Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai Movie Review:
Eternal. There is so much positivity to the idea of something being eternal. But is it always a great thing? Experiencing a love that transcends time and space is a beautiful feeling, but what if it comes with the pain of separation, the angst of yearning, and the burden of repetition? In fact, the nameless protagonist (Nivin Pauly) of director Ram’s latest, Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai, is an immortal being who has been walking through the sands of time for over 8,000 years. He is worldly wise, weary, and anything but winsome. But one can’t blame him for his irritable demeanour because, as Kamal Haasan wrote in Uttama Villain, “Saagavaram pol sogam undo…” (Is there anything sadder than being immortal?) What keeps him walking on the face of the earth? Love. So an immortal falls in love with someone (Anjali); he has met her five times over 8,000 years, and between each meeting, he craves her and lives his life searching for her. Now, this timeless love story has all the makings of a… let’s say timeless love story. But even with the backing of a whimsical idea, it is perplexing to see Ram try to ground his film in a moving train that, unfortunately, chugs around in circles.
Director: Ram
Cast: Nivin Pauly, Anjali, Soori, Rat
The film begins as a bedtime story narrated by a woman to a child, who wants to find himself a permanent home. It is a beautiful way to start a film about a time-transcending traveller who doesn’t have a name to call himself, or a home to settle down in. Through this story, we meet this guy who loves sleeping because that is the only time he gets to be with his dream girl. Fascinating, right? But he is rudely woken by another traveller (Soori), who almost misses the train but jumps onto this ride into his worst nightmare at the last minute. He is someone who is returning home after 8 years. What happens when a man who never had a home in 8000 years meets a man who hasn’t returned home in 8 years? What conversations would they have about love, longing, and belonging? How would they deal with the people left behind on their journey to find better means of living? But that isn’t the film Ram wants to make. Instead, half the runtime is devoted to discussing the lack of humanity ingrained in our evolution from Early Man to today’s late-for-the-train Man. These portions are whimsical, but they become exasperating because they feel like a jumble of ideas that confuse you.
For some reason, the immortal tells his story to a mortal who constantly disrespects the life of a rat living in the train with her family. In a way, it is like reading a biography and an autobiography of the same person at the same time. Yet we don’t get any new perspectives; we just get overlapping stories that become unnecessarily indulgent and, unfortunately, artificially intelligent. In the portions where we transcend timelines, Ram uses subpar CGI and AI slop to bring the bounties of our nature to life. The irony notwithstanding, these sequences are not what we expect from someone like Ram. What makes it even more infuriating is how NK Ekambaram's work gives the film's various timelines such an authentic feel. Yet when artificial intelligence is brought in to bridge vision and execution, the film ends up disappointing. Of course, anyone can adapt to evolving technology, but it makes you wonder if this was the best way to tell a story that aims to reconnect mankind with nature. Is it the best way to talk about how mankind fails to understand that the world is not just meant for them? But even if you look past the quality of these scenes, Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai drowns in its detours.
But some aspects feel straight out of Ram’s cinematic universe. He doesn’t paint the immortal as someone who knows everything. Yes, human beings are oblivious to the world around them, but… is the immortal any better? In one scene, an exasperated Soori breaks all the lights on the train to escape the clutches of an angry Nivin, who wants to punish the former for trying to kill that rat. Nivin subdues Soori and tells the rat not to come out of its home until he collects all the glass shards and disposes of them. However, after cleaning up the shards, he just throws them out of the moving train. Now, what about the rats that might have been holed up in those areas? Or any other living beings that walk around there? What about their safety? If that’s how an 8000-year-old man thinks, can we blame someone a few millennia younger than him for having a narrow-minded approach? Through the vortex he builds by interweaving the two stories, it is almost as if Ram is saying that, unlike women, men have always seen the world through the lens of immediacy.
In fact, these are wonderful takeaways from a film that dares to show how love can make even an 8000-year-old man hopeful about tomorrow. A beautiful scene shows Anjali on a seashore, where love transforms even untoward glances into tears. In another scene, Nivin asks if he could go back to the time when sleeping on her lap felt like home. A couple of dialogues explore how the flowing water and swaying breeze take on new meaning when she is next to him. In these portions, the music fills in some heavy themes with such elan that you crave more. However, these beautiful scenes are sparse in this film, which also wants to be a survival drama that becomes painful to endure.
In those train sequences, Soori feels out of place, and the writing gives him nothing to do except be bewildered by everything happening around him. And Nivin hams it up like there’s no tomorrow. With both actors operating on a caricaturish scale, the rat’s journey is the most human. Every single time her life is in danger, we worry about whether she will safely return to her children. The film also explores fatherhood, which becomes another fantastic idea that isn’t fleshed out enough. A last-minute addition to the journey feels as random as it can get, and its resolution doesn’t belong in this film. Even in a film where anything goes, this feels a tad bit too much.
But whenever this film moves away from the train and indulges itself in a fairy tale about a man and a woman finding themselves again and again, Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai shows what it could have been. We also have Nivin and Anjali at the top of their game in these portions. But along the way, we're forced to meet a toucan, a lemur, a tiger, a monkey, a crocodile, an elephant, a bandicoot, and, of course, the rat. Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai wants to be many things, especially the cinematic equivalent of the trolley-train experiment. Is a rat's or a rabbit's life less important than a human being’s life? We know evolution has put us at the top of the food chain, and what we do to each other and the rest is an act against humanity and nature. However, it doesn’t mean preachiness translates to compelling cinema.
But there is something magical about seeing how love can fester in hearts separated by eons. It gives you the hope that soulmates do exist. When we hear the final voiceover circle back to immortality and men's inherent shortsightedness, it makes you believe in love that transcends seven seas and seven mountains. If only the film didn’t think it needed to break away from this mystical journey about eternal love to reiterate, for the 8000th time, that humans are selfish creatures... Introspection is good, but there is a difference between a gentle nudge and a violent push onto a coming train.
