Oh David what art thee?
A few months ago, on a fine night I started binge-watching Tamil short films on the YouTube channel Bench Culture. An initiative by filmmaker Karthik Subbaraj (Pizza, Jigarthanda and Iraivi), the channel orders and streams some of the quality short films in Tamil.
One of the films which blew me over was the murder mystery Jilebi directed by Rishi Karthik.
The film has it all, right from the trippy intro visuals accompanied by Illayaraja’s Illaya Nila number to the odd Tarantino, Sherlock and True Detective references. Both screenplay and dialogues were one of the strong points of the film.
Soon after watching the movie I looked up Rishi Karthik’s future projects on his FB profile and I found the trailer of Duke David.
The trailer featuring Black Strobe’s I’m a man and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody as the BGM gave the impression that the film was a no holds barred version of a classic Guy Ritchie film.
Positive reviews started flowing on the internet as soon as it released. Duke David too was ordered by Bench Culture.
I decided to watch the movie at late night yesterday and my initial reaction was that it was nowhere near as good as Jilebi. In fact, I did not like it all.
The film is a story about how a chain snatcher, hunts down those who robbed his life savings kept in a non functional Maruti Suzuki Swift. The protagonist's friend Bottle Bobby, in-charge of guarding the money is also killed brutally.
I could not bring myself to like the lead protagonist ( some solid acting though by Muthu Kumar) for the choice of his profession. The character is a bully in every sense.
It was easy to predict from a distance that the bad side will win in the end. I felt the director had become too indulgent this time which was dangerous for someone who still hadn’t made the transition to the mainstream medium.
I felt like personally messaging Rishi Karthik about my problems with the movie, as he is my FB friend. And also thought of making it the subject of my dissatisfaction and for the next blog post.
All of this was until I started reflecting about the movie which is when my thoughts became bit clear. The positives for me were the dialogues. One of which goes like this-
“Aaluma Doluma, ithu patchei ane olluma”.
Which translates to Aaluma Doluma ( a popular tamil song), you’ve been caught red handed while lying.
There is also one interesting bit involving the case of missing keys named Trisha, Nayanthara and Tammanah.
Finally one dialogue helped me understand the motives the characters in the movie. It goes like this-
“When do crimes happen? Mostly when the person committing them is sure that nobody has the guts to stop him”.
It summed up the whole movie for me and I could infer the following important points :
A) The Bad side won since no one had the guts to stop them.
B) Most of the characters were consumed by the drive to act on their own interests and hardly had any shades of good.
C) The protagonist having all the negative shades was again an ode to the above dialogue.
Or, I was probably making too much out of an average movie and it was high time that I slept.
