Decoding the movies of Dasavathani
There is a saying that goes like “life is a stage and we are all actors”, but I am skeptical about how many roles one can play at max throughout his life. There are 4 to 5 roles which invariably everyone plays due to the curse of time, but apart from that, there is hardly any. People who are really actors by profession in the stage of life are blessed when it comes to this. They can play several different roles throughout their career. But still, many actors end up playing the role of a police, a body builder or an American groom their entire life because people are so used to seeing them in those roles. Then there are few exceptional actors like Kamal Hassan who actually become the role they are playing. Kamal is such a good actor that a real don will evaluate himself after witnessing the performance of Kamal as a don in a movie. This blog is an attempt to decode the legend’s filmographic data.
Kamal is one of the very few actors who has broken the North-South demarcation of movie stars and has convincingly acted in films from different regions and won hearts. Kamala Hasan is a name which is familiar with film fraternity and film lovers throughout the country. Let’s take his movies and cluster it by the language of the film.
Kamal started his career with Tamil movies, then started acting in Malayalam films. His first appearance in a Hindi movie came in the year 1977, but his market in Hindi films really shot up after the release of Ek Duuje Ke Liye. This movie was such a big hit that for the next four years Kamal had at least two Hindi movies releasing every year. The plot of the year 1984 looks as though a Bollywood actor has given a shot in Kollywood for a change. By mid-80s he had acted in most of the major Indian Languages. In 1987 he acted in the language that the whole world loves, the Silent film. Thereby, Kamal had already found a solution to the present issues in cinema like remake rights, copyright, regional conflict etc. 30 years ago.
Ek Dujje Ke Liye was directed by K.Balachander. Not only this movie, many other movies involving KB-Kamal combo became a super duper hit. Let’s now quickly take a look at K.Balachandar’s filmographic data with the Kamal ingredient.
Well Well, Looks like Kamal was the blue-eyed boy of Balachandar. Just check the films between 1973 to 1980. Look at the number of consecutive movies in which Balachandar had cast Kamal. In the current era, we get bored and start criticising actors for signing films with the same director consecutively. In those 8 years, more than 80% of KB’s movie had Kamal in it, yet most of them were super hit. That might be partly because those movie had strong stories supported by some serious acting rather than just walking and shooting.
Kamal is someone who likes playing multiple roles not just in filmmaking but also in the films he is making. Kamal is no stranger to dual roles or multiple roles. Let’s now look at the character map of Kamal’s movies. There are many bilingual movies which Kamal has acted. So a dual role in that movie would signify 2*2 = 4 Kamals. For the ease of understanding things better, I have removed such duplicates from the dataset.
Just look at the number of multiple roles he has played. In the year 1985 alone he has played 3 movies with dual roles. I think by the end of 1985 people must have started believing that Kamala Hassan really has a twin brother who goes by the name Vimala Hassan. With editing and CG not so well developed in those days, just imagine the amount of effort he must have put in. Plus most of his multirole movies are not like you act as protagonist A and you place a mole in your right cheek to become protagonist B and tie a kerchief in the right hand to become protagonist C. They are very different from each other.
Just to harden my point, I did prepare a visualization for movies which has more than one Kamal in it. Each emoji represents a Kamal. The emojis are picked based on the character which Kamal portrays in that movie. The emoji with the grey coat and the tie represents kamal himself without much make over. Everything else represents a make over. The places where you see two or more Kamals together with grey coat are the kind of multiple roles where you can switch the roles easily, for all others you need some good effort to do the same.
There is a popular belief that for each person there will be 6 lookalikes around the world. I am sure this won’t apply for Kamal. When a person can’t look like himself within a span of months how can we find six more look-alikes like him? It is impossible.
After the release of Bahubali, saw news bits that someone is going to make an epic movie of Mahabaratha with a budget of 1000 crores. When you have trouble to cast actors for the roles of Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula and Sahadeva reach out to me, I know a guy who can play all their roles as well as the role of Draupadi.
