Is Kamal Haasan the most versatile actor of our country? Evidence of this has been stockpiled over the years in a number of stunningly etched performances that have left us gasping for breath.
Add one more brilliantly accomplished and astonishingly layered performance in the Kamal Haasan hall of fame. As the commando officer Vijay and his psychologically traumatized twin Abhay, Kamal Haasan dazzles your senses with his naked intensity. His performance as the schizophrenic Abhay is an experience that movie buffs aren’t likely to forget in the years to come.
Abhay marks the complete reversal of several conventional mainstream patterns. For the first time, viewers enter the unhinged hallucinatory world of the psychologically traumatized protagonist. We see Abhay’s world the way he sees it: damaged, wonky, psychedelic, and completely traumatized.
The computer graphic animation and special effects denoting Abhay’s surreal images are examples of cinematographical splendour that merges without stress or strain into the cohesive design of the hypnotic thriller.
In terms of the overall structural design of the ‘twin versus twin’ yarn, Abhay is predominantly Hollywoodian, comparable with a film like Jacob’s Ladder, where we saw the world the way the wacked-out protagonist did.
But Abhay goes further than our average cat-and-mouse Hollywood thrillers about serial killers. As Abhay, Kamal Haasan interiorizes the character’s trauma to an extent that we have never experienced before. Long after the end titles, when the ‘good’ twin has vanquished the traumatized psycho, we are left with images of pain and hurt that director Suresh Krisshna splashes into his tightly structured cat-and-mouse tale.
Fortunately for us and the film, the main character’s intense psychological trauma never weighs down the narrative, which functions with lubricated fluency throughout. Like most Kamal Haasan starrers, this one too is a one-man show. But Raveena Tandon, as the good twin’s newscaster-wife, brings a bubbling life to the stormy narrative. Manisha Koirala, as the bad twin’s lust interest, and Kitu Gidwani, as the young Abhay and Vijay’s fiendish stepmom, manage to leave an impression.
Technically, Abhay is one of the most vibrant films in a long time. But the production details never take away from the impact of the basic plot or the sheer muscle power of the main performance. Take a bow once again, Mr. Kamal Haasan.
Recalling the Abhay experience, Kamal Haasan says, “Abhay could be seen as a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski. It belongs to the genre of the bizarre bazaar, but enjoyably bizarre, like the house of mirrors in a circus. Abhay is about the most bizarre bazaar of all. The human mind. It’s the most unsolvable mystery of the universe. Thousands of films have been made about the human mind. And yet we’re nowhere near solving its riddles.”
The chameleon actor had to work on his physique for this part. “That isn’t as easy as many people think. Not when you’re unwilling to take any of those magical drugs. It requires a lot of concentration and exercise. For Abhay, I had to modify my entire body language.”
Kamal Haasan had earlier played a seriously traumatized character in Red Rose. “That was a suave Jack The Ripper character. You could never tell he was a killer until some forensic expert tracked down the bodies he had buried. My character in Abhay isn’t a gentleman on the surface. He is what and who he is. It’s almost like letting the demon loose. This character’s etiquettes are different from the norm. He doesn’t follow the basic rules of civil society. I had a friend who was perfect in every detail. For me and a third friend, he was a leader and a hero. He could’ve been anything—Kamal Haasan’s film producer or director, for all we know. Instead, he became a psychopath. That’s when I started reading up on criminal behavior. Why did it happen to my friend and not me? That’s how the novel on which Abhay is based was born. Incidentally, the third friend in our trio is a sporadic actor. He keeps appearing in my films. He’s a Chinese who speaks Tamil fluently. He was in Mayor Saab. He plays an inmate of the mental asylum in Abhay.”
Did he enjoy playing the positive or the negative twin? “They’re both equally strong in their perceptions. The commando training that I undertook for the positive character came in handy for both characters. When you see the film, you’ll see how tough the stunts were. They may be a cakewalk, or rather a kickwalk, for Jackie Chan. For me, they were tough. I went under for a month with a back problem.”
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