Navarasa Review: Produced and presented by Mani Ratnam and Jayendra Panchapakesan, Navarasa was conceptualized as a means to support film industry workers impacted by the Covid-19 lockdown.
The toughest aspect of Navarasa, a nine-film, five-hour anthology that brings together some of the brightest names of Tamil cinema, isn’t its length. It is the erratic and arbitrary manner in which the nine emotions of Indian dramaturgy have been translated to the screen. But to be fair, barring an exception or two, Navarasa, streaming on Netflix, makes a fair fist of delivering a range of cinematic moods and colour palettes, if not the intended spectrum of emotions.
Produced and presented by Mani Ratnam (who also contributes a story to one short and a screenplay to another) and Jayendra Panchapakesan, Navarasa was conceptualized as a means to support film industry workers impacted by the Covid-19 lockdown. None of the short films, however, factors the pandemic into its storyline. In fact, three of the films are set in the past.