Lucia (2013)

From the projectionists' booths have come films packaged with everything that the medium has brought: all the desires, all the dreams. From the Italian great Nuovo Cinema Paradiso to the ambitious Kannada Lucia, the crumbling theaters are only held together by love, an innocent assistant (Salvatore or Toto, Nikhil or Nikki), and a wise master loyal to his craft (Alfredo, Shankaranna): and these theaters will become the scenes from where the young men will launch onto the seas of life, equipped with everything they have learnt, spending hours changing reels or showing torchlight in the 'talkies'. But while most of such films focus on life's journey and romance, Lucia takes a step up: it delves into psychology and science fiction, and even metaphysics. The unforgettable film does it all packaged tightly in the typical Indian masala: a pejorative term for many in the West who are unable to see spices lacing up good cuisine, and yet a beloved ingredient for any real food lover outside of those milieux where a film is cut and dried into genres.

Set to pulsating music and bright humour, the film brims with energy through its constant alternation between two worlds (or one?): the real and the dream. The switching starts to happen so constantly, that soon both worlds meld easily into one story in the spectator's mind, unable to take in such fast pace of dual lives: until the amazing end of the film, when the viewer is forced to cleave the two. Or, unable to, is left with stranded questions. I wonder what would have been the result if Pawan Kumar, the director of Lucia, had met Kieslowski, the director of Rouge. The film world could never have been the same. Kumar does well also to rope in two relatively unknown actors for the two major roles of Nikhil and Shwetha: in particular, Sathish Neenasam as Nikhil is the person who makes the film really work. He slips easily into both his characters, and while an endearing smile plays on his face as the torch shiner, a tiredness of life hovers around his mouth as the famous celebrity.

The film leaves you with the question: "Is the dream within you? Or are you within the dream? Or are both of you just in the Omniscient eye?" And it shall haunt you forever.