Nearly a decade ago, Selvaraghavan made "7/G Rainbow Colony" which told us there is life after love and how suicide is not a solution for heartbreak. A decade later, he gives that message a fantastical twist, asking us to go a step further in reclaiming lost love - even if a step means traveling to a parallel reality. "Irandam Ulagam" is mostly a populist RomCom in the clothes of a high-concept sci-fi fantasy. It is the journey of a Vinod or a Kathir in search of his Divya or Anitha.
I cannot be entirely sure just how much Selva has fumbled here in relation to that one previous big-budget film of his. I haven't seen "Aayirathil Oruvan", but I massively respect the fact that a director took it upon himself to give the people a fantasy film about our absurdly rich history. The same cannot be said for "Irandam Ulagam"; what it lacks in originality, it also lacks in clarity. The end result is a messy compound of undercooked ideas wrapped inside an incoherent and bloated narrative. It's hard to believe someone like Selvaraghavan has made such a corny film about "pure love" and "all the Universe conspiring in helping a person achieve it."
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I like how the film didn't resort to excessive spoon-feeding and jumps right into the narrative, expecting us to keep up. We are introduced to our two pairs of protagonists, living in two different worlds. Anushka is Ramya and Varna, and Arya is Madhu and Maruvan respectively on Planet Earth and Planet I-don't-know-where. Selva uses a modern-day setting just to ease audience into a world which is completely strange to them. The two love-stories, if we can call it that, run parallel before it's time for these worlds to collide. Here's where the abstraction begins to take its toll on us. There are long stretches of scenes which make very little sense. To make things worse, an abrupt and unconvincing tragedy is forced upon us.
We don't know if a portal opened on its own to let Madhu in or if this particular Oracle lady, played by a Kalki Koechlin lookalike, made it happen. The Oracle's role in the Kingdom and in Maruvan's family is never explained either. Then there is a subplot about an ongoing war with a neighboring kingdom that felt severely under-explained. It's also very hard to believe that a world, this world in particular, could exist without love. It's such an incredible idea which is so under-explored that it becomes maddening after a point. The film is only too happy to keep aside its ambitions in favor of love failure songs. I just hope Selva doesn't blame the film's failure on audience's inability to comprehend what he's trying to say. It's a poorly directed film and that's the only truth.
You are not in Koyambedu anymore. Myth building is perhaps not Selva's strong suit and his version of Pandora is a proof for that. The issue is not the quality of CG at all; it's just that there's no visual consistency throughout the film's runtime. The geography and its other defining aspects are confusing to say the least. The sky looks different in each scene, populated with distant stars and galaxies thrown together haphazardly. The flora and fauna looks heavily inspired, differing only due to unintentional discrepancies. The natives are all Caucasians with the exception of our protagonists. The derivative nature of the world is a problem especially because all these elements come together and create something improbable. Selva expects audience to take his creation seriously, but won't return the favor by offering a little more insight about the science. But I have to admit the work on one particular variant of a lion was pretty stunning. Sitting two rows from the screen, I found it deeply unsettling.
On the surface, it may be about a man's search for lost love, but beneath the layers of tacky visual effects, I have reasons to believe "Irandam Ulagam" dealt with one unifying theme: feminism. At the very beginning, we are told that the parallel world, the Irandam Ulagam, never prospered because their people never learned to love; a world where the thought of getting a woman's consent never crossed the mind of a man; a world where rape is the natural state of order. Selva gives primeval characteristics to the natives which sadly seem to exist even today in our "civilized" society. Selva provokes us to think about the world we live in and how we treat our women by drawing parallels which should have ceased to exist long, long ago. He talks about dwindling sex ratio and how turning down a woman's proposal is the worst thing one could do in this day and age.
Maruvan conquers a feared beast to keep Varna from falling onto the bed of the King, but this understandably doesn't sweep her off her feet. It's still an agreement between two men, with no place for her consent. She would even kill herself rather than be married to a man (why this world even has a system of marriage, we will never know.) Varna eventually has a change of heart towards her man. There's a crackling scene where Varna and Maruvan draw swords at each other in the middle of their fight with a common enemy. Perhaps that's the only way to solve the menace of inequality. Together. But the lines often get blurred and the subtext doesn't reflect coherently on the screen. Who are those people in black robes who want to create a world with one king, one religion and one God? What do they represent? How can a world that doesn't respect women be revering a female prophet? Is she a slave to them? It's questions like these that keep me up at night.
I cannot imagine any other actor besides Anushka to play the female lead. The character demands a big girl and big is what she is. In spite of being a fairly lengthy film, there are many scenes in the film which feel rushed. Maruvan goes from being a village bum into an invincible warrior of sorts in the blink of an eye. He becomes so good at fighting that the clashes at the end become pointless. The idea of a kingdom which is on the cusp of experiencing love for the first time is all good, but Selva does too little where there was scope for so much more. And he does it with utter lack of finesse. For all I know, thematically, the film might not even be as deep as I am willing to give it credit for.