For my money and time, Tovino Thomas is one of the most adventurous actors of Indian cinema, dabbling, as he does, in multiple genres where he tries to conceal his matinee idol image in flawed characters. It doesn’t always work. Even when playing a clod he sometimes remains devilishly charming.
Damn!
In Nadikar, he is cast as an ‘insufferable superstar’, which is really in oxymoronic paradox in Kerala: there are no superstars in Malayalam cinema and the stars in Kerala are far from insufferable. So it takes a while to get used to “superstar” David Paddikal whose inflated sense of selfworth is not quite matched by his descalating stardom.
You see, David’s recent films have not been doing well. And he isn’t able to cope with the cut in his stardom. His two faithful companions are his manager Paily Kuruvilangad and his make-up man-cum-driver Lenin. David doesn’t treat them too well. But he leans on them for emotional support as there is no other supportive figure in his life. They take his tantrums in their stride, much like the core team of superstars in Bollywood.
The sterilized script (Suvin S. Somasekharan) plays it purely by numbers. The star-on-the-skids theme, also know as skids-o-phrenia in filmy parlance , is never given any twist that we don’t see coming. Showing David as a hedonistic child-man is not the act of image-breaking bravery. It is just a convenient peg to hang the actor’s redemptive journey.
Luckily, the narrative doesn’t buckle under David’s shame. There is a restraint in the way the emotions play themselves out , piece by piece, in a jigsaw which is not difficult to solve. We know exactly where director Lal Jr (his father Lal makes a cameo appearance during a shooting) is going with this. But the journey doesn’t get wearisome.
The peppery plots perks up pronouncedly after David hires an acting coach to improve his doddering skills (his last three films are boxoffice duds). As Bala, the acting (and life) coach the irrepressible Soubin Shahir is a saviour, and not just for the protagonist. He insists on telling David the truth about his films and acting ability. This doesn’t necessarily make him the most popular guy in the room. But it sure as hell makes him the catalyst of change so required in David’s life, not to mention the show-perk.
Soubin Shahir’s Bala is infectiously blunt, calling a spade a spade and a trashy film just that, I wish there were some Balas in the lives of selfdeluded Bollywood stars who believe the sun rises and sets from their posteriors, as there is no one there to tell them the truth.
Nadikar misses being a great behind-the-scenes film on the movie industry. It is too busy counting the tress to notice the forest, too taken up with tossing trope-ish characters into the frantically simmering cauldron.
If it would have only paused for a deep breath, the falling star would have fallen from grace more gracefully.
