7G Rainbow Colony
Cast: Ravi Krishna, Sonia Agarwal, Shalini, Vijayan; Director: Selvaraghavan; Music: Yuvan Shankar Raja



This requires a prelude. 7G Rainbow Colony is not a new movie. It came, ran for more than 100 days and went. As I have mentioned in the past, I have been avoiding Tamil movies altogether because of lack of talent and content and hence did not muster the courage for 7G. My friend, an ardent fan of this director kept pressurising me to watch it. The enforcement became so strong that he procured a Singapore DVD. I kept it with me for a week and finally it happened yesterday.

I was too scared to talk to my friend, so decided to write here. Those non-Tamils, please bear with me. Or read on to know where Tamil film industry is heading currently.

As a disclaimer, I started watching the movie with as much unbias as I can muster and more so my objective was to figure out what is so 'cult' about this film.

The result, I must humbly say is extremely disappointing. The movie rattles on and on and never seems to end and when it does it leaves a great sensation of relief that it finally has. This is perhaps the longest three hours I have spent in my life.

I don't want to reveal the story. But some details The movie is about what I have been accusing the Tamil industry for. A lower-middle class below-average looking Tamil guy with 12 arrears, with absolutely no aim in life, who steals money to drink and smoke and unbrazenly gyrates inside a movie hall. Some samples of his miscreant activities: using a cycle key, he scratches all the cars parked in the movie hall, he spits on the girl's boyfriend for questioning his nuisance inside the hall, he tries to slap his dad for questioning why he failed in his finals and, drinks himself silly, pukes in the middle of the road because his girlfriend told him to study.

And he meets a fair, beautiful, intelligent north Indian girl who is good disciplined and studies well. Alas, his life changes. And how! She, who despises him and suddenly gets into a confused-love-or-friendship dilemmas and tries to refine him. In the process there are some pearls of wisdom like 'When you make love to me, even if there's a hint of lust, I'd think you don't love me truly. It must be pure love and not lust'. Can the director explain how this can be done? The movie is full of such enlightenments.

The jarring aspects are when the rowdy-loser suddenly gets a Buddha-type awakening and speaks to the girl for five continuous minutes on why he's doing what he is doing. The reasons are easy to figure out. His dad has always yelled at him, beaten him up and never bothered to sit with him to counsel. Well, my nagging question is what happens when the girl sits with him and counsels? He still goes around drinking and puking and mouthing expletives. And there some serious plot-holes like, the in a momentary decision, the girl tells him let's break our contact and continue with our studies and career and meet after two years. But from the next frame they continue to court. Then why was that advise?

These are notwithstanding, my first problem is with the intention of the director. The nuisance activities of the youth are quite elaborately depicted and his change (if anything) is just skimmed through. Those awakenings are always split-second ones. So is the objective is to show how rubbish their activities are or is it celebrate that. Someone remarked that usually Tamil movies show these low-class rowdy-characters behaviour as heroic. 7G alone has managed to show it without celebrating it. I doubt. it. As a matter of fact, I don't remember any other movie where such activities are shown so elaborately and graphically.

My second problem with this movie is the voyeuristic tendencies. The camera freely and unabashedly scans various yet strategic parts of all the women in the movie. Especially on the female-lead. I'm sure those sequences must have been welcomed cheerfully in the theatres with roaring applause.

To me 7G is a movie about a dark-loser aspiring for a fair-beautiful and intelligent girl. Just like every second Tamil movie is. I was told that there are millions of such men all over Tamil Nadu (perhaps even India). And this movie caters to them. If it is no, this movie doesn't do much except titilating them and feeding their failed esteems. And making money in the bargain.

This movie can be about identifying the talent of an individual or refining a youth. The girl suddenly discovers this guy's interest in automobiles. This again comes as an enlightenment and nowhere in the movie it was shown before. But such refining-a-lose-guy movies are dime a dozen in Tamil and some were really good movies. Bharatiraja handled it so delicately in Kadalora Kavithaigal (Poems by the beach), and a lesser-known Thiramai (Talent) is purely about reforming drug-addicted bad-childhood kids into realising their real talent. Even Rajinikanth's Nallavanukku Nallavan (Good guy for good men) is a much better presentation of this theme. In 7G, this is hardly focused and is also underminded by some really insipid performances.

A letter to editor in Outlook called 7G a new wave movie. If it is so, I'm extremely content with ancient masalas. Give me a Baasha anyday.