Director: Chachi
Cast: Vaibhav Reddy, Pallak Lalwani, Sathish, Radha Ravi
Chachi’s Sixer, starring Vaibhav and Pallak Lalwani, suffers from every Tamil cinema ailment that we thought we had left behind. First, its plot hinges on a disability – night blindness – and taking the mickey out of it.
The Tamil cinema form of night blindness is too specific – it doesn’t follow actual medical conditions. Adi (Vaibhav) simply turns blind when the clock strikes 6 PM. It has the quintessential TASMAC song soon after the girl rejects our film’s hero. It has a heroine who doesn’t have a mind of her own and an actress who cannot utter a note in Tamil. It has Sathish as the hero’s friend; his comedy, by now, works like this – he arrives at the sets of the film, greets everybody, tries to crack a joke or two at the expense of some of the people around and the crew simply films this.
In fact, the whole of Sixer follows this principle. There is no writing involved here. You cannot write any of this stuff. Adi waits for his friend to pick him up from the beach because his bike broke down and it is past 6. There is a protest happening at the beach related to a sexual harassment case against a popular businessman-politician (this is constantly referenced with comic effects). Our hero’s earphones are the noise-canceling ones of such epic proportions that he never realises that he is sitting right in the middle of the protest and his inactivity is misconstrued as his staunch support of the protest.
Can you imagine putting this on paper? Even my description is too awkward to put into words. And then the gall to film something as unwieldy and unfunny as this. This is the whole film. Any self-respecting writer would burn the computer he used to write this. What about the producer, you ask?
And then, we come to newer Tamil cinema ailments. A homophobic joke here, a joke ridiculing the Me-Too movement there. But the bigger issue with Sixer and Chachi? Meme makers and people fascinated by memes consider themselves filmmakers. That’s what Sixer is.
Recommended
Cliched complaints are “this could have worked as a short film” or “this could have been a school-level skit”. But Sixer is worse. It is a meme that you could have conjured up in five minutes. Its whole premise is based on a Goundamani reference. It makes further references to Thalapathi, Indru Poi Naalai Vaa and Singaravelan. There is also a scene from Perarasu’s Thiruvannamalai, featuring the director. Perarasu. The guy who’s never made a good film in his life. He’d shed tears of blood watching Sixer.
A host of recent directors has tried this – piggyback on famous jokes, film references and nostalgia. Some of them have worked. But a meme as a film is really pushing it.
*****
The Sixer review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have any commercial relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.