A few years ago, I watched a movie called Tamasha, a beautiful film by Imtiaz Ali where the protagonist goes on a journey to find himself. He believes that the world is stacked against him living to his full potential. He goes through a journey from doing what is expected out of him to what he truly loves. I remember almost 9 years back when I watched the movie, I wept like a kid, and I wanted to watch that movie again and again. I must have watched it more than 20 times. Interestingly, I stopped relating to that movie a few years back, and you know why? Because I was not able to resonate with that character anymore since I started living my life on my own terms. 

Cut to 9 years later, today I watched a movie called Star. It's a movie about a man struggling to become an actor in cinema. My wife and I watched this movie and came out with a lot of mixed feelings about it. It definitely didn't make me cry, but it made me think a lot. To put it in short, this is a movie about one man who puts all his relationships around him, including the ones he shares with his mother, sister, father, girlfriend, and wife, in jeopardy to just move towards the singular goal of becoming a 'hero' in movies. When you put the camera in his vantage point, it looks like the man is stubborn enough to reach his goal. Now, if you move the camera away from that point of view and look at it from a slightly 10,000-foot view, seeing all these characters with equal weightage in life, then it just makes the man really narcissistic. A man desires to act in movies. Nobody ever forced him to, nobody ever asked him to; it's a path he chose himself, and he went on to it. He probably conquers it at the end, but that doesn't give anyone the right to be narcissistic and full of himself. I have a problem with celebrating that as a journey towards passion.

Now, at the end, you could have reached your passion or your dream, but when you look back, if you were alone in that success where all the people that you loved left you because the journey turned you into a villain, it doesn't feel like success to me. I don't mean to say people shouldn't have passion, and I don't mean to say people shouldn't follow their dreams, but at what cost? Sometimes, you are in the middle of the journey, and we have really forgotten the origin of the journey. Somebody at some point has indirectly touched your ego by blocking you from tasting that success, and now it's a game of proving them wrong as opposed to the original goal. For example, in this case, the goal of becoming an actor.

I wonder if this protagonist, Kalai, had probably gotten an opportunity early in his life and had starred in a couple of movies but failed or wasn't accepted by people. Would he still have had this passion to follow? I don't know. Here, this film just talks about how he never got an opportunity, and unfortunately, the movie doesn't really speak about the art of acting, the art of expressing onself on screen. Instead, it mostly focuses on this journey of becoming a hero, and that's the problem. A good artist's story lies in the intensity of the relationship he shares with the art, not with the outcome. Him becoming a star is an outcome. Him acting well is the output, but that journey towards craft's excellence was never captured in the movie; it was mostly about him becoming a big star. That's why we see snapshots of him being photographed with superstars like Vijay and Rajni, etc.

Not to mention the women and the suffering that they go through around him... I don't know when Tamil cinema will stop glorifying this idea of women sacrificing for a man's passion. I don't mean to say it's a wrong thing, but having unempathetic protagonists towards their women counterparts and showing that as a man who is overcoming life and his hurdles to achieve his passion is slightly very difficult to accept.

I'm sure this movie is going to do phenomenally well and collect really well at the box office. The protagonist, Kavin, has excelled in the way he has portrayed his character. It's a very convincing movie, but I feel that it's just a journey of a self-centered man. It's probably not the greatest example of someone who achieves his dream with passion.

Somewhere between watching Tamasha and STAR, I have grown up.