Suriya takes Vishwanath & Sons home to Coimbatore

Suriya spent every school summer of his childhood in Coimbatore, and on Sunday evening he stood on a stage there and read the route back out from memory: away from the railway station, through Sulur, Kasi Gounder Pudur, Puliyampatti, Goundampalayam, Ilaiyaraaja playing in the car the whole way. Cattle to graze. A bullock cart to drive. Fields to walk through, a bund to sleep on, a well to jump into. Vishwanath & Sons put its soundtrack out in front of thousands of students in his birth town, twelve days ahead of a worldwide release on August 14, and the town ended up doing most of the talking.

That was the plan. Venky Atluri, who wrote and directs the film, said the team could have held the event in any city in India and chose this one deliberately, because the place, the town and the people in it all belong to Suriya. Work on the film started here too, after a stop at Palani, and the first piece of promotion has now been staged in the same city. Producer Suryadevara Naga Vamsi, who has made this his second Tamil production, put it more plainly: Coimbatore, in his experience, is a place that hands films their wins.

Vamsi then gave the hall the line it had come for. After a long gap, he said, Suriya’s fans will get to see him in a character in the register of Sanjay Ramasamy. It is the second time the Ghajini connection has been attached to Sanjay Vishwanath, and hearing it from the producer twelve days out reads less like a coincidence than a promise. Sithara Entertainments makes more than ten films a year, and Vamsi went as far as placing this one alongside Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo, his own biggest hit, before adding that he was not drawing a comparison so much as declaring how much faith the company has in it. He also flagged a comedy stretch in the first half involving Suriya, Mamitha Baiju and Radikaa Sarathkumar, and asked the audience to post about it once they had seen it.

Suriya opened by thanking the crowd that had turned the stretch from the airport to the venue into a festival. He said he had chosen not to celebrate his birthday this year, but had been keeping count of what his fans did with the date anyway: more than 5,000 blood donations, welfare help reaching more than 40,000 people, clothes bought and gifted to children who had asked for them.

The childhood inventory had a point waiting behind it. He took his children Diya and Dev to Coimbatore last year and walked them through it in person, the tamarind tree he played under, the well he jumped into, the channel he used to lie down in, finishing at the family temple. The time everyone spends with a digital screen has gone up, he said, counting himself in, and the time spent with family has gone down. Make memories while you are still in your own town, he told the students, and hold on to them, because a phone will not hand them back to you.

He also used the stage to close the book on Karuppu, thanking the distributors, exhibitors and financiers who stood with the film when its release ran into trouble, and confirming that arrangements for its 100th day celebration are already moving.

GV Prakash Kumar used his slot to release The One, an aggressive number written for Suriya’s fans and held back for exactly this room. He counted the awards the collaborations have produced along the way: Soorarai Pottru brought both him and Suriya their first National Awards, and Vaathi, his first film with Atluri, brought him another. Lucky Baskhar followed with the director, and this is the third. Two special forces on one film, as he put it. He described Vishwanath & Sons as a feel-good family entertainer and asked the audience to bring their families to it rather than come alone. He has also been watching Mamitha Baiju for five years, and said Pattampoochi has been lifted by her dancing, which social media has spent the last few weeks recreating.

Atluri traced the film back to Rajasekar Pandian of 2D Entertainment, who wept in places while listening to the narration and then set up the meeting with Suriya himself. Atluri had prayed in 2023 for a chance to work with him; the full narration followed, and the blessing came immediately after it. He has since watched the first half with the score in place and called it superb, which is the basis for everything else he said about the film. The comedy stretch Vamsi teased runs about ten minutes and turns on Radikaa Sarathkumar, Suriya and Mamitha arriving at an understanding about the cigarettes and drinks being hidden inside the house, the sort of scene he expects most families in the hall to recognise from their own.

Mamitha Baiju said an earlier chance to work with Suriya had slipped away and this one felt handed to her. What she took from the set was his discipline, his approach, the way he arrives ready for a scene and what he does when the camera is off him, and she called him a generous co-actor. She missed Radikaa Sarathkumar at the event and described her as a guide on set. Atluri’s own account of the shoot had the same family shape to it: Suriya an elder brother, Radikaa a mother, Mamitha the youngest sister who turned the floor lively the moment she walked on.

Suriya’s longest thank you went to GV Prakash. He remembered being shown, as a boy who had not yet grown a moustache, the child scoring jingles for Radio Mirchi, then watching him become the first composer he had seen climb on stage and sing and dance to his own song, the Aadukalam number, and thinking, well, look at that. Soorarai Pottru sits at the centre of everything that followed, a song placed in the climax that lifted the whole film. On Atluri, he said the director had given him a new identity after a long time away from this kind of film, and pointed to the three women in the script as writing worth respecting. Mamitha, he said, was the only name anyone considered once the story was on the table, and she has dubbed her own Tamil lines.

Arunraja Kamaraj, who wrote Pattampoochi, said GV Prakash was the one who made him a lyricist while he was still struggling, and that Ayutha Ezhuthu is the reason he decided to become a director at all. He has spent a career writing hero-worship anthems and screaming them into a microphone to give them life. This time he was asked for a butterfly instead, his first love song in years, and it has since become the album’s most-used sound, with more than a lakh reels cut to it.

Nimish Ravi shoots the film. Raveena Tandon, Yogi Babu, Nasser, Kaali Venkat, George Maryan, Rajiv Menon and Sunil Reddy fill out the cast around Suriya, Mamitha Baiju and Radikaa Sarathkumar, with Vamsi and Sai Soujanya producing for Sithara Entertainments and Fortune Four Cinemas and Srikara Studios presenting. Sunday was Friendship Day, and Suriya signed off by wishing the hall wins larger than his own. Vishwanath & Sons opens worldwide on August 14.