I am so embarrassed! I got confused and accidentally watched the Tamil remake of Lucia first!  And now I can’t go back, my primary reference is always going to be the second version not the original!  The best I can do to make up for it is to review them both together.

(Luckily, moviemavengal did not make the same mistake, and was able to watch the original unspoiled!  Check out her review here)

Luckily, they are almost the exact same movie.  The only difference really is funding.  The Kannada film has a raw and wild energy to it, crazy cuts, unusual settings, unpracticed actors.  Sure, maybe that’s mostly because they had to work with no money for sets or locations or professional actors for the bits part.  But it gave it a great feeling, a unique feeling.  A feeling that went well with the dream based plot and the message that a regular life can be magical.

But then the Tamil film took the same plot and threw money at it.  Suddenly they don’t have to use funky angles to hide the rest of the room, or make do with a somewhat awkward extra, or use whatever location they can find rather than the one that makes the most sense.  It makes the feel of the film less unique, but the storyline clearer.

The other big difference is in the movie industry as it is shown in the film.  Moving it from Kannada to Tamil Nadu changes things.  In the Kannada version, our hero in his “real” life works at a crumbling old movie theater which is struggling through the owner’s determination to only show Kannada films, not Hindi or Hollywood.  In his “dream” life, he is a movie star.  But a Kannada movie star, so the stardom feels a little bit smaller.  His apartment is nice, but not spectacular.  His press conference feels small and he knows all the reporters.  His big dream for retirement is to open a theater in his home village.  Film runs through both films as a magic part of the world, but also a local and familiar part.

Meanwhile, in the Tamilian version, everything is a little bigger.  In his “dream” life, he can’t go anywhere without being mobbed by fans.  His trailer is luxurious, he has dedicated police protection, his big dream is to produce his own movie.  And in his “real” life, the issue is not that the theater is showing Tamil films (because a theater that only shows Tamil films would have no problem making money), it is that the theater is a single-screen being threatened by multiplexes and the owner’s determination not to give in to the gentrification of the neighborhood.  In this version, film is not just magic, but powerful, reliable.

That’s what’s different in general, there were a couple of other small distinct differences, mostly related to how the ending unfolded.  But over all, it’s the same movie.  And it is a beautiful movie, with a beautiful message, beautifully conveyed, in both Tamil and Kannada.

It starts out interesting, confusing, complicated.  We see a man in a coma, a lot of news crews talking about him, the police investigating.  And then it becomes simple, just a young man from the villages talking about his life in the city, living with 3 roommates in a tiny apartment, working for the fatherly manager of a local cinema where he is the “torch bearer”.  His only problem is insomnia, and even that is simply solved, with the offer of pill from a stranger who promises it will make him dream.  And then he dreams, and it is a world of wonder!  Black and White (as dreams sometimes are), but he is a movie star with gorgeous women in love with him and assistants and police at his beck and call.

When our simple “real” hero sees and falls in love with a girl on a motorcycle, our “dream” hero sees the same girl in an ad and falls in love at first sight, trying to track her down.  This is also one of the small changes between versions, in the Kannada he sees her photo in a magazine ad for bridal wear; in Tamil he sees her in an ad for a motorcycle.  I suspect the motorcycle ad is the prefered version, because it shows a little more of her personality, and it is related to the “real” version of her, but it was too expensive to shoot a fake ad so they had to make do with a photo instead.  Their romances progress slightly off kilter in both versions, while she easily falls for him in the “dream” life, in the “real” one he has to convince her.  When everything goes sour in the “real” life, it soon goes sour in the “dream” one as well.  Even in his “dream” he can’t imagine having her.  When his mentor-theater owner dies in his “real” life, he similarly can no longer imagine having his mentor-manager around in his “dream” life, and sends him away.  Finally though, everything is happy in both lives.  In his “real” life, he has made a success of the theater and his girlfriend is impressed.  In his “dream” life, his girlfriend has come back to him.  And then it all beautifully turns on its head, and we are not watching a movie about dreams, but rather about depression.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER MASSIVE SPOILER IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EITHER MOVIE YET DO NOT KEEP READING:

Turns out, the “real” story we have been seeing, about the struggle to keep a small theater going, the slow pursuit of a girl slightly above him, having a hard time even learning enough English to get a slightly better job, that was all a dream.  In reality, he is a movie star, who is being threatened by gangsters, who struggles with insomnia, who is in love with a model that he imagines is a waitress and who has a mentor-manager who he imagines is the owner of a small theater.  And the reason it felt so dreamlike, in black and white, with everything being a slight remove from reality, is because he is deeply deeply depressed.  And finally, in the end, chooses to kill himself and escape to the dream world where he can feel “real” again, instead of staying in his actual life, where it all just feels like a “dream.”

