I (Tamil, 2014 *ing Vikram, Amy Jackson)

(Note: I have the impression that the version I saw was either censored or skipping bits due to video streaming issues, and I have the impression that I missed some scenes in the Linga/Osma subplot.)

Having just seen it, my own take is that while Anniyan (which this film sort of resembles) is a masala movie and a horror movie, "I" is mostly a critique of pop culture using horror movie tropes to make its point. The "cool" world of bodybuilding turns out to be a place of arrested development, mental immaturity, and bullying. The glamorous ad world turns out to be a place of betrayal, sexual predators and cackling, blaspheming witches. The heroine's cosy soap opera life with cuddly, too-old-for-her family friend pining for her in a dignified way, turns out to be a fractured retelling of Lolita. (Is there a potshot here at some of the April-October/November/December romances going on in Indian cinema here? If so, it seems a bit hypocritical, given the 17-yr age gap between Vikram and Amy). The ultra-rich, allegedly aspirational capitalists who make all this possible, and profit by it, are petty, egotistical creeps.

It's not really profound, but the combination of valid points to be made, the freewheeling association of references to other works, the nonlinear storytelling, and the striking imagery all give it a dreamlike quality that I found easy to roll with inspite of its plot holes and slow or annoying points. Vikram lives up to his reputation. Lingaswaren is a shallow, brassy idiot that very few actors could have made likable, but Vikram succeeds. As the "hunchback" (the character calls himself that, sorry), you quickly stop noticing the grotesque makeup and focus on his emotions. His take on the Beast deserves a full movie rather than a song.

I was pleasantly surprised by Amy Jackson. She is of course dubbed, but her body language and facial expressions are convincing, which is kind of impressive given that this is a relatively complicated character in the hands of a director who has not (at least in the films I've seen) shown any particular interest in getting good work out of his heroines. (This is not to say that Rani, Shriya Saran, Aishwarya Rai, or Boring Anniyan Chick were *bad* in their respective movies, just that I didn't feel like Shankar deserved much credit for what they were doing right). The other advantage to Amy, as with Aish or Shriya, is that she has the looks and presence of the kind of woman men obsess about. Casting Samantha Ruth Prabhu in this role would have been like casting Kate Hudson in Vertigo; you wouldn't know why this chick had the hero and two villains dangling after her. This is the most proactive female love interest I've seen in a masala in a very long time: she takes practical steps to deal with the sexual harasser she has to work with, her decision to string the hero along is wrong, but is portrayed as coming from a place of real desperation, and her comeuppance, if you want to call it that, is handled in a fairly respectful way. The only things that can knock her unconscious are a blow to the head that would probably kill someone in the real world, or getting slammed with about six hundred super-disturbing revelations all at once. There's also two sequences in the second half where I just really admired the heck out of the character, but I don't want to get into that here.

Ojas Rajani as Osma Jasmine...a commenter on Filmigirl's blog said (not on the main I review but another post, IIRC) that she thought the character would have played better as something along the lines of Priyanka Chopra in Aitraaz (whose character is simultaneously very desirable to men* and yet skin-crawlingly ruthless and crazy), and I kind of agree. The movie does seem to need a female predator to counterbalance the two male predators, and I think either Shankar, in a fit of cluelessness, didn't believe he could make an XX-chromosome vamp carry the right level of menace, or (in a fit of cowardice) didn't think his audience would buy it, and either way he fell back on Ojas, who has a height and a commanding demeanor that most Tollywood starlets lack. He doesn't exploit the audience's baggage regarding hijras as aggressively as he might have; the scene where Linga and his buddy taunt Osma on first meeting her is probably the worst part in that regard. Osma is a comparatively restrained portrayal of a transgendered person for Indian pop cinema; even the (sympathetic and prominent) hijra character in Vedam is more broadly played. In general, her harassment of Linga comes off as being part of the same continuum as what John does to Diya. I would say it's meant to be read as a "fashion world thing" rather than a"hijra thing" but the people who are uncomfortable with it and feel that casting a transgendered person in the role plays to stereotypes and raises unfortunate implications have valid objections too.

The "de-formation" of the hero and the villains and both sides taunting each other about it is plain old-fashioned eye-for-an-eye masala stuff; I think Sholay and its mutilations are a distant ancestor, through many intermediaries. It's noteworthy that the villains manipulate the hero into thinking of himself as doomed, worthless trash after they damage him, but the hero, despite punishing them in what he considers a fit manner, does not begrudge them their high-class medical care, and the film ends by emphasizing that the hero's situation, for all his raving about how doomed and pointless his life is, can be improved with proper care, physical therapy and emotional support, which is a good message so far as it goes.

Quibbles? I found it slow in spots and uncomfortable to watch in others-certainly it is not a film I would care to view in mixed company. The fight choreography is uninteresting, with the warehouse fight and the train fight running on suspense rather than interesting fight moves and the other fight scenes being kind of a waste of space. The cgi was surprisingly weak in places, considering this is from the director of Endhiran. Some reviewers are convinced that the hero gave his dog rabies, but that turned out to be a misdirection, with the dog being spared anything worse than having to bite and taste the desi version of Humbert Humbert, and the actual rabies vector being something else. Similarly, I don't think the various potential grooms actually had a problem with Diya's previous lovelife, that was just more of Desi Humbert Humbert's manipulations.

*Osma in her workplace persona, as opposed to her villain persona, comes off as photogenic and sophisticated, but not hugely attractive in that sense.  I'm not saying that a transgendered character/actor couldn't pull off an Aitraaz, but I am saying that this particular person is not equipped for the job, and the unfortunate implications would have been magnified about a hundredfold.  And although Ojas does a fairly good job of the character's anger, frustration and fear, she doesn't sell the character's interest in Linga/Vikram all that well. In that sense, it's hard to buy her as a vamp of the Helen/Bindu school.

Awesome movie with superb animation