Dhanush steers Vaathi to the shore with his swagger and moving performance

A teacher from a humble middle-class family serving in a deserted village school instills the significance of  education and one’s right to attain it — this makes for the skeletal plot of debutant director Venky Atluri’s film Vaathi. And, unsurprisingly, superstar Dhanush is the crowning jewel of this seen-before story.

Atluri — who has made his first Tamil film after three Telugu ones — has managed to harness Dhanush’s star-actor credentials to deliver a moving and engaging film.

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Vaathi — a Tamil terminology for ‘sir’ in English — taps into a topic that is still relevant years after India became an independent nation. How students from economically backward and marginalised communities struggle to access education.

The film opens with three young students wrestling with their grades and chance upon vintage video cassettes at a dilapidated shop that belonged to one of their grandfathers. They discover footage of someone teaching mathematics in a seemingly simpler manner. They decide to hunt the educator down to seek tuition classes. However, their search leads them to an IAS officer who looks nothing like the man in the video. But the government officer identifies the on-screen man as his former teacher and just then, the camera pans to a frame of ‘Bala sir’ hanging on the wall.

From hereon, the film moves back to the late ‘90s, and Balamurugan (Dhanush), a junior assistant maths teacher at Thirupathi Educational Institutions, steps in. And since it is the Tamil superstar, the introductory scene involves a well-choreographed action sequence.

In a bid to resurrect the government schools, the head of the educational institution and president of the private schools’ association, Srinivasa (Samuthirakani) deploys some teachers with poor or no track record and stops the government from implementing a ‘free education for all’ bill. But for him, education is a currency, and students its customers. “Only money can buy education,” he boastfully claims in one scene.

Balamurugan is sent to Sozhavaram, a small village on the Tamil Nadu-Andhra Pradesh border. For him — unaware of Srinivasa’s intentions — this presents an opportunity to prove his worth and advance his career further. But things are bleaker than he had imagined. Children don’t attend school in Sozhavaram as helping their families in menial labour is a way to make ends meet. From this point forth, the 140-minute film traces Balamurugan’s struggle to get the children back in school and Srinivasa’s schemes to keep high-quality education restricted to the affluent class.

There are several touching scenes wherein Dhanush and the screenplay shine. Keeping in the tradition of many mainstream Tamil films in the recent past, Vaathi addresses caste as a social barrier to accessing even fundamental rights like education. In one telling scene, a group of students refuses to sit next to the other bunch because of their caste identity.

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Balamurugan teaches different topics to each group turn by turn and asks the two to prepare for a test that would have questions on both matters. Perplexed by what he said, the students wonder how they would prepare if they have been only taught one of the two topics. “You have a need for me that’s why you don’t bother about caste,” says Balamurugan while emphasising the importance of learning, which ranks above any societal differences.

The climax disappoints. It seems like what it built up for its entire runtime, the final few scenes could not sustain the momentum.

You may cough over scenes wherein the humble maths teacher catapults into an action hero and beats down a dozen goons. But Dhanush impresses in emotional and dramatic scenes. The remaining cast comprising Samuthirakani, Samyuktha, Tanikella Bharani, and Aadukalam Naren play their parts well. However, the film would have been more effective had it cut down the length and tightened the screenplay a little. Oftentimes, it tries to make the same point that it made two scenes before.

All in all, Dhanush steers Vaathi to the shore with his swagger and moving performance.

(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)