Anand Deverakonda gives his finest performance yet as Aditya, a man in his early twenties. He is from a small-town, and his world opens up when he goes to study in the UK. There, he meets Kadali, nicely played by Vaishnavi Chaitanya, and his world opens up even more. He begins to find out what it’s like to be around a woman. Kadali moves in with Aditya, but this is not a live-in relationship. This is more like a ‘friends with benefits’ type situationship. As Kadali and Aditya navigate their feelings about each other, the story attempts to show what it’s like to be young and confused. The film doesn’t work fully, but it’s sincere and honest. It is an interesting attempt by a filmmaker with an interesting voice. That’s the basic storyline and the quick review. A longer analysis follows, and it may contain some minor spoilers.
If Vijay Deverakonda made an Arjun Reddy, his brother Anand has made a movie that is the polar opposite. It’s called epic. Note the lettering of the title. It is entirely in lower case. In the dictionary, the word “epic” suggests something enormous, but in this film, the title design brings the word down to something small. Aditya Haasan has made an intimate epic. Some stories are life-altering to the people who experience the events in those stories, but to others, they may or may not be as impressive. This is a film about a series of such events. Aditya has never been on a domestic flight, and his first time on an aircraft is when he goes to the UK for higher studies. For him, this is an enormous thing, an “epic” thing. But some viewers may ask why he is making such a big fuss about getting into a plane.
They may also have another question. If this is indeed such a big deal, isn’t it the writer-director’s duty to “dramatise” this event so that we feel the “epic”-ness that Aditya feels! Why is this revelation thrown away in a single line of voiceover as we see Aditya in the airport? Instead of a close-up that isolates the protagonist and makes him special, why do we get this line in a wide shot that reduces him to one among many people? Because Aditya is a “lower-case” guy. Here’s where the Arjun Reddy comparison kicks in. The protagonist of that film was all upper-case. If you remember the way the title was designed, every letter was in brash, bold upper case, and it suited a man who was confident, entitled, privileged, skilled beyond belief…
Aditya is the exact opposite. He is not confident, not privileged, and he has no special skills. And he is super-sensitive. When he has sex for the first time, he has tears in his eyes thinking about the “divine event” that’s just happened while the woman casually drops off to sleep. He is afraid of everything, from showing his father his report card to heights to the sight of blood. (There’s a touching payoff to his fear of the sight of blood.) Almost all of Aditya’s decisions are made by Kadali or by his best friend back home. Kadali suggests that she move in with him. Kadali initiates sex. Kadali, later, suggests marriage. In each case, instead of reacting to the situation, a confused Aditya asks his friend how he should react to the situation. Anand Deverakonda plays this character beautifully. He never raises his voice. He gives us a soft, confused man without overdoing the innocence.
epic is some sort of autobiography. We get a meta line that goes “Naa peru Anand… sorry Aditya.” The actor utters his name, and then he says the director’s name, which happens to be the name of the protagonist. And guess what this protagonist wants to be! A filmmaker! Aditya Haasan put a lot of his own life into his utterly charming web series, 90s’: A Middle-Class Biopic, where Sivaji and Vasuki were wonderful as the parents of the character modelled on the director. In the series, we followed this character through school. In this film, we follow this character through college. The early scenes with the protagonist and his parents are set in the same house where the web series was shot, and it’s a blast of warm nostalgia. It’s also a reminder of the warmth that Aditya is pulled away from when he is sent to study in the UK. One of the first things his mother asks after he lands is whether it is cold.
And what Aditya goes on to experience is a splash of cold reality. Back home, his gang of friends encouraged him when he spoke about working with Allu Arjun and becoming a big director and buying a Range Rover. But in the UK, the Indians around him mock his filmmaking dreams, and they mock his plans of getting a degree and then moving back to India to pursue his passion. “We all have a passion,” they say. “But we are middle-class people, and we have to stick it out here.” How else will they repay their huge education loans? How else will they give their family the “status” of having a child who is settled abroad? Even in this aspect, Aditya is an innocent. He came to the UK only because his parents pushed him to get a degree here. Unlike Kadali, he is not seduced by the life and the freedoms of the West. During his first night in the UK, he doesn’t go to bars or clubs. He sits in his room and works on his script.
The other Aditya – Aditya Haasan – is determined to let these lower-case moments remain in lower case. Most of the film has a peaceful pitch. Even the interval point is not the usual dramatic high. It is a very big moment, an “epic” moment to Aditya, but in cinematic terms, it is staged like a small moment. This insistence on keeping things grounded, this refusal to blow them up for the sake of dramatic highs is both the screenplay’s strength and its weakness. Logically speaking, the feel of the film is like that of listening to someone else’s story. It is never going to be as interesting to us as it is to them, because it is a story that’s “unique” only to them. We have all seen and heard and probably even experienced many such events. And on paper, this lower-case approach sounds logical, maybe even brave.
