christy is around the corner. I also saw the trailer of the Ram Charan starrer Peddi, where he’s playing cricket.

But when it’s a sports drama fuelled by Mari Selvaraj and Pa Ranjith, you know ki the story isn’t just going to be about the person, woh desh ke andar ghus jaayegi kahaani.

Hey y’all, my name is Sucharita. Welcome back to my channel, jahaan today we are talking about Bison Kaalamaadan, starring Dhruv Vikram in the lead role, now in movie theatres.

The film opens on a grainy Doordarshan broadcast in 1994. A glitchy news report is coming from Japan, where the Asian Games are ongoing. Early in the morning, a whole village waits for updates from a Kabaddi match; local boy Kittan is scheduled to play. Excitement turns to disappointment as they realise he’s been benched once again, not allowed to enter the arena. Dekhne waalon ki and Kittan’s frustrations match the screen flickering and fighting to stay alive.

This sequence is in black and white, but it’s not a flashback. When we cut to a flashback, suddenly everything’s in colour. Kittan’s memories, the stories he carries within him, are clear, in technicolour. Instead of fading, his past life serves as fuel.

The story is inspired by the real life of Kabaddi player Manathi Ganesan, nicknamed “Bison” because of his strength. The version shown here begins with a child who bears the weight of his mother’s untimely death and his father’s many fears. His father, like many Indian parents, wants Kittan to stay humble, focus on studying, avoid thinking about sports, and remain as invisible as possible. As a result, Kittan grows up to be a meek young adult with no social skills.

Through the film’s layered flashbacks, Selvaraj shows you the social hierarchies Kittan must navigate to judge his life’s value, most of which seem predetermined. In a country obsessed with hierarchy to a harsh, extreme degree, Kittan’s existence is seen as little more than a series of rankings, he is poor, has no mother, is an introvert, speaks only Tamil, has a basic education, and belongs to the Dalit community. At best, he is expected to survive and lead an unremarkable life. This is emphasized further by a father who is too afraid to even envision a future better than their current one.

Many of Mari Selvaraj’s hero figures are men who aren’t trained to be in battle but find themselves pushed in that direction. The village Kittan, his father, and sister live in is embroiled in local violence almost constantly, drowning in the din of knives slashing human flesh. “Nobody knows if we will pick up a knife or if time will hand it to us,” Kittan’s sports teacher says to his father, urging him to free up inherited rage instead of suppressing it, lest it detonate.

Due to a decades-old conflict between two men named Pandiaraja and Kandasamy, an inexplicable anger engulfs everyone in Kittan’s life, he has never known peace, let alone joy. Small disagreements erupt into murders. A man stabs a goat and throws it out of a moving bus before the driver can even react. Tube lights are broken, tables upended, things thrown about, it’s almost too much. People in the region are so desperately looking for a saviour to alleviate their circumstances that they pledge allegiance to these false gods in the hope that they’ll be the avengers they require. Nearly every man in the district is part of one gang or the other, are all indistinguishable from each other.

Dhruv Vikram is marvellous as Kittan. Each time you see him train, his face is a mix of determination to obtain peak human fitness, but also a resolve not to use resultant strength for violence. Anytime he’s confronted with a situation where something is denied to him and he can’t find the words to express himself, he simply starts to run, in the streets, in the school playground, on the road alongside cars. The actor brings a different kind of mania to each run, montage, and Kabaddi match. But try as hard as he might, each time Kittan manages to step one metaphorical foot over the line, trying to be “outside,” frenzied men around him keep pulling him back in, like a giant game of Kabaddi being played with his life.

The film doubles down hard on underlining its “message,” using a disruptive background score and occasional simplistic dialogue. The long runtime allows it plenty of space to become heavy-handed. There’s a dizzying sequence where Kandasamy (played by Lal) delivers a Mahabharat-like sermon to Kittan in an empty field. The camera spins around them, jumping axis and eye-lines till you almost want to look away. The moment is designed to feel important and grand, but its emotional payoff doesn’t justify the gymnastics.

Higher-up sporting officials are cartoonishly evil. Women’s stories are all but missing from the narrative. Rajisha Vijayan plays Kittan’s sister Raji, who is older and stays at home, but aside from standing up for her brother in two scenes, the character has no arc. The same is true for Anupama Parameswaran as Rani, the love interest — she loves him from childhood, but the intensity or importance of that isn’t truly felt in the story.

As you come back to the 1994 Asian Games match in the final act, colour returns to the frame on a shot of multiple Indian flags waving in the audience. Mari Selvaraj is trying to take his film to where the audience is. He wants to show people a side of life in India that moviegoers don’t usually see in flashy cinema, while presenting it in a visual language they understand. The final match is India vs Pakistan. In the climax, most people are speaking Hindi and Urdu, the background music is consistent, and the moment feels designed for mainstream emotional resonance. Which could be both good or bad, depending on what you go in the movie theatre expecting.

The film ends in 1995, around the time Selvaraj’s 2021 film Karnan takes place, in the same region of Thoothukudi, Tamil Nadu. Both films are great companion pieces, highlighting that the fight to break the arbitrary but stringent caste hierarchies in India never really stops. Despite small wins, it is one battle after another.