The premise

In Kottukkaali, which is set in a small village near Madurai, we meet Meena (Anna Ben) whose family believes she is ‘possessed’ and is all set to take her to a shaman to drive away the evil spirit. They pack themselves into an auto for the journey and the group led by Meena’s fiancé, her maternal uncle Pandi (Soori), head out on this trip. Meena’s angry family thinks she has been possessed by her lover, who they believe is from a lower caste; this road movie takes us through Meena’s journey.

PS Vinothraj is a master storyteller. who has supreme control over his craft and the characters he presents to us on screen. Meena is someone, who has just one dialogue in the film and her entire story is told through her expressions and emotions. For her, silence is power, and through this she retreats into a world that no one else can break into. She is trapped and the director depicts this using the rooster that thinks it roams free yet it is caught in a trap.

On the other hand, Pandi is a typical, petty yet aggressive, entitled male who epitomises patriarchy and the belief that women are objects that are owned. Caste plays a key role here as well as regressive beliefs that keep women in check. Unfortunately, the women also perpetuate these regressive beliefs because they don’t know any better or anything different. We see how the men think they are all-knowing and can’t get a simple thing done, like deal with the fly, and how the women are smarter by comparison.

The performances

Anna Ben and Soori have lived out their roles in this film and their performances need to be applauded. They are the heart and soul of this film. Soori, who started off as a comedian and proved his mettle with director Vetrimaaran’s Viduthalai, has shown once again that he is a highly talented performer, who needs to be given the right role.

Kottukkaali is an experience and not just a film

Visually too, the film is a piece of art as Vinothraj takes us on a beautiful road trip with a family steeped in regressive, patriarchal beliefs from a small village in rural Tamil Nadu. The director’s writing is impeccable, while the shots and cinematography by B Sakthivel and editing by Ganesh Siva is top-notch.

Tamil star Sivakarthikeyan and producer Kalai Arasu must be congratulated for choosing to back this gem by Vinothraj, who has proved that he is an extremely talented director, whose best work is yet to come. Kottukkaali is an experience and not just a film.

Published 23 August 2024, 22:19 IST

The momentum of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign helped push the ratings for the Democratic National Convention past the Republican festivities for former President Trump.

Nielsen data showed that Harris’ well-received acceptance speech was watched by 29 million viewers across 15 networks.

The figure is 14% higher than for Trump’s speech, which scored 25.4 million viewers July 19. Harris also drew substantially more than the 24.6 million viewers who watched Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the convention in 2020 and about the same as the 29.8 million viewers who tuned in to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Harris helped herself by keeping her speech to 37 minutes. Trump’s 90-minute-plus stem-winder went on well past midnight on the East Coast.

The speech caps a successful week for the Democratic National Convention, which topped the audience for the GOP’s gathering every night this week.

Harris being thrust to the top of the ticket after President Biden decided to end his reelection campaign on July 21 — one of the wildest political twists in U.S. history — has energized Democratic voters who were unhappy to have a rematch of the 2020 campaign.

Harris used the speech to reintroduce herself to the public, going heavy on biographical details and her work as a prosecutor in California.

Harris may have also gotten a boost from false rumors that music superstars Beyoncé and Taylor Swift were coming to the United Center in Chicago to perform at the event.

The rumblings — which tabloid news website TMZ reported as fact in the case of Beyoncé — were repeated by several network anchors.

The Harris campaign is likely to feel encouraged by how her speech outperformed Trump’s in a number of cities in the swing states where the election will be decided in the electoral college.

Harris averaged 50% more viewers than Trump in Philadelphia, 36% more in Detroit, 31% more in Raleigh, N.C., and 21% more in Atlanta, according to Nielsen.

Harris underperformed Trump by 10% in Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention was held.

MSNBC, the home team channel for liberal voters, saw its largest audience ever for a Democratic convention, averaging 6 million Thursday and 5.2 million viewers over four nights.

CNN was second for the week with 3.6 million viewers, followed by ABC (3.3 million), NBC (2.5 million), CBS (2.2 million) and Fox News (2.4 million).

MSNBC also had the most viewers in the 25-to-54 age group most coveted by advertisers, edging CNN by around 10,000 viewers in the category — a first.

CNN had won the demographic audience segment by much wider margins in 2016 and 2020.

Fox News, which injects conservative, pro-Trump commentary into its coverage, made a concerted effort to book more Democratic politicians this year — four times as many as it did in 2016. But the network has never been a first stop for the party’s conventions.

After Harris completed her speech, Trump called into Fox News to criticize it. Several times he pressed the keys on his phone as he ranted to anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.

(Fox News was the most watched network for the Republican convention by a wide margin, averaging 6.6 million viewers over the four nights and 9.8 million viewers on the final session.)

Harris’ speech was probably watched by millions more people on streaming platforms.

Fox Corp.’s LiveNOW, an ad-supported free streaming site that presents raw news video without any commentary, peaked at 117,000 concurrent viewers Thursday, and 75,000 throughout the week with continuous convention coverage.

CNN does not reveal data for its live stream on parent company Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max platform. But the network said the four days of the convention rank in the top 10 in daily usage since the service was launched last fall.