MS Bhaskar Wept Recording the Voice-Over for Promise

A voice-over session is usually a quiet, technical afternoon. The actor reads the lines, the engineer cleans the levels, everyone goes home. That is not how it went when MS Bhaskar walked in to narrate Promise. The National Award winner watched the footage cued up for him, and by his own account the scenes got the better of him. The team says he finished the session in tears and full of praise for Arunkumar Sekaran, who both directs the film and plays its lead.

Promise builds itself around a single idea, the weight of a person’s word. Arunkumar reaches all the way back to Gandhi’s autobiography, the one literally titled an experiment with truth, and to the older story of Harishchandra who held to his promise through ruin, to argue that truth-keeping is stitched into the culture rather than bolted on as a moral. The film puts an ordinary man through that test. At some point, the pitch goes, everyone faces a moment where the honest choice costs them something, and the drama lives in what the hero does when his turn comes.

The project is billed as based on a true story, and it was shot away from the usual city backdrops, across Vellore, Hosur and Krishnagiri in the northern belt of Tamil Nadu. Arunkumar leads opposite Nathiya Somu, with Sujan, Amrish, Pratap, Gokul, Sundaravel, Rajkumar and Kalaivani filling out the cast. Vinoth Kumar is behind the camera, Saravana Deepan scores it, Bala writes the songs and Sriram Vignesh cuts it. N. Nagaraj presents the film, produced jointly by Sangamithran Production and Amman Arts Creations.

The film has been picking up signal-boosts from people whose word carries in the industry. Director Cheran and cinematographer-actor Natty unveiled the first look, and the trailer has run up several lakh views on AP International’s channel, which has done most of the work of introducing a no-star film to an audience that had no reason to know it yet. Bhaskar’s reaction is the latest of those, and the most useful, because it is the kind a marketing team cannot manufacture.

Promise releases in theatres on June 26 under the Action Reaction banner, a Jenish presentation. The pitch is unambiguous about the audience it wants: families, in a hall, ready to be moved. Whether the film earns the tears it has already collected from one veteran is the test that opens on the 26th.

For the earlier launch, see our report on the trailer and audio reveal for Arunkumar Sekaran’s debut.