Thanks to a miracle, a child grows up to be male for 12 hours and female for 12 hours. Both halves get a partner, and this could have been a terrific comedy of confusion. But the film doesn’t find a consistent tone and the results are merely okayish. That’s the quick review. A longer analysis follows and it may contain spoilers.
A baby is born on a rainy night, and there’s a peculiar problem. From 6 am to 6 pm, this baby is a girl, and from 6 pm to 6 am, this baby is a boy. So the name of the child, Rajini, isn’t just because it was born on the Superstar’s birthday, but also because the name fits both genders. Double Occupancy is like the kind of body-swap films we’ve seen in Hollywood, like Big, where a boy becomes a man, or Freaky Friday, where a mother and daughter find themselves in each other’s bodies. But the interesting twist in Aswin Kandasamy’s debut is that the two entities occupy the same body, but at different times. Imagine being a pretty girl wearing a floral print dress at 5.59 pm, and a minute later, turning into a man who’s stuck in the same floral print dress. Full marks to Santhosh for playing this part in a culture where macho heroism and a saviour complex is all the rage.
The male version of Rajini even gets to use his bra as a weapon in an action sequence. This item of clothing is, of course, a leftover from the female-Rajini he was a few minutes earlier. (Reshma Venkatesh plays the female version of Rajini.) Are male-Rajini and female-Rajini the same “soul”, because they occupy the same body? Are they technically siblings? What are the complications that will be caused, and how will they be resolved? Double Occupancy is refreshingly open-minded about gender. Male-Rajini works as a bartender and he falls for Priya (Samyuktha Viswanathan). Female-Rajini works in a genetics company, and she gets involved with Karthik (Vinoth Kishan). Neither Priya nor Karthik seem troubled by the fact that their partner is of their preferred gender only half the time. Despite an exaggerated double take when Karthik finds that he is kissing male-Rajini, there is no homophobia. There’s a relaxed new-gen vibe, and you wonder where this is all going.
The reason the film doesn’t land is that it wants to be both classy and massy. On the one hand, we have Priya showing up at male-Rajini’s place with a bottle of wine, and the word “sex” is used instead of the wink-wink euphemism “matter”. But on the other hand, we have loud Sundar C-style music (it’s his production), and VTV Ganesh asks male-Rajini if he is familiar with the bathroom habits of female-Rajini. The conflicts are all cinematic and contrived and they don’t result in poignant moments. There’s a beautiful idea that female-Rajini gets to see what life is like after 6pm (something happens, and she does not swap back into male-Rajini). But we don’t feel the emotions she is feeling. It’s all very generic. The song placements and picturisations are generic. The action blocks are generic. The way the corporate villains are worked in is super-generic. I kept wondering how Double Occupancy, which has an appealing cast of youngsters, would have been without villains, and as just a story about relationships. What we have is good ideas but a mid movie.
