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‘Nayanthara: Beyond The Fairy Tale’ Review: A Bland Career Chronicle Meets Touching Love Story In Netflix Documentary
The film is determined to celebrate her legend, yet barely establishes it.
Director: Amith Krishnan
Writers: Nayanthara, Vignesh Shivan
Streaming on: Netflix
Language: English, Tamil
Nayanthara, fondly known as Lady Superstar, is the rare female movie star who commands the same level of adulation and reverence as top male stars from Tamil cinema. Through her 20-plus-year career , and having starred in close to 80 films, she’s hit a level of stardom where smashing, swag-fuelled entry sequences, whistle-worthy punchlines and callbacks to her previous films are written into her projects — privileges traditionally associated with her male counterparts. Not to mention her ability to deliver consistent hits across Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam cinema.
Put simply, across multiple male-dominated film industries, Nayanthara has not only held her own, she’s cemented herself as one of the country’s biggest movie stars. In a 2019 Vogue interview, she said. “For my solo films, I decide everything. Sometimes, directors do come up with subplots revolving around husbands or boyfriends, and I ask whether they’re even necessary”. Pure swag.
In short, she’s had one of the most exciting underdog trajectories, and stories, of any living Indian movie star. And yet, Netflix’s new vanity documentary Nayanthara: Beyond The Fairy Tale doesn’t seem all that interested in doing justice to her meteoric rise, her glass ceiling-shattering achievements or the uphill battles and endless obstacles she’s had to overcome. If anything, with this brief summary of her life career, I’ve arguably done a better job of putting her stardom and achievement into context than the 80-minute film from director Amith Krishnan. In the age of superstar vanity documentaries, Nayanthara: Beyond The Fairy Tale is perhaps the blandest, most frustrating one yet.
The first half of the narrative plays out like a by-the-book documentary lethargically chronicling her journey, from her childhood to her foray into films with the 2003 Malayalam drama Manassinakkare. What follows is a Wikipedia-style career highlights reel, spanning her 2005 Tamil cinema debut with Ayya, followed by her sharing the screen with Rajinikanth in Chandramukhi that same year, before she reinvented her image with Billa in 2007 and so on. This extends to the most challenging phase of her career, in which she almost left the industry as a result of a highly publicised, hotly discussed relationship with a filmmaker; a controversy so vaguely discussed and skirted around in the documentary that you wonder why they even brought it up in the first place.
Attempts to bring her journey to life consist of mostly hollow platitudes and generic anecdotes. We get a customary collection of talking heads made up of her directors, collaborators and co-actors, like Rana Daggubati, Tamannah Bhatia, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Nelson Dilipkumar, Vijay Sethupathi, Nagarjuna, Atlee and even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Taapsee Pannu who offers: "Every single rule written in the book for a female actor has been proven wrong by her". It’s a powerful statement that the narrative barely probes further.
What we’re left with is a harmless, superficial and largely insight-free look at the highs and lows of her career thus far. Beyond The Fairytale neither paints a meaningful picture of the degree of her stardom, nor does it examine what it is about Nayanthara that allowed her to achieve what few have, and what makes her the unfortunate yet inspiring exception within the man’s world of superstardom. The film is determined to celebrate her legend, yet barely establishes it. Rather than do justice to her story, Beyond The Fairytale, then, looks to do little more than preach to Nayanthara’s existing fans.
The “career half” of Beyond The Fairytale feels like a cautionary tale about an artist controlling their own narrative (the film is, of course, produced by Nayanthar’s own Rowdy Pictures). On the one hand, there is something admirable about an actor taking charge of their own story, given Nayanthara’s famously rocky relationship with the media after being repeatedly misquoted and misrepresented. But, as a result, what we get isn’t the story of an artist as much as it is an artist telling their own carefully-curated version of it. I’d argue a more fitting title might have been Nayanthara: An Incomplete Portrait, or perhaps Nayanthara: A Half-Told Story.
Almost halfway through the film, filmmaker (and now Nayanthara’s husband) Vignesh Shivan enters the chat (apparently even superstar documentaries come with a clear “interval point”). The undeniably adorable, more pleasant latter half of the film switches gears to recount the pair’s love story and it’s here that the narrative springs to life and evokes genuine emotion. Through Vignesh, Nayanthara and a smattering of other talking heads, we get a cheeky, playful retelling of their budding romance on the sets of 2015’s Naanum Rowdy Dhaan — Shivan’s debut film. Vignesh has a wit and innocence that makes him an immediately endearing figure.
We get a delightful anecdote about his first week on set as a director, clearly unsure of himself and still finding his feet. To calm his nerves, Nayanthara made it a point to loudly announce in front of the crew that this was his film and, regardless of her stardom, he shouldn’t settle for anything that didn’t feel right. Similarly, watch how he talks about initially processing the very idea that the two of them might have feelings for each other and that he may have an actual chance with her — as if he was being pranked somehow. For him, she was a star; she was “Nayan ma’am”. Perhaps the most adorable stretch features Jailer filmmaker, and Vignesh’s close friend, Nelson Dilipkumar laughingly describing how he’s used as a buffer and constantly caught between them when they’re fighting.
All of this culminates in footage of the pair’s 2022 wedding — attended by the who’s who of superstardom, from Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth to Shah Rukh Khan and Mani Ratnam. There’s something delightful about watching an actor get the kind of run-into-the-sunset happy ending we’ve seen them experience numerous times in their movies.
But the fact remains that Nayanthara: Beyond The Fairytale left me confused about how to feel and what to make of this documentary. It’s a head-scratcher, in which a bland career chronicle meets an affecting love story meets a starry wedding video. The only meaningful thing the film seems to offer is the absolute bare basics: access to its subject. Nayanthara is a movie star with an incredible story that deserved to be told better.