The Tamil Nadu CM skipped his son's first-day-first-show but made sure the crowd at his Madhurandhagam campaign stop saw the framed poster anyway.
A volunteer handed Vijay a framed photograph from Sigma during his Madhurandhagam roadshow on Friday, and he didn't just accept it, he raised it over his head and showed it off to the crowd. The clip has been doing the rounds since, timed exactly to the day his son Jason Sanjay's directorial debut hit theatres.
Vijay wasn't at Kamala Cinemas for the first-day-first-show. He had a packed Friday, starting with the launch of a free bus travel scheme for women before he headed out for campaign work tied to his Madhurandhagam push. But the roadshow moment did the job that attendance might have, a public, visible nod to his son's first film, held up for everyone to see.
The family split the difference. Jason's mother Sangeetha Sornalingam and sister Divya Saasha showed up at Kamala Cinemas for the FDFS instead, Sangeetha smiling for the paparazzi on her way in, Divya in a black Sigma t-shirt that left no doubt whose side she was on. Jason himself was there too, watching his first film as director land with an audience for the first time.
He'd already said, ahead of release, that he expected his father to need a bit of time with it. Talking to Pearls Maaney, Jason put it simply: "I think you need more time to analyse the film. But he'll like the film. He'll be proud." He's also been upfront that Vijay was one of the first people in his corner when he decided to go behind the camera instead of in front of it.
Sigma itself is an action-heist film built around Sundeep Kishan as Guru, a librarian and treasure hunter who stumbles into a Rs 500-crore racket run by a syndicate too big to take on head first. So he does what these films always have the hero do, pulls together a crew for a heist, and then watches the plan threaten to fall apart under the weight of betrayals nobody saw coming. Faria Abdullah plays the female lead, with Sampath Raj, Shiv Panditt, Yog Japee and Raju Sundaram rounding out the cast.
At 26, this is Jason's first outing as director, and the opening day numbers will matter more to him than any framed photo. Whether Sigma holds its own through the weekend, and whether Vijay eventually makes it to a theatre to watch it himself, remains the open question heading into Saturday.
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