Film: I
Director: Shankar
Cast: Vikram, Amy Jackson, Suresh Gopi
Is there another filmmaker as fascinated by the double role as Shankar? Where others employ this trope as merely a means to magnify the hero — see two stars for the price of one! — or maybe to flesh out the separated-at-birth scenario so popular in the masala format, Shankar uses the device to split open the protagonist’s psyche. In films like Mudhalvan and Gentleman — where it’s not two roles so much as two faces of the character (journalist/chief minister, mild-mannered entrepreneur by day/vigilante by night) — the second ‘character’ is made to do things the first one cannot, and in Sivaji , the bald-headed persona was essentially the hero assuming another ‘face’ in order to continue where he left off. This split was carried out to the extreme in Anniyan and Enthiran , where the other roles weren’t just assumed by the protagonist but birthed by him For all its problems, Enthiran marked a departure point in Shankar’s career because, for the first time, the second role wasn’t that of a vigilante, but a confused, gone-berserk manifestation of the protagonist’s ID.
But I is just more of the same — it’s the old vigilante scenario, except that the villains don’t represent a microcosm of society. This time, it’s personal. The evildoers mess up the hero’s life and he embarks on revenge. After a point, the film reminds us of Aboorva Sagotharargal , where a noxious substance results in the hero’s ‘deformity’, and when he discovers how he came to be this way, he doles out punishment in inventive ways. (Even the parrot from that film finds an equivalent: a faithful dog.) For a while, I is innocuous fun. We meet Lingesan (Vikram), a gym rat who’s in love with a model (Diya, played by Amy Jackson) he keeps seeing in magazines and on TV and on billboards. As his best friend Babu, Santhanam contributes a few laughs, and Vikram, too, does no heavy lifting outside the gym. He is relaxed, charming, and he draws us to this nobody who wants to be a somebody.
But once Lingesan meets Diya and gets a makeover, the film turns tedious. Since Anniyan , Shankar has run out of ideas for storylines for the ‘normal guy’ character — we need to wait for the second half in order to get to the real story, with the ‘other guy’ character, and so we bide time with lavishly shot (but very generic-looking) song sequences (music by A. R. Rahman) and a patience-sapping love angle. Shankar’s never been the most sensitive of filmmakers, and there’s never much use in expecting these ‘mass films’ to depict politically correct attitudes
There’s a hint of subtext in the beauty-and-the-beast premise. I is set largely in the world of advertising, where looks matter, and the biggest suffering one can endure, according to the film, is the loss of these looks. But it’s understandable that these themes aren’t elaborated — no film made on this kind of budget, with gargantuan images from P. C. Sreeram, can afford to traffic in that kind of nuance. What’s surprising though is that even the entertainment aspects are glossed over.
Baradwaj Rangan
I
Genre: Action
Director: Shankar
Cast: Vikram, Amy Jackson, Suresh Gopi
Storyline: A hunchback sets
out on a revenge mission