But dramatically speaking, an element of dullness does creep in from time to time. And we feel that maybe, sometimes, upper-case storytelling is not such a bad thing. Kadali thinks she may be pregnant. Kadali asks Aditya to marry her. At one point, Kadali breaks up with Aditya. In each of these situations, Aditya does exactly what he would do. He stands there frozen and confused like a deer caught in the headlights. But just because Aditya behaves in a way that does not violate his character arc, it doesn’t automatically make the movie more interesting. Many times, you feel that one person – Kadali – is driving everything while Aditya is just sitting in the passenger seat, staring at the scenery. I loved the “idea” of a passive protagonist, but I was also wondering if there’s a way to write a movie where the protagonist is passive but who’s also someone who invites us to invest in him. epic is that odd film that stays true to what it sets out to do, but this truth stands in the way of emotional satisfaction. In other words, the very things that make epic interesting to analyse may also be the things that make it not work as a full-fledged dramatic experience.
In 90s’: A Middle-Class Biopic, the “truth” was embellished with humour. But here, Aditya Haasan is not able to find an equivalent flavour to embellish his “middle-class boy goes abroad” story. But he does emphasise this middle class-ness strongly. Aditya’s mother talks about the dowry he will be able to get because of his UK credentials. Kadali, oddly, keeps talking about caste. I say “oddly” because she seems to be sympathetic to LGBTQ issues and is able to see sex as “just a biological need”, but she is still bound to the social realities of the community she comes from. I realise this is Aditya’s story and Kadali is simply a catalyst for his coming of age, but I wished Kadali had been given some weightage, too. We see her as a potential love interest. We see her as a woman with wild mood swings, which contrasts her with Aditya, who is eternally calm.
But we don’t see her story, which is the story of every young woman who has to get married to the man her parents find for her. Some of these women decide to study abroad so that they can get a last stretch of full-on freedom. At times, I felt that Kadali’s smoking and drinking and her ease with sex were all a bit of overcompensation on her part, the way one would hoard food before a famine. She’s fascinating, and Vaishnavi plays her with a hard edge. Kadali has put on an armour that only Aditya is able to take off. But she comes across like an inexperienced man’s idea of a woman rather than as a real woman. In her one big breakdown, Kadali is written like a PMS-y caricature rather than a character. I would have also liked to see Aditya talk more about his one great passion. It’s clear that Kadali has become his identity and his identity as a filmmaker has been edged out for the time being, but some career talk might have given us a break from the single-mindedness of the relationship talk.
There is this theory that we go to the cinema to “escape reality”. And despite the overdose of Hesham Abdul Wahab song montages, Aditya Haasan is trying to bring back a sense of a lived reality into cinema. Maybe the extent of this reality is the balance he has to find. Maybe epic is too real. Maybe a man trying to wash a woman’s menstrual blood from their shared bedspread is too real. This scene does not suggest that the man is a saint. It just says that this man is a human being who is constantly evolving. There are beautiful musings like when Aditya wishes he had listened to his schoolteacher and learnt one English word a day, and maybe now he wouldn’t be struggling so much with the language. Again, this is not angst. Aditya says this like a statement that’s true, like a reality that cannot be changed. There’s another lovely lower-case moment where Aditya opens the window of his room, and the breathtaking view is that of the sun and the sea, of a wide-open world outside. The camera doesn’t jump outside and start doing drone shots. It just stays with Aditya’s point of view. After Kadali moves in, this view is seen mostly at night, with the moon outside. Things change.
And yet, some things stay the same. Aditya’s idea of background music is romantic violins. Kadali’s idea of background music is electric guitars from a rock concert. It’s convention versus chaos. There’s real potential here for a story about opposites attracting and repelling, all at the same time. Had Aditya Haasan not seen epic as an extension of his web series, maybe he could have seen the story with a fresh eye and fixed what needed to be fixed. But even as it is, epic is an interesting film from a young director at an interesting stage of his young career. In the early twenties, you are hit by love and passion and thoughts of marriage and career and what not. You want to rebel and you also want to blend into society. epic is a film that tries to address this tsunami of confusion instead of resolving every conflict with a neat ending. For instance, what will happen to Kadali? Aditya Haasan became a filmmaker, but will the film’s Aditya end up making a film? Like life, this is a movie with more questions than answers, and that may be why it works in some ways… and doesn’t work in other ways.
