I'm excited as I'll be seeing my name in the byline of a newspaper tomorrow morning after a long time. I'd submitted this interview a while back. But, it got delayed due to Newspaper Agents Strike.
Here
is the unedited version:
'In the recent times', we may
use this phrase in our day to day conversation but, it is different
to conjure up a story depicting the contemporary society and training
the camera on the social mores and bringing into open the things that
are considered taboo and shooed under the carpet. This is what
director Arun Kumar Aravind has done in his new film 'Ee Adutha
Kaalathu'. The film depicts contemporary urban from every angle be it
a child's or a septuagenarian’s, the vulnerability we all feel yet
display a confident façade as if we are total control and nothing
would go wrong however precarious our actions maybe.
The
young director would rather like to call his film a “genre-mix”
and not a multiple narrative film like last year's superhit
'Traffic'; “To start with, EAK (the abbreviation of the title) is
not a multiple narrative movie. It has a straight narrative. Murali
Gopy had made the detailed one-line script for this movie three years
back, which means it was conceptualised in 2009. EAK, if you ask me,
has a completely new narrative, which blends various story-telling
techniques together. It is a genre-mix”, he says in a self assured
manner. Further adding that “We never planned this movie, drawing
inspiration from movies like ‘Traffic’, which were different in
their own unique way. When I first heard the one-line from Murali, I
was pretty sure that this movie was going to be completely different
from what we have seen till now on the Indian screen”.
The
script of 'Ee Adutha Kaalathu' is much discussed as it is structured
as a Rubik's Cube telling the story of six people (or three couples)
from different sections of the society beginning with rag picker
portrayed by dependable Indrajith, his wife played by Mythili. Next
come Murali Gopy as a Corporate Honcho type of guy running a
multi-speciality hospital and his wife played by Tanushree Ghosh who
had failed to make it big in Bollywood in her younger days. And, the
oddest of them all being Anoop Menon, a modern day cop and Lena as a
TV journalist, pretending to be the liberated woman of twenty first
century with a host of other minor characters. At first the narrative
seems to be scattered as the pieces of a cube. They start to fall in
place at the end of first half. The Cube is even an intrinsic part of
the story, which is solved in the end with a hurrah. The director
explains the logic behind this: “We have used the Rubik’s Cube
not literally but subtly in the movie. The only point where it gets
literal is when we give the quote at the beginning of the movie
explaining the Rubik’s Cube and how it has similarities with the
lives that we lead on this planet. Beyond that, it is all subtle
pointers. And if you look closely, you can see that the dramatic
progression of the movie is akin to the solving of a Rubik’s Cube”.
The
film also becomes a visual documentation of contemporary urban
living, not only on the surface but also the psychology sketches of
the characters tackling taboos like a stressed out man trying hard to
hide erectile dysfunction, casual extra-marital flings and the
flourishing industry of making sleazy video clips using hidden camera
to feed the internet. One would be really curious find if the team
was apprehensive that these things could have alienated the family
audience, “We were not apprehensive but we were a bit nervous,
because of the amount of repression that we, as a population, have,
in this part of the world. But since this movie is all about telling
our stories in a sincere way, we were pretty sure that it would have
its connect with the audience”, says Arun.
Arun
was a visual effect expert who then turned to editing before taking
up direction, yet both his directorial ventures 'Cocktail' and 'EAK'
are stories requiring minimal technical glitz, “I don’t believe
in on-screen gimmicks, for the sake of it. I am very particular about
this. I believe that even a small movement of the camera must be
dramatically justified”.
'Ee
Adutha Kaalathu' marks the second coming of Murali Gopy as a writer
after a long gap. So, to end the talk on a lighter note you ask Arun
how much credit should the writer get for the success of this film?
“In this movie, content and narrative is the hero. So, I give full
credit to the writer. I, however, would pat myself for sensing the
possibility of such a subject and scripting style”, he says with a
wink
In
fact, the writer and the director have bonded so well during the
making of this film that they have locked not one but two projects
working as a team.
