Name: 7/G Rainbow Colony
Director: Selvaraghavan
Writers: Selvaraghavan
Year: 2004
First published Aug 18, 2024.
The inner discovery of a man through a woman is perhaps now seen in a problematic manner that it is not the job of a woman to uplift men. But in my view, it is not a sin to do so; just that there needs to be equivalent representations from the perspective of women to see men as their saviors or the lack thereof. It is also important to consider that when men uplift women, and in general, the mass of people, they are seen as ideology and religion makers, while the corresponding women are tagged with biological markers such as mothers and sisters. In arts, one could understand such portrayal as a reflection of the society at the represented point of time, and 7/G Rainbow Colony deals with the portrayal of one such man, a loser in the eyes of the society, who seeks a woman in his life to trigger a change to push himself higher.
Kathir is a 20-year old son in a lower middle class family living in a colony which hosts a group of people in similar economic situations. He has his small group of friends who are like him; they are not good in their studies, they waste their time playing cricket and ogling at girls, they are seen as losers by the society. On the other hand, Anita moves into the same colony as her family goes from being rich to poor in an instant due to the loss in her father’s business. Their family forces her to get engaged with the son of his father’s rich friend who could help with his monthly credit dues.
Anita refuses Kathir’s advances and develops a hatred towards him due to his stalking and perverse behavior. Once she sees that even his fiancé has a perversion towards her, she gets dejected with all men. At the same time, Kathir realizes his sins and atones for them in front of her. She accepts him fully despite being in an inescapable situation of arranged marriage herself. She provides him the fruit of being with him for a single night. Finally, she sacrifices herself for him as Jesus did. Richly imbibed in Christian theology, 7/G Rainbow Colony rises from just being a stalker film to being one of sin, atonement, and salvation.
I watched this movie just a few days back for the first time, i.e. 20 years after its release date. The movie still holds. It’s also mainly due to how the families of the guy and the girl are setup. The girl is from a North Indian business family settled in Chennai, and so as a Tamil person, I am subconsciously made to see Anita as someone from outside, from another world. I associate more with the guy’s family which is set up to be economically similar to most families in early 2000s. The movie works also due to the micro relationships, such as the father-son and the mother-daughter ones, depicted outside of the main man-woman relationship. Finally, the movie is made a total bliss with Yuvan Shankar Raja’s background music and original scores.