Dasavatharam



Time: Circa 1981. The first scene of a new movie opens. A music studio is seen where the recording for a song is about to begin. The easels for the violin notes are shown in a row. As the camera pans to each stand, one easel is blank without the notes sheets. That violinist is a blind man. The title card appears: Raaja Paarvai, literally, The Emperor’s Looks.

Kamal Hassan, who ventured into story and screenplay writing for the first time, also acted as the blind man in Raaja Paarvai. For the first time in the Tamil industry a hero artist played the blind man’s role. That and other novel and aesthetically subtle nuances of the movie made the critics to sit up and take notice. The movie bombed miserably at the box office. But those who longed for good cinema tightened their fists with the hope that here’s someone who is going to tread treacherous yet sweet unchartered waters of art.

Montage shots swiftly shuffle the years across. Circa 2008. The title card opens: Dasavatharam, Ten Incarnations. Of the same artist who thirty years ago came with heaps of promise. The movie begins with sloppy graphics work passed off as the glorious twelfth century. Then the scene pans to twenty first century to a huge auditorium with, again graphics crowd that looks like the first semester project from a multimedia student. As the story progresses, and as each avatar of the lead (and the only) actor unveils, weariness engulfs as we tiresomely expect the movie to pick up progress. It doesn’t. It drools on at the celebrated multi-fadedness of the artist and refuses to focus on the story. The story, a fugitive hunt a-la Fugitive, Bourne Identity, rushes hurriedly, slows down to adore the actor, again attempts to pick up pace and again slows only to infuriate the viewer. Sloppy and juvenile dialogues make the viewer scream in agitation. Sample: An American to a Japanese in combat: ‘Remember Hiroshima!’, Japanese Response: ‘Remember Pearl Harbour!’

The artist, over the years, owing partly to the hyperbolical endearment culture of Tamil Nadu, has grown incessantly narcissistic. The overt self-admiration and the unchecked plagiaristic practices seem to have cost him his art. Dasavatharam that stands as the empirical evidence to the effete Kamal Hassan, is an insipid, half-hearted attempt at the height of his narcissistic indulgence. As the substandard graphical portrayal of Tsunami brings the three hour horrid drama to an end, the jaded audience crawl out of the theatre lamenting at what had become of one of the most promising artists in the Indian Cinema.