Raavanan at Cannes

A trailer of Mani Ratnam’s bilingual Raavanan/Raavan was screened on Monday to journalists from the world over, who had assembled for the 63rd Cannes Film Festival. The event was attended by the lead stars of the movie, Vikram, Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai.

Amit Khanna of Reliance Big Pictures, which has produced the films along with Madras Talkies, described Mani Ratnam as arguably the best Indian director living today, and said that he and the rest believed in taking such rare movies to the global audience.

Suhasini Mani Ratnam, the film’s co-producer and dialogue writer for the Tamil version, said that the film would help “Us understand the grey parts that all of us have in us…None of us is completely white or black”.

Heaping laurels on Grammy-Oscar winner A R Rahman, who had scored music for the film, she said that the music maestro’s work merged beautifully with the story. “In fact, the music accentuated picture. Songs have a great role to play. They do take the plot forward,” she said.

Vikram and Abhishek told the media that their roles in the film were most challenging, most difficult and most stimulating. It was physically exhausting, the actors said. Aishwarya said that apart from the intricacies of essaying the Hindi and Tamil heroine all at the same time, the inhospitable jungle terrain where they shot the film posed its own hazards.