The film has a fantastic star cast, with Shiva Rajkumar, Upendra, and Raj B Shetty. The story is super-different, and there’s some genuine out-of-the-box thinking. But the writing and execution don’t do justice. That’s the short take. A longer review follows, and it may contain spoilers.
In 45, Raj B Shetty plays Vinay, a mid-level software engineer who lives with his mother. He has a girlfriend who can whistle as though mimicking the sounds of birds, but try as he might, Vinay cannot whistle the same way. If you think that is a strange plot point, you haven’t scratched the surface of strangeness in this ambitious directorial debut by composer Arjun Janya. In the opening stretch, Vinay dies in a road accident. But the next minute, he wakes up in his home, with his mother fussing over him. So what happened? Did Vinay dream about his death? Did he get some kind of supernatural hint that he is going to die? Why does he keep imagining corpses that resemble him? And why does the girlfriend not seem to be a permanent part of his life? Why does she come and go as she pleases? Is she a part of his imagination as well?
And then we get to the really interesting part. Vinay is now obsessed with death, and his Google searches take him to the Garuda Purana. After you die, the soul, apparently, keeps trying to get back into your body, until two of Yama’s henchmen take it away. Vinay closes his computer, and two rowdies come and take him away. What Vinay is reading in the Garuda Purana seems to be happening in real life – of course, assuming that he is still alive. And now the groundwork is laid for the big guns to begin firing. First, “Real Star” Upendra shows up as Rayappa, and then “Mass God” Shiva Rajkumar walks into the movie, as a character named Shivanna. Rayappa sits on a throne that has horns like Yama’s buffalo. His shoes have little skulls on them and he is lit in shades of red. Shivanna is lit in sunlight yellow, like the giver of life that he is. Rayappa wants Vinay’s life. Shivanna wants to protect Vinay. Who wins?
Well, certainly not the audience. Like the Mohanlal-starring Vrusshabha a few weeks ago, 45 is a film that has a whole bunch of interesting ideas that are not backed up by the execution. Even if you can overlook the middling quality of the visual effects, the film has no steady rhythm or tonality. Arjun Janya has dug up a ton of mythology and presented it in a “mass” manner. For instance, in a massive action sequence, Rayappa and his men seem to have stepped out of the Mad Max movies, with their masks and motorcycles, while Shivanna summons the avatars of Shiva like Virupaksha and Veerabhadra and Ardhanareeshwara. And both the stars like to smoke cigars. You might be left with the feeling that you are smoking something else, especially when the final stretch comes up. It is a play on the fact that the director is god on a film set, just like god is the director of our lives in reality.
The writing feels less like a coherent screenplay than a bunch of clever (or wannabe clever) ideas slapped together. Rayappa orders his men to give his dog Italian diet food. A butcher named Altaf closes a scene by giving a customer what looks like some animal’s testicles. Shiva Rajkumar has a scene with Sudharani, the heroine of his first film Anand. She asks if he wants a dosa. Meanwhile, the wandering soul is dragged through a sea of pus (I think). Sometimes, a lovely bit of philosophy emerges. Vinay walks into a scene where his girlfriend is marrying someone else. You await some kind of confrontation. But we get a bit of wisdom. Just like we are not going to be in others’ lives till the end, we cannot expect others to be a part of our lives forever. The line is great, but we don’t feel the full weight of it because the writing hasn’t brought us organically to this point. And that’s 45 in a nutshell. The ideas are great, but they stand as isolated bits, waiting for the writing to bridge them together. One thing must be said. Fans of Shivanna and Upendra will be reasonably happy with the mass-ness of their moments. But they would have been so much happier had they gotten a good movie instead of just good ideas.
