'Kaantha' Movie Review: Dulquer Salmaan Is Arresting In This Meta Masterpiece

Not since Mani Ratnam has a Tamil director showcased so much love for mirrors in his cinema. In Selvamani Selvaraj’s Kaantha, mirror scenes aren’t just narrative devices used to underline introspection, but they work as the film’s conscience, reflecting truths to the viewer the film’s complex characters themselves do not have the courage to admit to.

There couldn’t have been a better film for this device given how the film deals with a superstar and the many images he lives by. To TK Mahadevan’s fans, he’s no lesser than God, a superstar capable of turning 10 consecutive films into super-hits. As for his Ayya, played by Samuthirakani, the director is the only God for an actor, considering how Mahadevan was a nobody when he found him, giving him the film that made him the superstar. But for Mahadevan himself, the images in the mirror keep flickering…is he the hero the world makes him out to be? Or is he a fraud, as he looks like to his Guru. Or is he stuck in the middle, embroiled in a battle between the man he once was and the man he has now become?

It’s a terrific premise for a meta movie about a narcissist, who is at once madly in love with and deeply disgusted by who he is. In a chilling scene, when this celebrated director ridicules Mahadevan for his habit of playing to the gallery, you first assume that this scene too is going to be about an actor who becomes bigger than his movies. Yet instead of displaying his arrogance, Mahadevan breaks apart as he remembers the stage plays that made him a performer in the first place. Broke and hungry, he developed a habit of equating audiences’ applause with the number of days he could now go on without having to beg for food. For a purist like Ayya, cinema is an artform that’s meant to outlive the audience it’s being made for. But for that tired, exhausted kid still living within Superstar TK Mahadevan, pleasing the audience is the only way he can try to satiate his unending hunger.

This makes Mahadevan an incredibly complex character, easy to empathise with but impossible to understand. His sycophants praise his ability to play as many as a dozen characters in one film. But perhaps he is capable of performing this well on screen only because he is used to having to wrestle with the multiple people he is expected to be. In Ayya’s final advice to Mahadevan, back when he was still his disciple, he says, “do not ever continue to act, once the director calls cut.” But does real life ever come with a director, watching your moves, if only to tell you when to stop?

Such philosophical reflections are dime a dozen in Kaantha. It also isn’t just a meta movie because it is about the making of a film titled Kaantha, but it involves many scenes in which the scene that’s being shot is almost a mirror image of what’s happening in reality. This could be something straightforward like how an angry Ayya shouts, “you ungrateful dog!” to Mahadevan, which also happens to be a dialogue they are supposed to be shooting. In other instances, Mahadevan isn’t mouthing the lines he’s meant to… he is speaking straight from his heart, as though the cameras have all disappeared.

Not that the film ever gets too dense or too complex to follow. After we are deeply invested in the ego battle between Mahadevan and his guru, the film takes an elegant turn towards an investigative drama. But instead of alienating the complex themes the film has built itself up to, the investigation only takes these questions forward. So, it’s not just important that we learn everything there is to learn about Mahadevan, but our understanding of him and the people surrounding him makes this investigation far more complex than just another whodunit. To understand who committed this crime, it’s also important for us to understand why they are who they are.

This makes Kaantha a truly special film, the sort that rises above the limitations of a meta drama and an investigative thriller. In certain sequences, you wonder how the film’s able to juggle between multiple narrators, multiple timelines and at times, with different aspect ratios without ever disturbing us. And of course, there’s no way to pull this off without the camera work of Dani Sanchez-Lopez, who can switch easily between the moody sophistication of classic film noir and the stagey, two-dimensional blocking of classic Indian cinema.

In Mahadevan, Dulquer gets his most complex character yet, which he uses to deliver the best performance of his career. In certain scenes, he needs just one tenth of an expression to convey insecurity, anger, rage and heartbreak. And with Selvamani Selvaraj, Kaantha rises above a love letter to cinema to evolve into an epic tragedy, about a man affected so deeply by the deafening applause that he couldn’t listen to the cries of his own conscience.