For the sake of the honor of Tamil Nadu and 77 million Tamils worldwide, we hope that the reports of Ajith’s Billa being screened on May 10 at the Cannes Film Festival turn out to be false.

Featuring the two non-actors Ajith and Nayantara, Ajith’s Billa (the remake of the old Billa starring Rajinikanth) is one of the ugliest Tamil movies we’ve seen in several decades.

As if watching Ajith’s Billa was not bad enough, now comes the horrifying news that this horror show is going to be showcased at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival.

All these years, we thought the Cannes Film Festival was the occasion to showcase high-art not serve as a bastion of low-fart.

Upon hearing of the Ajith’s Billa-for-Cannes report, we were reminded of what the British author Theodore Dalrymple wrote in the book Our Culture, What’s Left of It:

To be a man of artistic taste now requires that you have no standards at all to be violated: which, as Ortega y Gasset said, is the beginning of barbarism.

When there are far better movies like Mozhi and Sathum Podaathay, it’s an affront to all notions of fair play to send garbage like Billa to an international film festival. It’s like awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to monsters like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.

Sending a remake-rubbish like Ajith’s Billa is an insult to millions of Tamil movie fans worldwide.

If the reports of Ajith’s Billa-for-Cannes are really true, we’d like to know on what basis Billa was selected.

Was a fair procedure followed? Which were the other films considered? Who constituted the jury that selected this abomination?

Vijay’s Pokiri and Rajinikanth’s Sivaji were orders of magnitude better than Ajith’s Billa.

For the record, Mozhi, Pokiri, Sathum Podaathay and Sivaji were also released in 2007.

Among the many bad Tamil actors we’ve had the misfortune to encounter on the big screen, Ajith causes the maximum agony to serious lovers of Tamil cinema.

As we wrote in our review of Billa last year:

The worst piece of Billa was Ajith’s pathetic performance. Prancing about like a Korangu than a seasoned actor, Ajith looks wooden in most scenes. There’s absolutely no range in his emotions or his dialogue delivery.

After watching Ajith’s Korangu like antics on screen in Billa and his other insufferable Tamil movies, we considered it fair to call Ajith the Tamil film industry’s Ultimate Korangu. Definitely not the Ultimate Star as he’s often referred to.