On Kamal Haasan's 59th birthday, his most underrated films

Highlights

• Actor-filmmaker Kamal Haasan, who turned 59 today, needs no special introduction, but some of his best performances have gone unnoticed in numerous underrated films.
• Here is a list of few such films from the career of this universal hero.
• Aval Appadithan: Arguably one of the masterpieces of Tamil cinema, this film may have been a box office disaster but it was made much ahead of its time. Kamal plays a documentary filmmaker, through whose eyes the film presents the moving story of Sripriya, a man with a bitter past, who hates independent women. The razor-sharp dialogues with surrealistic filmmaking style offer an experience no Tamil film, before or after, has managed to deliver.
• Anbe Sivam: The actor takes an agnostic stance about atheism and communism in Anbe Sivam, which translates to "Love is God". The film revolves around two characters - a communist and a capitalist, who learn important lessons of life via road trip. The film remains underrated to date because many misunderstood its sarcastic undertones associated with atheism.
• Raja Paarvai: I doubt if any actor would take the risk of playing a blind character in his 100th film but Kamal Haasan is an exception. In this poignant tale of romance between a blind violinist and a young Christian girl, director Singeetham Srinivasa Rao extracted the best out of Kamal, who had also co-written the film.
• Virumaandi: Borrowing the narrative style of Japanese film Rashomon, Kamal addressed the abolition of death sentence from the Indian judicial system in Virumaandi. As a happy-go-lucky village rogue, he delivered one of the finest performances in his career with this film, which is remembered for giving Tamil cinema one of the finest actors, Pasupathy.
• Hey Ram: In this semi-fictional recounting of India's partition and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, Kamal as the film's writer-director and actor highlights religious extremism. The film was a box office disaster and paved way to a lot of controversies but the audience hardly realised that its purpose was to highlight the journey of a character named Saket Ram, who rejected the notion of securing rights through violence and allowed religious hatred to be taken over by love.
• Guna: It is very unlikely that Guna would ever feature in a list of best films featuring Kamal because it still remains unappreciated and had turned out to be yet another box office failure. But I doubt if anyone else could have played an innocent schizophrenic to perfection. A complex love story, the film could only be embraced if one understood an important line from a song, which translates to "this love, to be understood by humans, is not human love; it's beyond that. This is divine love".
• Varumayin Niram Sivappu: A satire on the unemployment situation in India in the 1980s, Kamal collaborated with his mentor K Balachander to play an unemployed youth in the film. Varumayin Niram Sivappu, which fittingly translates to "Colour of Poverty is Red", is a unique film that not just entertains but questions the veracity of modern-day youth in a socialist India.
• Mahanadi: Easily one of the most tragic films in Kamal's career, Mahanadi pits a villager against those from a town who rob him off his prosperity. As a tormented father in search of his missing children, this is easily one of the actor's best performance in the 1990s.
• Swati Mutyam: As an adult with the mind of a child, the actor proved once again why he is considered one of the country's finest actors. It was touted to be the Indian version of Tom Hanks-starrer Forrest Gump but in reality Swati Mutyam was a brilliant effort to confront existing socio-cultural traditions through the eyes of an autistic man. It is considered underrated because many failed to understand what it set out to achieve.