It’s actually one of the most beautiful depictions of depression I’ve ever seen onscreen.  The problem with depression (besides it being a potentially fatal illness), is that it’s not very cinematic.  The whole point is that you don’t really feel anything or care about anything.  What kind of a movie is that?  Much better is schizophrenia, with all kinds of excitement and energy and fear and mad plots and caring too much about the wrong things.

(See, now this is cinematic!)

But in this, they managed to have it both ways, and trick the audience in the process.  We think that the “dream” world is in black and white because it is a dream.  We don’t care as much about it, it doesn’t feel quite real, or like it really matters, because it is a dream.  Our hero moves through space at a remove, he drives people away from him, he doesn’t seem to care about consequences or the future.  Because, we think, it is all a dream.  The “real” world has emotions and consequences and friendships and caring.  It has tragedy too, and sorrow.  Clearly, this is reality, not the dream.

Only, for a depressed person, “reality” is a dream.  To feel something, anything, even sorrow.  To make a connection, even if it leads to sadness when it ends.  To risk losing a job, to worry about money, to care about disappointing your family.  Only, as his disease worsens, he loses control of even this escape.  His “real” girlfriend leaves him, his mentor dies, everything is slipping away and his sickness is bleeding into his escape.  That is why he makes his plans to leave his “dream” life and escape to “reality” at the end.  We see him drive away all those close to him, his manager, his girlfriend.  He doesn’t care about anything any more, not even his job.  And in the end, he just needs one more small shot of happiness to get him to decide to take the final step, to see that even winning back the woman he loves is not enough to break him out of the illusion in which he is trapped, and therefore he must escape into a life that feels “real”.  And so, our “dream” hero, the movie star, with the gorgeous model girlfriend, and all the power and money he could ever want, jumps off a balcony to escape into “real” life like he sees in his dreams.

The biggest difference between the two films is in how this conflict is resolved. And I’m not sure which one is really better.  In the original Kannada film, our hero asks his girlfriend, now that they are reunited, what they should do to celebrate.  She says they should just go for a long ride on his motorbike.  He has a vision of the two of them together, and then jumps.  Months later, to bring him out of his coma dream, she speaks to him, trying to call him back from the abyss, and they shoot a gun next to his head, trying to shock him out of it.  In his dream, he has been married to his dream girlfriend and has turned the cinema hall into a success.  But, as he walks through his apartment, first his child, then his wife, then the furniture and decorations all disappear.  Finally, he finds himself on a beach, and as they shoot the gun in the hospital room (is no one worried about oxygen tanks?), he dreams that a figure comes up behind him and shoots him.  And he finally awakes.  And we pull back out of the hospital room and into a projection room, just like he had seen in his “reality”, to see his manager running the projector, his girlfriend bringing pizza from the restaurant in which the “real” girlfriend had worked, and our “dream” hero, the movie star, happily wearing glasses and dressed like a working man, helping to move reels of film.  He has made his dream into reality and his reality into a dream.

Now, see, that’s a beautiful ending.  But it wouldn’t really work in the Tamil remake, because frankly I don’t believe a major Tamil movie star could just slide into obscurity and open a movie theater.  Plus, there’s the whole problem that in the Tamil version they make a big point that single-screens are dying, so it has this tinge of a world that is ending, not a good and hopeful future for him.  So in the Tamil remake, they went another way, and they killed the dream.

Of course, there was a little more that went into it to make it work.  You can’t just change the whole ending like that.  They took out the dream of running a theater, and put in a dream of making a movie, the script for which was based on his dreams, and which he shared with his girlfriend.  She was always part of this other life for him, and part of the joy of it was the closeness he felt with her in sharing it.  And secondly, in that final meeting with his girlfriend, he doesn’t ask her what the two of them should do next, he asks how their movie should end, what should be the last he sees of his “real” people.  And she says they should be sitting on a beach, and she should just lean her head against his shoulder.  That is the image he sees before he jumps.  And that is why, when the gun goes off next to him in the hospital, he sees himself back on the same beach, shot.  He tried to escape to the dream through death, but now his death in the dream is driving him back to reality.

I think I still like the Kannada ending slightly better, but it is a close thing!