Film: Uttama Villain
Director: Ramesh Aravind
Cast: Kamal Haasan, Pooja Kumar, Andrea Jeremiah
Kamal Haasan’s films suffer sometimes because they end up looking like vanity projects, but Uttama Villain , directed by Ramesh Aravind, couldn’t be anything else — for this is the story of a vain star named Manoranjan (Kamal Haasan). Kamal has often called himself a limelight moth, but here his wattage is increased a million-fold. Has any Indian star bared himself — and bored into himself — on screen the way Kamal has in Uttama Villain ? The closest cinematic cousin is probably Fellini’s near-autobiographical 8 1/2 , which was about a director grappling with a creative block. Manoranjan’s guru — allegorically named Margadharisi — is played by K. Balachander, and like the legendary filmmaker, he finds it difficult to make movies with this star, who was a mere “actor” when they made a series of hit films together. In a season of meta films, Uttama Villain is possibly the meta-est of them all.
Apart from a typically solid lead(s) performance, Uttama Villain has a lot of what we’ve come to expect in a Kamal Haasan movie. There’s the expected mix of languages — Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam, English. And there’s the play with language.
But finally, Uttama Villain is just a series of discrete scenes. And at least part of the problem is the people Kamal has chosen to help him bring his vision to screen. I didn’t buy Pooja Kumar for a second as an eighth-century princess. Andrea Jeremiah, too, is incapable of pulling the weight her role requires. Kamal Haasan’s writing is so dense and overstuffed and layered that it’s always a question whether even the best actors and directors can come up with the wit and timing needed to make the transition from page to screen — in other words, the best Kamal Haasan movies are probably locked up inside his head. But with some of the lightweight cast he’s been working with of late, this material doesn’t stand a chance. I saw a version of Uttama Villain that ran close to three hours. I hear some of the Uttaman portions are being trimmed to bring the film down to two-and-a-half hours, and I can’t say I’m surprised. How I wished the entire film had been a mirror on Manoranjan, about what it is to be a star of a certain age, at a certain stage, about what it means to be Kamal Haasan.
