you still have to see Dashavtar to know what the astounding Kamal Sir has attempted and failed to achieve in this woefully ambitious tale of greed and lust for life…and I don’t only mean the emotions that motivate the characters.
The actor who’s also the screenwriter of this flamboyant tale of rebellious warriors, international gangs and parochial accents , is also motivated by a lust and ambition for more more and more of himself on screen. He doesn’t just hog footage. He wallows it up without a burp.
On-screen megalomania is not a good thing for the wellbeing of a film. When the actor becomes several sizes larger than the vehicles invented to accommodate his restless talents, it’s time for the actor to slow down and consider why cinema flourished as an art-form in the first place.
Was it so that one day an actor of Kamal Haasan’s stature could monopolize screen time to the detriment of all narrative equilibrium?
Indeed the actor’s audacity takes your breath away. Right before our stunned eyes Kamal Haasan transforms into characters ranging from an old cantankerous woman to George Bush. The funniest of them all is an impersonation of a pompous parochial Bengali government agent(whose ringtone is R.D Burman’s Jaane-e-jaan tu kahan main yahan in Bengali) , assigned to bring an global terrorist(played with snarling lipsmacking relish by , who else, Kamal The Chameleon) to book. They case one another on land and in space. They create mayhem but no pace or space for the narration to breathe in any semblance of grace.
This is an epic that loses control over its resources. A Tamil maestro of the performing arts, doing a Bengali accent is as outrageous as Jaya Prada playing the wife of a cancer-stricken Punjabi Bhangra-pop singer.
Meri Padosan 2009 Hindi Movie Watch Online links at
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