To watch films like these is to see cinema emerge not from the scene but as some haphazard, cumulative, misshapen thing. In picture, director Shankar and actor Ram Charan from the sets of the film.
| Photo Credit: BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
Riddle me this. You say you are making a film for a generation suckling for nourishment on Instagram reels. But you are also making a 2-hour, 45-minute-long film.
That is 165 minutes. Assuming an eye rests on a reel for 30 seconds, that is 330 reels. Assuming an eye rests on a reel for 10 seconds—more believable an assumption—that is 990 reels. For context, a study by MS University’s Department of Statistics found that Gen Z watches between 360 and 480 reels in two hours, daily. The scene moves at the pace of a swipe. The film’s motions are as much marching as jerking. These films do not end. Their battery runs out.
The director Shankar’s Game Changer and his pre-release statement about editing the film keeping in mind the hacked attention span of the audience has opened up new ways of engaging with cinema. The average duration of a shot in the film’s trailer is 1 second. What was once a tester has become a flipbook. The film is no different, playing out with the ever relentless, ever compelling ennui of a scrolling thumb. When the film broke for an interval, I felt a heaviness in my nose, as though I had been plummeted from a steep height and then retrieved.
How else would the body feel? Pushpa 2: The Rise began on a Japanese dock, and the speed with which the camera moved and the scenes cut, left one with a sneaking suspicion that the projectionist was speeding through the film.
Waiting for the men on the docks to speak to confirm if this was, in fact, true, I realised that what was considered a flaw was, in fact, a feature. The film flickered past. At 200 minutes, it had to be squeezed into its duration such that its closing credits scrolled at a pace unseen—you could not even make out the language in which the credits were written. The makers kneaded and knocked down the film so strangely, it was not even explained why the film began in Japan. A colleague thought it was a dream sequence. (They released a “reloaded” version of the film with a bonus 20 minutes that finally makes the connection.) There were logistical reasons behind this: a longer film means fewer screens in theaters, which means less profits. The form and finance of a film are so entwined, in such a deep dialectic, that it is hard to see Pushpa 2 as anything but a ravished, improvised commodity.
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Game Changer, like Pushpa 2, like KGF, is not cinema. It is post cinema. The whole point of a scene is to bring forward the next scene. You can feel it recede even as it states itself. The story of an election officer in Andhra Pradesh who takes on a corrupt politician as the elections come close—backstories involving the election officer, who was an IAS officer and, before that, a college stud, and his father being an activist-politician who is stampeded out flash by—is thrown around with side plots and meanderings of acid baths and mall bombs, adulterated rice, and hollowed mines. It is a rapturous placeholder for our attention, a fractured collection of moments that are strung together with such force, vitality, and velocity that they emerge, somehow, as one film. The world building is done by sweeping top shots. The speed is a clever masking of the logical free fall. If there is no time, no breath, no pause to even consider logic, or simple cause and effect, how can there be logical loopholes? If there is no one to watch a tree burning in the forest… the same conundrum.
The visuals—an anger meter that revs every time the hero grunts, only to be doused by love because what else are women but water thrown on fire—are Shankar-proofed. As in they exist in that hazy patch between rejoicing and recoiling.
The songs exist in their own multiverse of madness: there is a hemispherical city, for example, the camera gliding down the edges of that bowl towards the dancers having seizures in the centre. They do not sprout from the film as much as are yanked out. They do not return to the film as much as get plonked into it.
The duration of the film is wholly a function of the audience and their desire for a prolonged interaction with their hero. The darshan that the film affords its fandom cannot be touched by smartphones or reels. So, it is the style with which this darshan is offered that must be changed. Game Changer’s editor, Ruben, is incidentally also the scissor and tape behind Jawan, another film that felt like five films rammed into one singularity, so dense when it played out, it felt like it exploded, making the act of watching the film one of sifting through debris.
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Masala cinema has always had a fractured quality—the comedy scene, the love song, the fight sequence—that somehow comes together the way food in a messy thali slides into one palm and slurps into the mouth. This fracture became templated; films now demanded the comedian sidekick, the fair-skinned, naked-waisted heroine, the slow-motion muscularity. Shankar is at the forefront of that template.
But the fractures are too frequent, the jumps between the fault lines so wide, so frequent that the act of jumping becomes the act of moving forward. To watch films like these is to see cinema emerge not from the scene but as some haphazard, cumulative, misshapen thing.
Nothing endures. I look at the flaring of the hero’s coat in both Sivaji: The Boss (2007) and Game Changer and see how Shankar’s artistry has twisted in the intervening decades. In the former, he cuts to the same action from a different angle. A repetition of the moment that flashes one above the other. In Game Changer, it is the camera that zigs from one corner to the other to the other, until the vertigo is refashioned as valour. Post cinema is not cinema. It is the slippage of cinema, the slurring of cinema.
Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.
