And, yes, Madam has porn. But, surprise: When Egg Muffin and his pals start to watch it, one of them becomes enraged. That’s his mother on screen.
This sets off a chain of mostly comic events that are, by turns, ominous, bloody and cosmic. And that’s just one plot strand. In another, a married woman’s ex-boyfriend dies in her bed, setting off a chain of comic, ominous events. In a third, a little boy pines for his father to return, and the father does — but now transformed into a woman. (Another chain ensues.)
Director Thiagarajan Kumararaja, who also had a hand in the script, takes his time setting all these shaggy, laconic storylines in motion. Part of the movie’s pleasure in its early going is figuring out whether and how they will all merge.
Another pleasure is visual. Colors pop off Kumararaja’s palette (the cinematographers are P.S. Vinod and Nirav Shah), and there’s always something to look at in his Chennai. This isn’t gleaming, ascendant India; it’s the lived-in one, crumbling around the edges, a little romanticized but recognizable in its narrow alleys and concrete stairwells and power outages.
“Super Deluxe,” Kumararaja’s second feature, has been a while in coming after “Aaranya Kaandam” (2010), which was a critic’s darling. No wonder — Kumararaja’s work is stylish and wry, with an indie-cinephile sensibility. (It’s no accident that “Kill Bill” and “Gangs of Wasseypur” posters hang on the DVD store’s wall.)
Part of that sensibility is a frankness about sex that’s still unusual in Indian movies, especially commercial ones. Though nothing explicit is shown, all the storylines in “Super Deluxe” have a little sexual motor, and there’s plenty of frank, off-color language, too.
Kumararaja also elicits some wonderfully deadpan performances from his actors. The teenage boys have a believably nerdy-raffish rapport, and Samantha Akkineni, as the cheating wife, builds a character of unexpected depths.
“Super Deluxe,” though, runs three hours, and Kumararaja loses his way in the draggy, overlong second act. It includes not one, but two drawn-out scenes of threatened rape. (We know the ugly outcome of one, though it happens off camera.)
That these scenes, with their leering Bollywood-ish villain, verge on the cartoonish doesn’t save them. They’re part of a tonal problem — what was mostly delicate and offbeat tips into something cruder and messier. They also serve as a reminder: Cinematic sexual liberation for (and by) men can be punishing for women.
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‘Super Deluxe’
Not rated. In Tamil, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 56 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.