But the tone is hardly that of a film like Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback (1983), the KG George classic that traced the life of a starlet that makes it big and then loses it all. The backstory of Tara Janaki (a real and affecting Tamannaah) is just one part of the movie with the majority of it being told from the eyes of a very unreliable drunk narrator named “Mirchi” (Kalabhavan Shajon). What makes his story even more ambiguous is how he will only speak in favour of his old friend, full-time family man and part-time assassin Aala (Dileep).
Despite this mafia-meets-film world meeting point, the film’s best surprises appear when it’s in the zone of a movie like Notting Hill (1999). There’s a little bit of magic in the way Tara lands up in Aala’s Kerala home as he’s dancing to one of her songs playing on TV. Decades of Tamannaah’s stardom contributes to this “vision” as a seemingly ordinary guy welcomes a “real” star into his seemingly ordinary home. She is in search of refuge and solace, away from her controlling momager. All he can offer her is protection, comfort and the anonymity of regular living.
This stretch makes for lovely surprises like how a cup of tea is shared between the two as a king-size hoarding of Tara’s stares down at the couple, unbeknownst to the world around them. It is here that Dileep’s Aala remains a regular, vulnerable guy, with limitations and real-world problems. So when the film abandons it’s Kerala setting to move across to 90’s Bombay, the film is meant to feel like a little guy, trying to be seen in a big city.
The film I was more interested in is the one that was about Aala struggling to help Tara mount her magnum opus, a Padmavat clone that could cost Rs.10 crore in 90’s money. It appears as though this is the film the makers too envisioned, until it dawned upon them the idea to squeeze a gangster saga into it. With this decision, it goes into the same zone as Gautham Menon’s failed Enai Noki Paayum Thotta (2019). The regular everyman is made to do the extraordinary but the film does this in the silliest way possible — to give him a dangerous past, again, like Baashaa (1995).
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