One moment, they are on a bike, the heroine shooting a fond gaze at the hero. The next thing you see, the bike is gone, so is the road, and they are standing atop a hill. The hero leaps with a flourish and the heroine twirls in a flowery gown, some thousand feet up in the air.
Low-altitude representations of romance? No, that’s too convenient. But for the first-time viewer, never exposed to such songs in Tamil films, the experience can be jolting.
Critically acclaimed films either don’t feature songs or consciously try aligning music with the plot. However, Tamil film songs of the type described above—which feature shifting locales & sprawling landscapes—are ‘written and composed irrespective of the filmic content’ in which they are placed. They run the risk of seeming irrelevant and isolated, out-of-place to the uninitiated eye.
But there is a framework that could help analyse how these songs succeed or fail in creating an immersive experience for the audience. And it draws from the writing style of two-thousand-year-old – Tamil love poems.
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