Charlie AKA Maara

Prelude : 

A post after a full 2.5 years.... oops....

Nothing ever starts afresh - so does nothing ends without a trace. 

Universe always operates with the principle of "punarapi jananam, punarapi maranam " and  I learnt that the word "avatar" just means "coming again" ; So neither entry nor exit gets more significant than "being" in universe.

 Dear All

I always have a flair for Remade Films ; Enjoying the individual styles of screenplay & customisation for "local audience", I like to compare and contrast the two films allowing myself the luxury of seeing the film in each language at least twice to take my analysis to a different level of depth. This blog contains my outpourings on Wednesday AKA Unnai pol Oruvan and Dhrishyam AKA Papanasam. which are the top of my memory still. In both the films I had watched the original non tamil version first (Hindi in the case of former &  Malayalam for the latter) and got into a RAGE when I saw the tamil version. The popular view of cinema field is that  Tamil audience needs more verbalisation and an extra pinch of sentiments and emotions. The "rawness" in Tamil version was too visible for me  in both the references above and I could not tolerate the manner Kamal killed the soul of the original version. However I felt Vasool Raja MBBS was one notch higher than Munnabhai  (though I still consider as an exception only). Another remade film that really amused me was 3 Idiots AKA Nanban where I was even enjoying even the cast of the Tamil version almost resembled the Original Hindi version.

Well, this post is about Maara AKA Charlie. I saw Maara right on the date of its release in Amazon way back during Jan 2021; some how was destined to see it again and again on 3 more consecutive days and there after another 2 / 3 times during the course of year. Just to put it straight, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I did hear that the original malayalam movie was lot better and in fact it was mentioned in the Ananda Vikatan's film review too - inspite of giving good rating to the tamil version.  I developed a  strong urge to also see Charlie - the original version which was released 6 years back for my "compare and contrast" game. Unfortunately, I could not find it in Netflix or Amazon and the free download available at a site had a very poor film quality without subtitles. My expectation got built up as for the first time, I had the situation in my hand where I saw the Tamil remade film first and it was a big question for me if the original could be better than Maara !!

It took such a long time to fetch a really good copy of the film with sub-titles thru a friend and during the course of Nov until today I watched Charlie few times (yep  3 times) before writing this post. The first time, I watched it without any subtitles - quite sincerely to get max out of the film's originality, I felt it was bit abrupt and with too much "gaps" which substantially got evaporated as I saw it next couple of times with sub-titles. This is also a well made movie and here I am sitting shell shocked at the discovery that - for the first time - I am enjoying both the films with their own intrinsic beauty and depth, few points where one film was few notches higher than the other & vice-versa in few other scenes / depiction.

This is going to be a series of posting as I will dig deep into Charlie in my next one and then sum up my observations on Maara in last post & there are two reasons for the order of posts. Yes chronologically Charlie is the first one and so it is fair it write about it before Maara but then, since a tamil film has at last broken my earlier perception, it is perfect to have a last word on Maara.  

Well, why this post ? 

When we are awe struck with too many thoughts;  it is better to vent it out, isn't it good for us ? After all no thought process should be allowed deep enough inside us and get us moored with those "got-over" stuff or past tense. To keep ourselves engaged and involved with active present, I feel its important to shirk off the past baggage and things that entangle us to the past. 

So do you think the last para was too much nonsense ?? I call it yoga or the process of moving out of deep impressions ("vriddhi"). 

Love // Suchoo