Irandam Ulagam (*ing Arya, Anushka Shetty)

That sounds a lot like my experience with that archaeological adventure movie Selvaraghavan did with Karthi, so I'm not entirely surprised. Bummer though-I was hoping he had somehow managed to get his act together.

This was it...I have alot of trouble with Tamil film titles...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aayirathil_Oruvan_(2010_film)

This has been a couple years now, so I don't remember Aayirathal Oruvan very clearly-it takes a long time to assemble the members of the expedition (including the anti-hero, who's some kind of rowdy or blue collar worker who kind of blunders into things), then there's some exploring and some regional political violence, and then there's some lost civilization stuff with some mildly interesting sword and sandal type action and some nastier violence and political intrigue. I found it aggravating in terms of who it chooses to side with and its general incoherence, and parts of it are hard to watch, in terms of violence, sexism, and general grimness (there's an implied rape IIRC but it is not shown). I didn't regret watching it, because I haven't seen anything else quite like it, and the female performances are good but I hesitate to recommend it to other people.

Karthik's character is kind of a jerk through most of the film (this seems to be an intentional choice by Selvagharan), and although I found him likable enough in the parts where he wasn't, I didn't develop an urgent need to see anything else with him.

I ended up fastforwarding a lot of the "real world" scenes because I just found the situation between the two romantic leads very uncomfortable to watch. The weird faux-Euro-medieval vibe of the second world makes more sense if you're familiar with the old school Errol Flynn-meets-the-Arabian-Nights style swashbucklers that Bollywood and Kollywood used to do (and which the director referenced briefly in Aayirathil Oruvan). Basically, the second world stuff is like that but with the references to Middle Eastern culture stripped out, perhaps to make it more exotic. The decision to Europeanize the second world (which is kind of this walking, heavy-handed parable about male dominated societies) may also be an effort to dodge the kind of controversy that Aayirathil Oruvan stirred up, with its portrayal of the ancient Chola and Pandya dynasties.

The idea that True Love cannot exist in the second world without Madhu (hero of the real world storyline) to teach it to his local counterpart and his love interest's local counterpart, is an interesting one, but the scenes of Madhu following Ramya around in India and generally not taking no for an answer, kind of undercut that. The portrayal of women's oppressed situation in the second world was also awkward; it alternated between the kind of stylized, "women are chattel here but we're not going to get into the sordid details" portrayal you would expect from a bunch of RenFaire fugitives wandering around in a vaguely psychedelic landscape, and an uncomfortably blunt tone (although still pretty PG/PG-13) that the film as a whole hadn't really earned the right to use. I was so delighted by Arya/Anushka's brief "battle couple" moments in the second world that I was deeply annoyed when the film decided that True Love meant that she should put up her sword and let him handle the fighting.

There are a handful of scenes that live up to the otherworldliness of the title: notably the fight with the manticore, Madhu's travels from one world to another, his encounter with what most viewers will recognize as a ghost long before Madhu himself catches on, and almost anything involved the second world's "goddess", a (badly dubbed) firang woman who does a good job of selling the alienness of her character, even if she ends up being a pretty literal deus ex machina. The scenery of the second world is also effective at being weird and "Other", even if it's a series of comparatively obvious tricks like funky colored grass and skies, multiple moons (and suns?) and random glowing mushrooms. I also liked our brief glimpse of the "third world", which resembled the cover art to a 70s rock album.

Arya and Anushka gave pretty good performances with the material they were given, although the scenes where Anushka was channeling Helena Bonham-Carter in playing Varna, her second-world character were kind of odd. I thought the film did a fair job of setting up why Varna was such a distrustful loner, but was less good at making the case that she ought to "lighten up" where her husband was concerned. The two leads didn't have great chemistry (although you could argue that was consistent with the plot), and I find Arya's screen persona kind of...bratty? in a way that didn't help reconcile me to his often unlikable characters in this. But I've seen way worse in that regard in other movies.

I have trouble recommending this to other people, due to the well-intentioned but unfortunate portrayal of the misogynistic second world, the garden variety sexism of the real world scenes, the slow and awkwardly constructed plot, the kitschy production values, the weak song picturizations.  But it is perhaps an interesting failure rather than a straightforwardly bad movie.  I think ultimately the problem is that this is a story that begs for a director who can sell that super stylized, operatic and rather morbid vision of True Love capable of crossing worlds-it needs to be Devdas/HDCCS, and instead it ends up as a kind of humor-impaired Princess Bride, with the kind of muted, world-weary romanticism that implies. I would be curious to see Sanjay Leela Bhansali remake it, either directing himself or riding herd on a visually interesting director who's a bit more sensitive about women than Selvagharan seems to be. (I don't see the Vedam director submitting to SLB and Shabina Khan a second time after he finishes Gabbar, but he would be good at this sort of thing).