![]() ![]() The male protagonist gets panic attacks, a top cop who is on the verge of retirement wants to solve the case of a series of child kidnappings, a wife is disillusioned with her husband, police egos kick in, and then there is a scientific experiment. The film deploys a number of disparate elements throughout its run-time. Preethi Asrani, who made a name for herself with 'Malli Raava', is surprisingly good in the role of an anguished wife. That says a lot about how the setup of 'A' is driven. In a way, the actor looks like a good-natured, distraught Malayalam movie lead. He is nuanced and is entirely endearing in whatever he does. Nithin Prasanna, who plays a challenging role, comes across as a seasoned performer with a solid grounding in stage performance. It enriches the saga although it doesn't have a direct bearing on what the film eventually seeks to narrate. And this backstory is not a mere red-herring. The film has a character who wants to topple the dictatorship of Mrs. What do the 1970s remind you of? Indira Gandhi. It revolves around a married guy who goes in search of knowing his past. The story of 'A' spans decades, moving to and fro from 1970s to 2019. What is Sanjeev's past? Can he reconcile it with the present? Who is the criminal and who is innocent? Answers to these questions are found in the second half. There comes a point when Sanjeev becomes a suspect in an important case investigated by Vishnu (Rangadham). With their little kid Amrutha (Baby Deevana), they lead a fairly normal life but for the fact that Sanjeev, a memory loss patient, is haunted by strange nightmares. ![]() ![]() His wife Pallavi (Preethi Asrani) is a nurse. Sanjeev (Nithin Prasanna) is introduced as a differently-abled private employee. To order a copy go to .'A (Ad Infinitum)' is one of the several movies that has come out this week. You count them down, every one.Īntkind by Charlie Kaufman is published by Fourth Estate (£18.99). But then Kaufman hurtles into the next surreal non sequitur, and the next, for another several hundred pages. One compelling section sees B meet his more successful doppelganger and tussle over their wildly different reconstructions of the film, throwing up enjoyably thorny questions about memory and interpretation, the purposes of comedy and what kind of talent and stories we value. Plus it allows him to get extra-meta: whenever B is rude about the films of Charlie Kaufman, the author enacts a slapstick revenge on his own creation, sending B tumbling down manholes.Īntkind feels like a book that’s been indulged rather than edited there’s a smaller, smarter novel somewhere in here, currently smothered in smug junk. He does use B’s insecure voice to snipe at real-life film-makers and critics, however, from Christopher Nolan to Mark Kermode, which lends Antkind a certain gossipy frisson (who is really doing the trash-talking: B or Kaufman?). These are Kaufman’s choices, not his character’s. There is something deeply wearying about Kaufman mocking woke culture while delivering 700 pages of tedious, white-dude inner life.īesides, Kaufman’s own tone is one of tittering provocation: sending up tokenistic trans characters, queasily naming B’s daughter – a feminist who publicly renounces her father – Grace Farrow. But when you demand readers spend that much time with someone, you are still, to use a phrase Antkind would sneer at, privileging that white-male-cis-het perspective above all others. Of course, Kaufman invites us to see through B’s self-delusion and hypocrisy - he doesn’t defend B. In fact, B is relentlessly revealed to be a self-pitying, sleazy racist. But although Antkind is skippingly clever – saturated with comic allusions, puns, linguistic inventiveness and wildly unfettered imagination – it is sorely lacking characters you actually care about or any emotional narrative to cling to.ī is a bitter, humourless, arrogant, middle-aged, white man, who believes himself to be extremely culturally sensitive he makes a point of stating that his girlfriend is African American and using the gender-neutral pronoun “thon”. Where Kaufman’s films are playfully mind-bending, they usually have real heart. There’s a smaller, smarter novel somewhere in here, currently smothered in smug junk If anything can happen without consequence, stakes are lowered. It offers a maximalist satire of a contemporary America defined by fake news, corporate bullshit, vacuous pop culture and performative wokeness, but one so excessive, surreal and repetitive that it is itself tiresomely bloated and absolutely exhausting. Kaufman certainly does: Antkind is 706 pages long. ![]()
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