Jigarthanda DoubleX

The two defining tendencies of Tamil-language cinema of the past decade – sociopolitical critique and post-modern cinephilia – collide head on in Karthik Subbaraj’s dazzling crime comedy Jigarthanda Double X, a spiritual successor to Cold Heart. Where the prequel was a celebration of the supremacy of cinematic mythmaking, the new film is an earnest, impassioned assertion of the importance of cinematic demystification. Like its predecessor, Jigarthanda Double X devilishly dispatches a sheep into a den of wolves. Coerced by a police officer to assassinate a ruthless, Clint Eastwood-loving gangster named Caesar, timid prisoner Kirubai assumes the guise of a filmmaker – a protégé of Satyajit Ray, no less – to lure his target with dreams of celluloid stardom and subsequently ambush him. Kirubai and Caesar embark on a movie project together, but they soon find their fictions overwhelmed by the weight of reality. Every shot is an event in Subbaraj’s unabashedly maximalist film, brimming with character doubles, symmetries, repetitions and reversals. With its heady soundtrack, emphatic visual palette and labyrinthine dramatic progression, Jigarthanda Double X takes the viewer on a dizzying roller-coaster trip – featuring movie stars and mountain tribes, elephants and evil poachers – that has to be experienced to be believed. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)