Anbe Diana Held Its Own Against Jana Nayagan, and Grew

Anbe Diana closed its second weekend still adding shows, and on Monday the team behind it gathered in Chennai to thank the people who put it there.

The film opened on 17 July alongside Jana Nayagan, the kind of release date most small films spend months trying to dodge. Two weeks on, the most concrete line of the afternoon came from a man who had never released a film before. Vamsi, who handled the Chennai distribution, said his entire investment had come back inside the second week.

He has spent twenty years in shipping and logistics and had wanted to move into distribution for a long time. He watched a preview of Anbe Diana, liked it enough to tell producer Yuvaraj Ganesan on the spot that this was the film he wanted to begin with, and went ahead even as friends asked why he would step out of a settled business for this. “The decision I took with confidence has been proved right,” he said, adding that the film was still running to good houses with big titles all around it.

Era Saravanan, whose Era Entertainment joined Million Dollar Studios and Neo Castle Creations on the film, took the Jana Nayagan question head on and threw it out. Sharing a release with a film that size was never a problem, he said, because it turned the fortnight into a carnival, and plenty of people who could not get a ticket for one walked into the other. “We didn’t defeat Jana Nayagan. We all won together,” he said, sending his congratulations to that team too.

Pari Elavazhagan, who wrote, directed and stars in the film, kept his speech almost entirely on other people. He reserved a special thanks for Vijay Sethupathi, who heard the story early, told him Million Dollar Studios would be the right partner for where he was in his career, and then spoke well of him to Yuvaraj Ganesan. He also thanked the press for staying with Jama, his first film, which took its time reaching people.

What he owed his producer, he said, was freedom. Not one line and not one scene was ever questioned. “For a director, a producer who trusts his writing completely is a blessing,” he said. He also answered the question he keeps getting asked, which is why the film is not called Anbe Magic. He wanted the word to land inside the film rather than on the poster, and he was confident even while writing that audiences would carry it out of the theatre themselves. They have.

Ramya Ranganathan, who plays Magic, said the app she used most last week was not Instagram or WhatsApp but BookMyShow, refreshing it to watch shows fill up. What has stayed with her is being called by her character’s name rather than her own. A little girl ran up to her and said, “Hi Magic, you really look magical on screen.” Another child waved goodbye with a “Bye Magic.” She has also been told, more than once, that she speaks Tamil beautifully for an Anglo-Indian girl, which she takes as the compliment it is meant to be.

She thanked Pari for handing her the part, costume designer Abi Nandhini for clothes that did half the work of building the character, and Roja, Chetan and Denver for the days on set. Watching the film with an audience, she said, and hearing them laugh and clap through it, is something she will not forget.

Yuvaraj Ganesan let every technician speak before he did, and said that was deliberate. A film’s success belongs to hundreds of people the audience never sees, from lightmen to production assistants, and he wanted their afternoon on the microphone before his. He said he had believed in Pari from the first narration and would happily do it again.

For Sathya Karikalan, Anbe Diana is Neo Castle Creations’ first production. She came to it from the education sector, where she had been working with students preparing for competitive exams, and described Saravanan as the person who did more than point at a door. “Some people show you a door, some open it. Very few take you into the world behind it.” She was equally warm about Million Dollar Studios backing a first-time banner, and about the way Pari folded love, equality and personal freedom into a comedy without lecturing anyone.

The lyricists gave the afternoon its best running joke and its best observation. Mohan Rajan, on his fourth film with the banner, pointed out that every Million Dollar Studios release has been about a different kind of love: Good Night between husband and wife, Lover between a couple, Tourist Family between strangers, and now Anbe Diana across caste and religion. He also let slip that if you put Pari and composer Bharath Sankar in a room together, the conversation turns into Goundamani dialogues within minutes. Bakkiyam Sankar said the film’s real strength is that it is set in North Chennai and contains neither a knife nor a drop of blood, and Muthamil, who wrote Thoduvanam, said hearing it come back to him in Bharath Sankar’s tune was the happiest part of the year.

Bharath Sankar returned the compliment about his director’s writing for women, saying Magic is built with the same spine that Jama’s heroine had. Shelley Calist and editor Partha both noted this was the first success meet of their careers, and Shelley said the distributor’s news about rising show counts was the best thing a cinematographer could hear. Art director Mahendran said he never once ran into the usual friction between producer and crew on this film.

Paritabangal Gopi, whose performance has become one of the film’s most shared talking points, turned his speech into a straight thank you to the press. A good small film lives or dies on whether the media decides to carry it, he said, and this one was carried. He wanted to pull people off their phones and back into a theatre, and enough of them came. The credit for all of it, he insisted, belongs to Pari’s writing.

Sudarsan, who has hosted plenty of these events and was speaking at one as an actor for the first time, noted that Sasikumar’s line about set property from the trailer launch is still doing rounds online and pulled its own crowd to the film.

Anbe Diana is in its third week in cinemas, with screens and show counts going up rather than down.