Kadal contains what is easily the most gruesome moment in the
Mani Ratnam oeuvre, and it occurs in an early scene about a dead
prostitute from a Christian fishing community. A few locals take the
corpse to church, where the priest refuses to permit this sinner’s
burial in a plot inside, and so they take the body to an open ground by
the sea and set about digging a grave. When done, they lower the body,
now inside an open coffin, and find a leg sticking out – that old joke
about the whore who couldn’t keep her legs crossed comes to mind – and
one of them sets about breaking the limb, in order to make it fit
inside. Over the sickening crunch of bones being broken, the director
seems to be telling those who keep moaning that he doesn’t make nice,
affecting, middle-class movies like
Mouna Raagam anymore exactly where to get off.
Ratnam spent the first part of his career becoming a legend, and now,
it appears, he’s working on his legacy