Kanguva teaser, trailer and songs launch: Everybody loves everybody else

Suriya Sivakumar, Disha Patani, Bobby Deol, K. E. Gnanavel Raja, Jayantilal Gada and Devi Sri Prasad was the quorum this afternoon at the Fun Republic, Andheri, Auditorium 2. Director Siva was busy giving finishing touches to the film, and excused himself, but Suriya said that he was extremely excited at the Mumbai event, but just could not fly down. But they were nowhere to be seen when I arrived, horribly late for a 12.30 event. One of the PR agency boys made light of it, “Sir, you are not late. They are.” But they came, they spoke, they spread love, hugged and hugged, and reminded you that the film is releasing on 14 November.

Kanguva, however, is about anything but love (!). The cast expressed amazement that a director, whose primary concern was always to make his artistes comfortable, could make such a gory, lavish, revenge drama. Producer K. E. Gnanavel Raja admitted that the film became too big for its budget halfway through, and had it not been for the funds pumped in by Jayantilal Gada, it would have been difficult to realise his dream. The film needed 170 days of shooting. It was revealed that Gada has been part of…hold your breath…3,000 films, in some capacity or the other. Now that is some record that the completely unassuming man should be rewarded for.

It would not require rocket science to guess that the film is about an epic combat between Suriya and Bobby Deol, a revenge drama. (Do they make any other kind of big films these days)? Bobby is a real-life Suriya fan, and was excited when the producers approached him to play the arch-villain, but things did not work out in the first meeting. Confident that everything would be ironed out in the second meeting, Bobby saw his foresight come true. Suriya and Bobby now bond as brothers, and whenever they meet, the main subject they talk about is each other’s family. Most of the personalities on stage, including director Siva, have worked together earlier. And Kanguva was signed before Bobby’s Animal. Though the teaser, trailer and two songs gave the feel that it is a tribal war subject, but then a third song, ‘Yolo’, brought us back to urban India, via an item number.

Music has been composed by Devi Sri Prasad (DSP), and has a snappy, catchy appeal, while doing justice to the expansive scale of the film. But the Hindi lyrics, fitted to the Tamil original, sounded patchy. Shot entirely in natural light, with apparently no CGI, the film seems to have been blessed by natural elements, like wind water and vegetation. If the number of bodies and body parts, the weapons and contraptions, seen in the sneak show are any indication of things to come, a census might be needed to compute the mayhem let loose in the film proper.

Suriya revealed that he loves Mumbai, and complimented Disha (wearing a teaser trailer top, which was lop-sided, with a method) for getting her Tamil lines right. Suriya’s wife is from Mumbai and his two children study here. Looking just about slim, sporting spectacles, speaking with a normal, sensitive voice, dressed modestly, Suriya looked a very far cry from his screen incarnation. K. E. Gnanavel Raja has been a distributor before turning producer. The web tells us that Gnanavel means wisdom. And what does DSP mean? Well, for some, it is a whiskey brand, for here is the music maestro Devi Sri Prasad. Suriya went gaga over his contribution to the film, and said that his music was like gold dust sprinkled on to the film. The two even sang a couple of lines for the benefit of the fans, who were present in no small number.

Bobby reiterated that film-making is the same down south, as it is in Mumbai. Suriya candidly stated that when it came to SuperStars, he was nowhere in the running. There was only one SUPERSTAR down South: Rajanikanth.