Writer and director: Elan
Cast: Kavin, Lal, Aaditi Pohankar, Preity Mukhundhan and Geetha Kailasam
Available in: Theatres
Duration: 158 minutes
A young Kalai is supremely pissed with life when we’re introduced to his tiny world – a world that constitutes cinema and family. Not only is this little “Bharathiyar” late to his drama recital at school, he’s also lost the Tamil poet’s staunchly prominent mark of identification: his (adhesive) moustache. But how Elan uses this episode to wordlessly forecast Kalai’s future packed with struggle is a nice little exercise in screenwriting. Small moments like this get hearty payoffs, often at the tail end of Star – a film lead by the impassioned Kavin – and often a little too late.
Inspirational, rags-to-riches stories in cinema follow, and sometimes run the risk of an ancient template. Man learns his purpose, struggles to navigate said purpose, falls down, is fed inspirational monologues, tears are jerked on cue, and he gets up again. It’s not unobvious that Star too largely follows this template. Some of the best inspirational films – as corny as they may sound on paper — come from this template. Think Will Smith’s weep fest The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) and films about the hustle life like Gully Boy (2019). What makes these films great is not the template itself, but what they do with it. Star is very visibly stuck with the nitty-gritty of this structure, even as it sits on achieving something heartfelt and huge.
Kalai (Kavin), together with his wonderful dad (Lal as Stills Pandian), fosters the dream of becoming a movie star. What begins as a small spark of desire on the school stage, builds into his life’s only goal. It works brilliantly for the film and the genre that nothing comes easy for Kalai, a detail that immediately softens our hearts for him, even before we see him really struggle. We all love an out-of-luck hero. Elan gives us the whole ordeal — failed auditions, stoney broke days, sleepless nights in Bombay and the full works. Kavin commands a sort of lived-in underdog energy into Kalai, bringing in a spot of unexplainable pain and nuance to this struggling actor. But most of this seems like a wasted opportunity in a film that is obsessed with excesses.
Instead of doubling down on this pain and hitting us with a sledgehammer of emotions, the film randomly hits pause, and shows endless patience for the most mundane things. Which means we’re made to sit through stretches of turbulent male rage, as Kalai shows people who’s boss in college, a romance that blooms when a man sweeps his woman off her feet by explaining to her and other women, how they should be empowered, among other things. What irks the most about a film like this is how it treats the women in its midst. They exist either to fix and resuscitate a drowning man (Aaditi Pohankar) or exist just to be “dangerous” enough to motivate the man to settle with a "homely" girl and succeed in life (Preity Mukhundhan). Any amount of agency is deemed to be “selfish” when it comes to the woman, and “passionate” when it comes to the man.
When the film isn't stuck with such setbacks, it’s stuck not letting its scenes breathe — when a dramatic moment ends up wrecking a dream, we see the devastation, but don’t really feel anything. Life-changing acts of kindness from random strangers don’t overcome us with joy. When a heartbroken man asks his friend why he doesn’t reciprocate the warmth of his friendship, we’re left unmoved.
Moments like these are done full justice by DOP Ezhil Arasu K, but not by its writing. There’s this brilliant shot in the film where the camera films an employee award function like it’s almost a glitzy film award ceremony. Immediately though, laughs and applause are intercut with a stunning moment of gloom and ugly truth — moments like these aren’t hard to come by in Star. It’s just lost in a film that’s obsessed with chasing a hundred other things.