The long awaited theatrical release of Sudha Kongara’s Parasakthi, which had to make 20 cuts to get the okay from the CBFC and was also embroiled in a dispute over the title with Vijay Antony, is finally starting to show off its political muscle through being picked up by television. And it’s no wonder – after its debut on Zee 5 last Friday, the 7th of February, the film picked up 100 million viewing minutes in its first weekend, which is no small feat. The results of Sivakarthikeyan’s big film at the Box Office over Pongal were pretty unusual – despite costing a whopping 200 crores to make, the movie still raked in 100 crores worldwide. And it seems family audiences only started getting into it once it was available for home viewing, which suggests the digital hype is really paying off.
The 1965 anti-Hindi protests provide the backdrop for Parasakthi, which stars Sivakarthikeyan in a new role that sees him having to dial it back a notch from his usual comedic style – instead, we see him using a more measured performance to bring this character to life – a student leader who finds himself at the forefront of the collapse of the government. Sreeleela makes her Tamil debut with a bang, showing off some real acting chops in a performance that’s a far cry from the “cute” roles she’s played in her Telugu films – she really gets to grips with the intense ideological battles that take place on screen. And then at the very end, Rana Daggubati and Basil Joseph turn up and bring that all important “Pan-Indian” vibe that the producers were hoping to get – although the movie did face some real challenges getting a decent showing in the Telugu regions because of all the other stuff that was going on at the time.
Transition is hard, let’s be honest, and it’s been causing a right old headache for the people behind Parasakthi. Social media has brought the “Golti” slur controversy back to the forefront of the conversation, which had first kicked up a fuss when the film was released in Tamil. Now that it’s up on OTT platforms, a whole new generation of viewers is discovering the original audio track and it’s just causing more trouble. Red Giant Movies and Zee 5 tried to mitigate things with some high quality dubbing, but the fact remains that some of the dialogue is still pretty cringeworthy and that’s just making people more and more angry – we can see the #BoycottParasakthi hashtags trending on social media, for example. And it’s all just getting a bit too heated now – people are really loudly disagreeing with one another, and it’s turning out to be a real ratings winner for the show.
Sivakarthikeyan’s 25th film is doing pretty well for itself through the Parasakthi project, which is a real tactical success story. The film shows just how much people are still into historical Tamil films, despite all the fuss and fan disputes that said the film would fail miserably in the Pongal competition against Vijay’s Jana Nayagan. And because GV Prakash Kumar’s 100th musical score is just so good, we can expect this film to be top of the Zee 5 charts for the whole of February – it’s really one of the standout additions to the platform in 2023.
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