I have always been intrigued by the chilling effect
of Virumandi theme, which plays in its entirety in the opening credits of the
film. When I watched it the first time, on the first day of the release, music
in the opening credits got drowned in the euphoric noise of the Kamal Hassan
fans in the cinema hall. I did sense that something strange, unusual, utterly
original was playing underneath the imaginative title cards, but couldn’t catch
the actual theme. It wasn’t until I watched the film again on Television that I
heard the piece properly.
I ripped the music from the bootlegged copy of the
film and added it to my Ilaiyaraaja score collection. I have heard the theme many
times since then, but didn’t fully comprehend the intricacies in the
orchestration that caused the chilling effect, until one day in the recent
past.
The theme is orchestrated very precisely to evoke the
overall morbid tone of the film, and also to suggest the film’s ambitious Rashomon-like
structure. The narrative of the film offers two different perspectives on one
incident — the truth narrated by the protagonist and the twisted version of it by
the antagonist.
In the theme music, the two versions of the story are
underlined by two layers in the instrumentation, in which two different instruments
from strings family, play the same motif with a slight and yet acute variation
in tone. A violin pronounces the theme with a dash of naiveté in its shrill
registers, and underneath, a cello renders the same melody with a cunning intonation in its
deep bass registers. Both are mixed in a way as if the cunning cello is snaking
around and squeezing the neck of the innocent violin. The two layers are wound so
tightly close in the final mix that the gap is ingeniously disguised; it isn’t
immediately evident, in the same way the truth isn’t in the two versions of the
story while they are being narrated. Later, a tender flute also joins the
layers of strings, duplicating the main theme, probably to suggest the plight
of Virumandi’s beloved Annalakshmi, the poor victim of the bloody war.
Astounding!
Other layers too are in the theme precisely for
reasons pertaining the events and ideas within the film. The eerie chorus and tribal
rhythms suggest the barbaric brutality of the violence in the key incident of
the film.
Furthermore, all of these layers are magnificently knit together with musical integrity of an absolute piece of music written for its own sake. It would work just as fine and satisfying as a standalone mood piece for a listener, who hasn’t seen the film, or isn’t cognizant of the film’s complex themes and ideas expressed in its orchestration.
Numero Uno, indeed.