Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Super Deluxe
2019 · Thiagarajan Kumararaja · Super Deluxe on Sightlines
A man is dead on the bedroom floor and nobody screams.
The wife stands over him. Her husband of a few days comes home to this. Behind them the wall is one flat, undiluted color, the kind of wall that belongs in a furniture catalogue, and the camera sits square in front of the scene and declines to move. It doesn't push in for a reaction. It doesn't back off out of tact. It holds, frontal and deadpan, while two people work out the logistics of a corpse. You laugh. Then you stop laughing. The shot never changed.
That unmoving frontal tableau, held over a block of saturated color until comedy and dread curdle inside it, is Thiagarajan Kumararaja's specific invention in Super Deluxe. Most directors use the cut to tell you how to feel. He removes the cut and makes you decide.
Deleuze gives that trick a name. In what he calls the small form of the action-image, you get the gesture before you get the situation: a man scrubs a floor, and you infer backwards what happened in the room. The gesture is an index, a clue pointing at a situation you can't see whole. Kumararaja works the rarer variant Deleuze calls the index of equivocity, where one gesture fits two incompatible situations at once and nothing in the film arbitrates. Hauling a body is farce. Hauling a body is horror. Yuvan Shankar Raja's score, cheerfully wrong for whatever is on screen, refuses to break the tie. That strain of holding both readings in one shot is the film's basic sensation, and it's why the tonal swings never feel like the film losing its nerve.
Four stories, one sweltering Chennai day. A wife with a dead lover. A parent, Shilpa, coming home to a wife and a small son. Four boys and a screen, on which one of them finds his friend's mother. A tsunami survivor who came back with God. For most of the running time they barely touch.
Deleuze's account of postwar cinema is that the big classical machine broke: perceive a situation, act, change it. He listed the symptoms, and two of them are this film's blueprint. The dispersive situation, where a film carries many characters and no center (his example was Altman). And weak links, where causality slackens and the cutting stops explaining itself. The dossier's phrase for Kumararaja's editing is that it withholds connective tissue. That is the thing exactly.
Why bother with the lens? Because the standard line on interwoven-destiny films is that everything is connected, and Deleuze lets you notice the opposite. What's loosened here is the link between what a person can see and what they can do. Each strand still runs a perfectly good little genre engine, a lie to maintain, a body to move. But no character's action can reach the whole they're inside. The biggest events in their lives arrive from outside their competence entirely.
So if nobody in the film can see the whole, somebody has to. That's you. Deleuze calls this the relation-image: the meaning isn't in any shot, it's in relations a viewer holds across shots. The film rhymes its strands thematically long before they touch literally, and the rhyme does the work causality used to do. And one object keeps recurring until it becomes what Deleuze means by a symbol, the thing that condenses the relation organizing everything: the television. A TV is a machine for looking at strangers and deciding about them. Every plot here is someone turned into an image and sentenced for it. A woman in a film. A parent read on sight. A survivor's testimony. One of the sets is broken, which is about right.
The color works the same argument in another material. Deleuze's affective color doesn't describe an object, it absorbs the whole scene into a single quality, and Super Deluxe comes in bold monochromatic washes with the strands separated by palette. That lacquered, poster-bright surface tuned against sordid events isn't decoration. The title is the joke. Everything gorgeous on the outside tells you nothing true about the inside, and the film delivers that demand through its surfaces rather than in dialogue.
Shilpa carries it in the body. Late Deleuze writes about the gest, a posture in which a body exposes the social theatre it has been placed in. Vijay Sethupathi, a leading male star, plays her with a restraint that declines both caricature and pathos, and the performance is built from how she stands, how she enters rooms that have already decided about her. The film's case for non-judgment is never argued. It's held.
Then, after two hours of realist mosaic, science fiction. Deleuze has a name for an image that confronts thought with what thought can't accommodate: the outside, the unthought. The finale literalizes cosmic scale and leaves human moral certainty looking tiny. It should be a cheat and isn't, because a coincidence machine can only be settled by something larger than the people caught in it. Magnolia bought the permission with its frog rain. Kumararaja spends it.
The debts are precise. Pulp Fiction supplies the rhythm of banter cut against sudden brutality, which is the equivocity engine itself. Short Cuts supplies the grammar of separate lives in one city held in simultaneous suspension. Amores Perros gives the triptych converging on a single traumatic node, Babel the ripple of one event across separated strands, 21 Grams the withholding-and-reveal sequencing that keeps fractured fates legible. The writers' room, Kumararaja with Nalan Kumarasamy, Mysskin and Neelan K. Sekar, is audible in the result: four voices, four strands.
What it sent forward is harder to see but larger. Kumararaja's debut had been a cult object that lost money. Super Deluxe took the same pitch-black sensibility, got stars to stake their images on it, and came out a National Award winner. For the wave of Indian directors building dark absurdist hybrids against formula, that conversion is the transmissible thing: proof that the formal risk and the marquee fit in one film.
It leaves a real question open. A plot is a judging machine. It sorts people into the endings they've earned. What is a plot for once you've decided not to judge anyone? Super Deluxe builds the most elaborate fate machine it can and then refuses to let it hand down a verdict.
Watch it again and watch the walls. Notice where the televisions are. Notice, in every frame, who is doing the looking.
Concepts in play
- index-of-equivocity — The camera holds frontally on absurd or grim tableaux with deadpan steadiness so humor and horror curdle in one shot (the corpse-disposal bedroom), with Yuvan Shankar Raja's deliberately incongruous score refusing to resolve which situation the gesture belongs to.
- dispersive-situation — Four self-contained storylines — the wife with a dead lover, Shilpa's return, the schoolboys and the pornographic film, the tsunami survivor turned zealot — braided across one Chennai day with no single protagonist or center.
- weak-links — "The cutting withholds connective tissue, trusting the audience to hold parallel threads in suspension"; thematic rhymes accumulate before the literal intersections arrive, so coherence comes from juxtaposition rather than linear causal momentum.
- relation-image (mental-image) — The film is "an editing feat before it is anything else": four strands cross-cut so that the connective relations are held by the viewer, not stated in any image — the audience as the knowing third that assembles the architecture of chance.
- symbol — "Television sets recur as objects and motifs" (including a broken TV) across a film in which every strand turns on someone being turned into an image and judged for it — the mother inside the pornographic film, Shilpa read on sight.
- affective colour — Intensely saturated primaries, controlled color separation between the four strands, interiors lit in bold monochromatic washes, and a lacquered poster-bright surface held in ironic tension with sordid events — the "super deluxe" surface as formal argument.
- the-gest — Vijay Sethupathi as Shilpa, a transgender woman returning to a wife and young son, calibrated to avoid both caricature and sentimentality — the film's ethic of non-judgment carried by bearing and posture inside frames that keep trying to make a spectacle of her.
- the outside / the unthought — The late turn to overt science-fiction/fantasy imagery that literalizes the film's questions about cause, fate and cosmic scale, converting a realist ensemble drama into a fable about how little human moral certainty weighs against the size of the universe.