A NEO-NOIR FILM WITH MANY TAKES OF THE SAME TALE

The American writer, Neal Stephenson wrote:“Once a person has all the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment.”

'ಉಳಿದವರು ಕಂಡಂತೆ' (“Ulidavaru Kandante”, which means, 'As Seen by the Rest') is a 2014 Kannada film, a neo-noir crime thriller, which presents an anthology of five versions of a story about a man's murder– various characters, with some knowledge of the crime, narrate the versions.

The story is set in the early 1990's in Malpe, a small fishing town along the Arabian Coast in Udupi district of Karnataka. The female protagonist, Regina (Sheetal Shetty) is a young journalist working on a past murder, for which Richard Anthony alias Richi (Rakshit Shetty) spends eight years in a remand home as punishment. Regina tells her editor that the intriguing story requires multiple pieces, each of which is a perspective about the crime. She interviews the characters to get five different versions, which are knit together into the script of the film.

Written and directed by Rakshit Shetty, the film starts with a bang, gathers steam well and peters out lamely. The debut attempt of the director to push the envelope on creativity– the aspiration perhaps was to emulate Quentin Tarantino and go a couple of notches beyond Pulp Fiction or Fargo– is indeed bold and laudable. The wonky, twisted, dark comedy of the film featuring a unique hue of "Roshomon Effect" is cool too. But, the movie crumbles under the overload of its non-linear, multi-threaded sequencing of the screenplay. The sub-plots do not synthesize seamlessly or harmoniously; in the result, the narrative is disjoint, perhaps deliberately so to enhance appeal with an abstruse, esoteric approach. But then, it misses the mark!

Kishore, Achyuth Kumar, et al, have put up decent performances in supporting roles. Karm Chawla's cinematography is awesome; the background score and editing could have been better.

On the whole the movie belabours to pull off something that it is not.

Nonetheless it is worth a watch.

My rating, a well-deserved: 7.0 on 10!

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