True Love' will be screened at the Substation on 10 April. Check more details on the film's website.
For a bland and generic title like ‘True Love’, one does not
expect too much from the film, especially after a trippy opening sequence of
jumpy camera work. However, patience
pays off in watching the film. It does a thorough grinding of the issue of true
love through a tangled web of relationships between several characters. Husband
being infidel, wife running away with a stranger, two married women engaging in
lesbian love, True Love runs a whole gamut of different permutations. All seen
through the eyes of a private investigator (P.I.), who needless to say, plays
God in this.
‘True Love’ is S. Vicknesh’ maiden feature attempt and offers
quite some food for thought in a mostly gripping 80 plus minutes. The film
follows the emotional and investigative journey of a private investigator who
is doubly troubled from a rocky marriage and the theatrics he witnesses from
his clients. At home, he is in a constant tussle with his
career-driven-regional manager of a wife who comes home late. And testy. At
work, he faces a stunning but no-nonsense lady who wants to track down her
husband and a hormonally-raged man who wants to get even with his wife’s lover,
whoever that may be. It is of little wonder that he is beginning to be two
minds about his job. He approaches the cases dragging his feet and finding his
own roadblocks.
Vicknesh does a competent job of eliciting very natural
performances out of his main actors and steers clear of melodrama even when the
situation beckons. Debra Teng nailed every expression in her role as the
estranged wife. The actor played Lizard, the gang boss, with composure and
complexity. The lady who played the career wife had one of the toughest roles
given her duality but gave redefined poker face. The lead actor who played the
P.I. held us onto the journey with his furtive eyes but could do with a bit
more punctuation in the way he expresses himself. Noticeably, the director has
a penchant for watchful eyes and does lingering shots of his characters
surmising their various situations.
While the P.I. bumbles along his work with a hint of reluctance,
the story really starts to get interesting when his wife’s late night suppers
are becoming a regular fixture. At the same time, doing his job brings him
closer to understanding the alienation his own wife has brought upon him. While
skipping a plot pivot to avoid a spoiler, the pivoting point, albeit a little
too abrupt, re-ignites the sniffing investigative instincts in him. So he sets
of in a determined way to uncover, not an infidel spouse, but crime this time.
While the director manages to cook up believable exchanges
between the characters, he falters in knowing how to punctuate those moments,
sometimes resulting in dialogues that amount to a drone. It also does not help
that the lead actor speaks in a drowsy monotone, though he is more adept with
his eyes. Noticeably, split-second flashes of scene-playback together the
abrupt gray-scale interjections that look like your TV needing a fix, are
peppered throughout the film, like the director’s way of accentuating moments.
Sometimes, this looks like a convenient stylistic motif. But if it is to
heighten the adrenalin, then more thought could be put into tightening what
seems like loose TV-style sequences.
Having said that, the film runs on a pretty tight script. All
the dots join and lead, in a logical way, to a thoughtful cliffhanger ending.
At the very core, the choice of a P.I. protagonist is shrewd as it welds all
the subplots together nicely like a spokes of a bicycle wheel. One person leads
to another and somehow it finds its way back again in the web of relationships.
Just like how the protagonist who initially chose to close the door on the
estranged wife, he ends up in a closer encounter with her at the end. Without
drama, just frozen stares, the film takes us to an epiphanic high-point and
leaves us to complete the love equation.
