Movie: Actor
Cast: Naveen Krishna and Sihi Kahi Geetha
Director: Dayal Padmanabhan
Rating: 3
About five year ago, the black and white French romantic-comedy depicting one of the silent eras in films was an instant hit, even bagging an Oscar. It revolved around a superstar of silent era films and how his switch to sound or talky movies affects him and his career as an artiste. Dayal Padmanabhan returns once again with his favourite artiste Naveen Krishna with the movie, Actor. This comes after his impressive Haggada Kone, a film that talked about death penalty.
With only two actors, shot in a single location for about 100 minutes, Actor is quite an impressive ‘attempt.’ Though it falls short of several accounts, the strong pillar is undoubtedly the lead actor Naveen Krishna, who has been struggling to find a strong foothold in commercial movies. It is like green tea without sugar and milk, which is good for health, but not as tasty enough for the masala audiences.
However, there is history behind the making of this movie – the main producer of the film took it as a challenge to produce a good movie in a short time, for reasons best known to him and to the Gandhinagar fraternity.
Dayal finds a perfect script which requires just two actors, a single location and a script which can hold the audience’s attention to the screen for less than two hours! Naveen Krishna plays a film actor who is a star with over 75 per cent hits in the short span of his career. He soon finds himself in an awkward situation with his previous films not doing so well at the box-office. With his lost stardom, the actor in him is going through a tough phase which starts to play on his mind. Wanting and waiting to act in good movies with good subject and characters, he starts to lead a secluded life.
If the acting is too good then the dialogues are brilliant too. In one of the scenes, while his mind is playing games on him, his maid, the only other character in the entire film, tries to cheer him up. She starts to narrate a story, one from her personal inventory of experience. The actor persuades her to tell him the story, saying that it’s been a while since he heard a good story – all the while thinking about committing suicide. But, will he end his life? Definitely a good watch.
