Enakkul Oruvan (The man inside me) - The Interpretation of Dreams

I’m going to start with an innocuous trivia - the last 2 Fridays would have made Kamal Haasan proud as the two films that were released (last week it was ‘Kaakhi Sattai’ and this week it is ‘Enakkul Oruvan’) bore his yesteryear film titles and featured young heroes who are desperate to climb the ladder to stardom.

‘Enakkul Oruvan’, directed by debutante Prasad Ramar and produced by the ‘hit-maker’, C.V.Kumar, is a remake of the Kannada hit, ‘Lucia’, which was the first crowd-funded movie in India. The plot has a purposeful bifurcation with the protagonist Viknesh (Siddharth) living a real life and a reel-life (in a dream). The cause of his dreams is due to a pill named ‘Lucia’. The movie opens with Viknesh being monitored in the ICU after he gets critically injured. Investigations follow as a result of the aftermath and then the story is revealed in two streams.

Firstly my hearty wishes would go to Pawan Kumar, the director and original story writer of ‘Lucia’. The script has an innate complication as not only the protagonist has 2 roles, but the supporting characters were also featuring in equivalent roles that alternates between dream and reality. Balancing the same with a disciplined narrative that is void of confusion would have been the foremost challenge. That has been so very well handled, that during the course we tend to sail along with the narrative, so much so that we tend to pick up cues of what is about to happen in the two story streams. The writer has remarkably scored in garnering audience-participation, which has become a rarity these days.

Remaking the same story in Tamil would have been relatively easier, but translating the elements of nativity by finding and replacing the subtle nuances in the script would have been a bit of a challenge and that seems to have been handled well by the director and his team. Even though I haven’t watched ‘Lucia’, I wasn’t able to find out any major nativity glitches. As mentioned before Siddharth has 2 very different roles that are poles apart. While one of the roles demands him to be himself or a bit overboard (which he has pulled off very neatly as predicted), the other role as that of an innocent ticket checker at a local touring talkies might have been trickier for him. As expected there were some make-believe acting and also his make-up seemed like a throw-up of Prabhu’s dark make-over for a one-off film like ‘Megam Karuthiruku’. In the end when the twist in the tale gets revealed, the makeover stands partially justified with an implicit justification, but still that would count for Siddharth as another average shot at playing a guy with a low-life. I somehow feel that his innate sophistication and urbane charm is a dampener for him to sell himself as a pauper.

Deepa Sannidhi as the female lead has got a plum role. She settles in the role without much fuss, but doesn’t do more than what was asked. The one who however silently stole the show was Naren. He has certainly filled the void of the likes of character artists like Nasser with a ‘friend-philosopher-guide’ kind of characters which seems to be his forte and also he has a natural inclination for those characters.

Songs and BGM by Santosh Narayanan were good. ‘Poo Avizhum’ was my favorite song in the album and it appears twice in the movie (including the climax). Editing and cinematography was also above average. I would still crib for that one extra song that appeared in the second half, but that finds a sort of justification later. However, the proceedings could have been a lot crisper had there been some scissor wielding for some unwanted scenes.

The movie doesn’t really fall into the neo-noir category, but it looks like it has heavily borrowed some essential elements from such a genre as the narrative looked fresh with a whacky blend of science fiction and fantasy in right proportions. No harm in tasting the magic pill, even though its not so addictive as it claims to be!!

Verdict: Above Average!

Rating: 2.75 / 5