In I, which is actually the most exceptional film of the high-maintenance, director Shankar’s extravagant oeuvre, this exceptional actor Vikram, known to transform into whatever he plays, stands in a room filled with multi-reflective mirrors, looking at his horribly deformed body and disfigured face. It is heart-shattering, glass-shattering moment. It is a moment that would be quoted as an example of what magic a capable actor can create out of melodrama.
Melodrama is certainly Shankar’s forte. His films are not only many sizes larger than life, they are also suffused in excessive exuberance and free-flowing rhetorics that do not render themselves to a proper Hindi translation.
In I, one doesn’t mind the blizzard of bombast and drama. This is Shankar’s most dramatic film to date. Drama has never been a rationed component in his cinema. Here the director known for his visual flair and vital connect with the masses, pulls out all stops, as he takes us on a colloquial and spectacular visual discourse on the subject of physical beauty and its impact on love.
Do we stop loving a person if he or she becomes physically undesirable? Films like Rajnish Behl’s Soorat Aur Seerat and Raj Kapoor’s Satyam Shivam Sundaram dealt with the theme of love and physical beauty with varying degrees of effectuality.
In I, Shankar, with his extraordinary command over the grammar of the narrative’s rapid run, goes for the jugular. The film clocks at 3 hours and a few minutes. Some of it is cheap cheesy window dressing…The kind that a spectacular film must indulge in to ensure box office returns.
There are cringe-worthy jokes about women’s lingerie and vital statistics. At one point the hero’s breast….sorry, best friend makes a dig at the heroine’s ‘headlights’, and she isn’t driving a car…not when she is in a bikini! There is nothing subtle about the way the film’s hero, a state-level wrestler filled with a boorish pride about his looks and physique, loses it all and becomes hunch backed and grotesque.
There is a lot of embarrassing humbug in the lengthy narration. With that penchant for over elaborate plotting whereby every component in the characterizations must be hammered in repeatedly, the film’s moral map gets tediously fine-printed in the narrative. The caucus of villains, which oddly includes an expressionless Upen Patel and a cross-dresser who lusts after the hero and then wants him destroyed,gets its comeuppance with infuriating mathematical precision.
But here is the thing. I is nonetheless an exceptional film. The main love story between the disfigured hero and the stunning model (Amy,ably cast) gets its core of compulsion from The Beauty &The Beast fable. The manner, in which the relationship between the coarse wrestler and the classy model grows and then takes a twisted turn, is skillfully maneuvered by the director.
There is no doubt that Shankar is a remarkable raconteur. His cinema is almost always blessed with a leading man who takes the director’s vision beyond the script. Here, Shankar has an arresting ally in Vikram whose interpretation of the protagonist’s horrific physical change is so palpable as to make every other recent attempt at prosthetic-induced realism look strained.
The film’s most majestic chunks are those where Vikram, playing the deformed avenger stalks dark dingy corridors and mohallahs in search of his tormentors. Here is where P.C. Sreeram’s magic from behind the camera opens its arms and hugs excellence. What we see on screen are visually interpreted themes on the destruction of human faith.
The film confidently balances the beauty of nature against the cruelty of mankind. The scenes shot in China against the backdrop of thousands of crimson flowers are enchanting in their summoned splendor.Watching the beauty of nature in all its glory we know what the mean when they say time stands still.
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Vikram’s courtship of the beautiful Ms. Jackson is taken through various stages of awkward self-assertion, each stage brilliantly covered and crossed by Vikram. As is the wont in Shankar’s cinema the songs (A.R. Rahman) and choreography are breath taking in their grandeur and eloquence.
Especially outstanding is the fantasy opera beautifully composed and choreographed where the Beauty is faced with the agonized helplessness of the Beast.
There are many sequences in I which linger in the mind long after the show. I only wish the narrative had avoided banal characters and long-drawn episodes of crass mass wooing where the film’s innate excellence is mocked. Shankar irons out the rough edges with his mesmerizing power to hold the character’s bizarre fate in place. Indeed, the film takes us beyond the imaginable and the conceivable, fusing with fabulous flamboyance the fantasy element with a level of heightened reality that’s commercial cinema’s forte.
Much More brilliant than the film is Vikram’s multi-personality performance which holds the film together, loopholes and all.Vikram embraces the grotesque as possessively as the glorious.It doesn’t matter which language you speak or think in. Just go for I. It speaks the language of cinema.
Talking about his drastic weight loss for I, Vikram in an interview with me said, “Unfortunately it’s true I lost 25 kgs for the part. But I am not alone. I think Matthew Mcconaughey lost 23 kgs to play the AIDS patient in Dallas Buyers. The thing is, he was already fit. He just stopped eating while I was on a diet to lose weight. I don’t find it interesting to do a character unless it offers me the challenge of reinventing myself. I don’t work for money. My wife has to constantly keep reminding me that we need to buy stuff around the house. For most of my movies I end up giving back some or all the money. So if I am not in this for money, I must be in this for something else. Right from the time I did theatre I have been like that. I have to be challenged as an actor. No amount of money can lure me into doing a film or character that I don’t want to do.I is my most challenging role to date.”
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