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'UI' Movie Review: Upendra's Head-Scratcher Misses Way More Than It Hits
The film has 'Uppi-ism' written all over it in that it is self-indulgent and intentionally chaotic, but a fragmented and murky narrative becomes its own bane
Director: Upendra
Writer: Upendra
Cast: Upendra, Reeshma Nanaiah, P Ravi Shankar, Achyuth Kumar, Sadhu Kokila, Murali Sharma
Language: Kannada
Upendra, the filmmaker, has often spoken his mind through his films, but the same brain becomes a literal physical element in his latest directorial UI. As usual, the title is symbolic and left open to interpretation, with Upendra allowing us to extrapolate it to concepts like Universal Intelligence (possibly a human-led counter to Artificial Intelligence) and the harmonious idea of ‘You’ and ‘I’. Interestingly, the implicit nature of the title extends to the film itself — it's up to you to figure things out.
UI has 'Uppi-isms' written all over it, in that it is self-referential, intentionally chaotic and led by a protagonist who is smart, well-read and yet so iconoclastic that he repels the world around him. It is also knowingly indulgent. The opening parody sequence features a hilarious public outcry to UI, the film, to augment the myth that one never really understands an Upendra film. There are not one but two (technically three, if you count his cameo as himself) versions of him who, as twin brothers, are polar moral opposites. We also get long monologues about his famed queer worldview that make sense only if we submit to the haphazardness of it all.
The problem, though, is that the haphazardness doesn’t have a clear enough intent. UI is an ambitious project that offers Upendra the platform to relay his thoughts in his unrestricted, whimsical way. The writer-director makes an impassioned case for countless topics such as human greed, lust, the idea and implications of God, religion, caste, politics and utopia-dystopia. The narrative, however, is devoid of a proper screenplay-led structure to guide all these conversations, leaving it fragmented and murky.
Even then, one senses that Upendra is talking about something rather sophisticated, asserting that the human mind is the origin of all evil. A voiceover in one scene says that despite being forbidden from eating the apple, the biblical figure Eve couldn't resist the temptation and lost her innocence. In another scene, Mother Earth is violated by industrialists who strip away her glory. There’s another action scene staged superbly inside a hell-like place shaped like the human brain (KGF and Salaar art director Shivakumar J delivers once again), where all these hopeless creatures are imprisoned. Social corruption has always been Upendra’s main subject, but here, he lends it a more subliminal meaning.
It is through these allegorical musings that Upendra gives the film a surreal setting. This is a dystopian world where hope is scarce, infrastructure is crumbling and human equity is lowering by the minute. One man fights for the good of society whereas another wants to see it wiped off the earth. There’s also a glimpse of the future, of a world in ruins in which the population is segregated into wards based on caste: the lower castes fight for bare necessities while the rich literally aim for the sky, and civil war is here. But can we blame the lawmakers? Or do we hold ourselves and our insatiable thirst for control accountable? Upendra’s well-known nihilistic side comes to the fore yet again, and he proposes an answer that only he could.
UI, however, is still tedious to watch. Upendra’s storytelling style has always involved him (as the central character) handholding us through the narrative and offering both problems and solutions. Barring films like Shhh! (1993) and Om (1995), his characters exist as accessories to his winding discourse about love and life, and are never really well-rounded individuals. Yet that technique served him well because it was ahead of its time when it first emerged in the late 1990s.
In the case of UI, one wishes that he had perhaps chosen an alternative method of offering his philosophy and giving the cast members ample room to shine. Reeshma Nanaiah, P Ravi Shankar, Achyuth Kumar, Sadhu Kokila and Murali Sharma seem vital to the story on paper, but we don’t see them do anything of significance on-screen. Upendra's way of getting things done embodies the cacophony and disorderliness of the worlds he creates. But here, a more refined style would have not only helped the other characters participate in the drama, but would have also narrowed the film's ambit to the right size and scale. UI has some incredible technical achievements (H.C. Venu's cinematography and the VFX work) and Ajaneesh Loknath’s omnipresent score is impressive, but ultimately, the film isn’t the head-scratcher one hoped it would be.