DEATH BECOMES HIM

Time is of the essence.

How does one begin to write on a film such as this? Is it even a film? The closest equivalent of this is when the person sitting aside you, waiting for time to pass, tells you his/her life. There comes a problem into classifying life into genres, there is a bit of it all, comedy, action, romance, sometimes all at once.

The best of art probably mirrors life and life is not without interruptions; for movies having poignant moments, are not expected to make you laugh at the same time, that we all do in retrospect.

But time is of limited scope here, not only as the running time of film as seen on the censor certificate, but in our lives as well; so in a similar telling moment when a wife understands that her husband probably still loves someone else and that she had been an obstruction in his life, we are supposed or expected to wet our eyes; which does happen with an actress like Uvashi in place, but simultaneously your eyes wrinkle and you break into a chuckle at the very moment. A real moment captured for eternity, well that is limited as well.

This is a very difficult film to write about Mr. Kamal, I am unable to fathom the difficulties that went into writing this film. So I will not spend precious words and time writing about how brilliant this film which you have given us is, I do not want to write about this film in the whole scheme of Indian films and how ambitious it is. That is for others.

It was only yesterday we were speaking how Avengers should be a talking point because how easily it spreads itself across genres and here is one of our own, who has made a film which leaps out of the screen and splashes onto our lives like muddle splatter leaving a mark, one difficult to erase even with detergents. Uttama Villain is not just a film, it is a sort of a love letter Kamal has written to himself, and yes there are love letter part of the plot as well.

Kamal Haasan often parodied for doing almost everything in a film, does almost everything in UV (Uttama Villain) and rightly so, often seen as intrusive and controlling but not so often seen as one man’s love for all things cinema, but that debate is for another time, which I need not remind you is in very limited quantities.

The bottom line is Uttama Villain contains more Kamal-isms than probably the entirety of his career and my God (hope u are there somewhere) these are extreme fun to watch. The physical and the verbal compete with each other to provide entertainment in one segment, while the weight of emotion neatly folds you like a paper readied for origami in the other, but both these segments say the same things.

Time is of the essence.

Uttama Villain is Kamal’s seemingly last love letter to everyone with a mail box of an open mind, it is also a love letter to himself, and mostly a letter of deference to his mentor KB.

To see moving images in the eyes of the great but now dead man is one of the most moving images I have seen, maybe that is why this is called the motion picture industry. But who would choose life, if death itself is so beautiful. (Again the theme of the movie)

Personally, I feel that there can be no more fulfillment in life than that deafening thing that happens to you after you see a film, and that does things in your head than you can never explain, but then you really want to and then when words come rushing out, your mouth refuses to open. Uttama Villain is something like that. Maybe, we are all more emotional than we would like to admit.

Time is of the essence.

Most of us on this planet end up living nondescript lives, however great we may think the things we achieve are, it really would mean nothing in the long run, but as Gandalf says “ All we have to decide is what we have to with the time that is given to us”

Even If I don’t achieve anything, atleast I am happy I decided to be a Kamal fan.

A great undoing for an artist is to be unrecognized in his time and even greater undoing is to be misunderstood in his time, whether Uttama Villain makes money or goes otherwise is the least of my concern as it would not matter in the years to come. Maybe it takes time for people to understand the weight of it all, but time is of the essence.